Chapter One,

The Land Beyond The Mountains

            On an ordinary day in January, in the first year of our participation in the Second Great War, our train pulls out of Union Station in Chicago at eight in the morning, an unholy hour, at least to my mother, who is habituated to late rising, as I was to become in my time.  We had sold the house at 717 Wedgwood Drive in Highland Park, movers had come to take away our personal possessions and furniture, and we shipped them by train to Seattle, which was about as far away as you could journey and still be in the continental United States.  Put that way, it sounds like punishment, but we were all ecstatic and my father saw it as a passport to opportunity.

            Me, I was not so sure.

            I had been forcefully uprooted only two years before andif the truth be knownhad not adjusted very well to life in a competitive suburb of Chicago.  Now we were moving again and I would be forced to go to a new school, meet new school chums and enemies, attune to new geography and climate.  I began to realize that men and women, boys and girls, were pretty much the same everywhere, which is to say cruel, snobbish, and unpleasant.

From some standpoints, it couldn't be worse than the football and baseball playing fields of Illinois.  And if it couldn't be worse, it was unlikely to be any better.  Once again I was proved right.  But there are better things in life than to always be right, or correct in one's estimation of coming events, I soon learned, and one of them was simply to be popular, to be liked.  This I coveted.

            The train pulled out of Union Station with no great billows of smoke, for it was a diesel, and began speeding North into the upper part of our former state and soon into the southern part of Wisconsin, a place I knew excelled at raising dairy cattle and where we had gone in winter to toboggan and in summer to cruise about some large lake in a small rental boat powered by a quiet, internal engine called in inboard.  We whisked through Wisconsin and its showy white landscape visible from the window of our stateroom, enjoying the ease and luxury of train travel of the 1940s, when it was supreme.

            Porters were black men in white coats and teeth, who brushed you off with little whiskbrooms carried for that express purpose and called you sir, even me, aged eleven, and were totally accommodating, their white gloved hands held out obligingly.  Edmund explained to me that you remembered their individual faces (though they tended to look alike, and not just because of the standard porter's uniform) and tipped them at the end of the journey, not for each service speedily performed without pause, for it you didn't, if you tipped them each and every time, as they wanted you to do, you would be broke before you reached Duluth.

            Each time we stopped, there they were, or there was ours, with his little steel stepdown stool with its corrugated top for non-slip purposes to put our feet down on before we touched the sheltered pavement of the neighboring train station, where all the amassed snow was held off at arms-length.  Then we would shuffle around the boarding platform as though long confined and compressed which of course we were not:  we had roamed the train at will, moving from coach to coach, until coming to the dining or club cars, stretching our legs, striding broadly, all who wanted to do so and some who did not, like Mother, but it was the only way to reach your meal, room-service not being available, at least not on this train or Milwaukee Road.

            Was it here that I developed my love of engines and train-travel, or was it from the backyard vista of our one and only house so far, the one we had just vacated?  I don't know.  A train then, perhaps now, is a magnificent excursionary vehicle, in no way inferior to the airplane, and with its superb cuisine and graciousness and style perhaps still its superior.  Often you ordered a la carte and because Fields was paying for it and our stateroom we ate high off the hog.  My father, in fact, always did live well, at least while in travel, though the vast portion of our life was ruled by a legacy of parsimony that went back to Gramps and Saraleigh and probably much farther.

            O how I wish I drank coffee, for it came in silver (pewter) pitchers with little snap-up lids and pot-bellies, and adults and large children, ones older than eleven, each had his or her own pot, with a striped cup and saucer that proclaimed the railroad line's identity proudly, I thought, not yet aware that passengers might steal everything  that could find its way into a suitcase.  Proud still, I might come to think of railroad life, aside from its expense and practical consequences of travel.  Everybody who worked for the railroad, up to and including the time I did in college, ten years hence, loved the railroad generically and was most proud of any affiliation.  The line did not greatly matter, for they were all wonderful.  This was Milwaukee Road, but Great Northern and Northern Pacific were equally renown

            Breakfasts were the best meal of the day, in my opinion, which was not very extensive yet, for this was my first long train ride.  You could order whatever you liked and Edmund put no stipulations on what you ate, for this was special.  Eggs came whichever way you wanted, and I liked them sunny-side up, so their yokes would bleed all over creation when I poked them with a tine.  There were rashers of bacon, quite a few slices included, sandwich-bread toast sliced on the diagonal, already buttered, with little pats of jam or jelly in abundance, coffee for adults, brimming glasses of milk white as snow for us children, for we all knew that coffee like cigarets would stunt your growth, and nobody wanted go through adult life a dwarf.  So we played with our sprigs of parsley (you weren't supposed to eat them, they were a garnish; nothing untoward would happen to you if you did, though, but nobody did, it was a sign of bad upbringing if you picked up your little tree and began to chomp on its branches) and made tracks with its trunk in the slime left over from the yoke, while adults smoked incessantly (including those who smoked all through the meal, like Mother did) and tried to empty those silver pots of coffee that the smiling waiter kept hurrying to refill before you could manage it.  Thus breakfast took an hour or more.

            Of course we ate in shifts, we who were unfamiliar to shift-work and found this our only occasion to experience it.  There was first-breakfast, second-breakfast, third-breakfast, and the same for lunch, the same for dinner.  You were expected to vacate the dining car when your shift was over, but there was no penalty if you didn't, no frown, no angry word, not from out waiters, who were the very model of consideration and ingrown mock-politeness, and I never imagined what they might say to one another behind our backs.  Probably nothing, for this way prior to the days when they vowed at the prompt issuance of some hidden signal to cut all the throats of the white others.

            Some lingered, some sped on back to their coach seats, compartments, and staterooms, and the next wave descended, and the dishes were cleared away and new linen laid down, or peeled off, I noticed, for there is a clever way of putting down three tablecloths and taking away one, each time the diners left, rather than putting down new or fresh, and only the train's special china and napkins had to be brought forward, laid down, and arranged in those fetching pyramids of cloth that beckoned and made easy the start of the traveler's next meal.

            Where do I remember jam pots from if not here, unless it was hotel grand dining rooms?  Special was orange marmalade, Dundee, my father told me; it came from Scotland and was made from imported oranges, for no true oranges grew in barren Scotland—did I know where it was on a map, Bobby?  Or was this Gramps speaking in his weird vernacular, retained from the ghost of a letter long since thrown out in the collectable refuse of Chicago or, more likely, the Highland Park that was growing ever more remote and forgettable by the hour?

            It was a long time until I learned about lime and then in my growing vast sophistication remained undecided for years and would alternate flavors, always Dundee, until ultimately my heart told me orange was best and had always been.  It still thrills me, partly because I know it is from Scotland, where there are no orange trees and in many places no trees at all, only crags and moors, burns and lochs.

            The stuff was sticky beyond belief and if you got some of it on your fingers, alas, you were doomed until you had a source of hot water.  There were bits of rind and candied skin segments mixed in, which gave it texture, something all the jellies were lacking, and if I recall correctly was absent from lime, though I don't know why, for lime is not lacking in these attributes.  No doubt some management decision, such as, "In orange we'll mix in the bits and pieces, chewy and made sweet as toffee, but with a warning to anyone who works for us, if you add chunks to the lime, it out the door with you."  All uttered of course in thick Scots accent.  You know what that is, don't you, Bobbie?  Aye, suren't that I do, Gramps.

            The train rattled through the day and the night on a roadbed well used by freights, traveling through the vast stretches of bleak Mid-West America with a sideways rollicking motion, like a horse at gallop, not canter.  But do not mistake me, it was a pleasant gait, each clack of the rails coming together with a considerable seam a faint tick to the trains tock, measuring out time and distance in a way that would convince me if Einstein had not done it earlier that time is indeed distance, distance time, and we are all bound together (we world travelers) in motion and the excitement brought on by the notion of travel alone.

            We were confined, of course, in staterooms (two that adjoined and had a sliding door left open until at last night came and early bed for us boys) that were opposed and mirror images of themselves, dark-toned as private men's clubs, with little gold shaded lights on posts and brushed stainless steel washbasins which inverted and disappeared and, behold, beneath were toilets that opened out on the speeding tracks, and all our bladders and colons would emit splashed down beneath the passing train, and this was why you did not flush while in the station, a little jingle we recited each time we tinkled, the Tinkle Jingle, but the land was vast and a little human waste bestowed on such generous landscape was insignificant, harmless.

            There was no tub or shower, but it was only the parts of four days, three nights, and there were the sponge baths of worldly travelers, supervised by my mother, conducted in series with tiny bars of Ivory soap in paper wrappers and a plethora of white and blue towels which like the china bore the logo of the railroad but were nonetheless swiped by people other than ourselves, people of less rigorous personal moral standards.

            Soap you could take, it was okay, they expected you to, it is why the pristine bars in wrappers were replaced daily, when the porter, our porter, tipless so far, earning bonus points, came round and cleaned up, usually while we second-breakfasters were slurping our orange juice.

            O all that orange juice that proceeded marmalade off the same tree.  It was fresh squoze by identical black railroad dining car employees who looked in white and black uniforms and little billed caps so much like one another that a honky like myself would believe they had the same others, this long before they saluted themselves as "bros" and back when the term black was derogatory to them, not the perfumed form of address.

            The orange juice flowed out of pitchers and was sweet in the way frozen is not, and we gulped it as our due, for at home we squoze it with one of those Pyrex hand-squeezers or, better, on the top of the Mixmaster, where there was a moving grinder to pulverize pulp and that soft inside behind the rind and slither it all into a bowl from which the seeds and pulp were separated by a ginning action and we could drink it all bubbly and beginning to settle.  Here servile kitchen employees did for us what we ordinarily did for ourselves at home and it was special, sweet.

            Parsley accompanied every meal and was a little tree, the miniaturization of the Big Sur cypress that I had not yet glimpsed and when I did proved to be a sprig writ large and no surprise, simply what I was long used to seeing; it used to come on the side of Dover sole, which lay there like the pallid remains of some small ghost fish that was well on its way to turning into breadstuff.  Here parsley, there parsley, and meanwhile the  Milwaukee Road ground on, past Milwaukee, Minneapolis and its twin, St. Paul, and into dim North Dakota.  Night fell and we disassembled into Pullman berths, narrow, the smell of freshly ironed sheets and wool blankets snugged into shallow mattresses, with a net bag to hold personal effects and a raised lip to keep you from tumbling out at night, when the rocking at high speed and open spaces might toss you around or else you might spill out, all by yourself, dismounted by nightmare.  The lip gave assurance and permitted you the deep sense of security, which would bring sleep, as did the softly rocking rollicking motion of the ripping train.  It brought a sleep that was bottomless and sweet, and then it was morning.

            A stop at Bismarck, a bleak snow-encrusted place, with the train pausing for about ten minutes, I recall, gasping and belching and bellowing its steam in the halting station, as we purposelessly stepped down again on the porter's stool, got brushed off, got sirred, and beamed at, strode around, thought, "I am in North Dakota and it is cold, cold," stared at a baggage cart containing a solitary black satchel and cardboard box wrapped with cord, sitting all alone and forlorn, ownerless, then strode again onto the bumpy steel step and entered the warm interior of the known and welcoming train and a moment later heard the train sigh and start to slide off nearly motionless but not imperceptibly.  And then it was on to places like Great Falls and Deer Park and Whitefish, which were in neighboring and neighborly (or so it seemed to boyish me) Montana, where there were cowboys instead of farmers and the country began to get wild, with off in the distance some curious objects on the horizon known as mountains.

            Mountains.

            They approached as we did, grew closer, and you could see them begin to dominate the landscape as the great plains fell behind us because of the incessant clattering that meant motion, movement forward, ceaseless, vital.  Mountains that revealed themselves as, true, dark, but presently snow-clad right down to the ground, we whizzed along so that they differed only in resident, unmoving steepness and how the ground buckled and rolled and swelled and above all rose, rose, and we were lifted to accompany it in swings called switchbacks, which were tedious and slow but was how trains climbed mountains and reached crossing altitudes at places called passes.  Mountain passes.  And ahead lay the Continental Divide.  It was where, Bobby, everything pointed East now flowed West, in the direction of your new home.

            I can fairly hear Gramps interrogating me.  What are the principle crops of North Dakota?  Wheat, corn, beets.  Very good.  And Montana?  Wheat, but more important are beef cattle, mining (strip) for copper and coal, perhaps iron and silver.  What is silver used for?  Making rings, Gramps?  What else?  I don't know what else.  Shame for not knowing.  Let me give you a clue.  You have some in your pocket.  It is round, but flat.  It's name?

            After a pause:  Money?

            A nickel isn't silver, but looks like it.  In the war we have pennies the same color, but very light-weight ones, and that is a clue that they are aluminum.  Can you say A-lum-i-num?  Try it.  Alum-in-num.  No, try again.  Accent on the lum.  It is Latin by the way.  Our word lumens, or illumination, comes from it.  And so on, Gramps or Saraleigh, in letters, epistles that follow our lives and cast slim light (or lumens) upon it, and, in some instances, are downright wrong.  But to be memorized, retained, nonetheless; part of our life together and separate.

            I have in my pocket some silver in denominations of ten, twenty-five, and (if I am indeed fortunate) fifty cents.  The coins are from Montana, smeltered there, perhaps even minted there, but probably not, since there are no mints here but are in South Dakota.  However, they generally make pennies there.  You can tell, Bobbie, from the tiny SD printed above the date.  You see?  Copper is in pennies, until copper went to war, in which case we have aluminum pennies, that mineral not being so imperative to the war effort.

            Why not, Gramps?  Question not deemed worthy of an answer or else unanswerable by somebody whose curiosity remains on the surface, at least in letters, and does not press matters any too deeply.  You are forgiven, Gramps.  I love you.

            Montana, home of cowboys, what used to be buffalo, many Indian tribes, and the tall, tall place where rivers begin to flow West and have salmon in them.  Land of towering mountains wearing snow mantles on their evergreen boughs now appearing in greater profusion and soon dominating the landscape.  Imagine how this must appear to eyes of eleven years and used only to the environs of flat Chicago.  A wonderland truly, and the snow deeper than even the head of my father.

            The temperature at Deer Park was 28 degrees below zero.  I stepped out to experience it.  I stepped right back inside, my nostrils tingling.  I had been repeatedly warned not to touch my tongue to anything metal for it would freeze there and, if it could not be moved to be thawed, to free myself I would have to rip my tongue out and, bleeding copiously, speechless for the rest of my life, I would with luck live on as a verbal cripple.  No more ice cream cones, Popsicles.  Impossible to blow a bubble out of thick,pink gum.  And—this I did not know yet—remain tragically lacking in the means with which to kiss a girl properly.

            It was all I could think of—my tongue on that rail.  Was it true?  There was one quick way to find out for sure, but the price for forbidden knowledge was to go through life speechless, muttering only guttural sounds and being constantly misunderstood.  If I had known my Greek tragedies, I would see my punishment as Grecian.  Instead, I traveled the train rearward until halted by the final car, the one that rode in the position of the caboose, of which we had none; instead there was the club car.  And what a wonderful place it was.  Black waiters in uniforms dedicated to emphasizing the contrast between races, between servile and served, passed among us with silvery trays of drinks.  Scotch and water or soda for the men and women, colas and orange pop for the rest of us—the very same stuff I used to sell from my iced cases at local baseball games.

            Here was a reversal.  I now bought, with coins supplied by my dad, the very same drinks I had hawked.  If only a black boy would pass among us offering for sale The Saturday Evening Post, Look, or Colliers, I would feel truly at home.  But none did.  Wherever they were, these kids like me, only darker complected, with these incredible white smiles, they were not riding the Milwaukee Road to Seattle today.

            We sat at tables or longitudinally along the inside of the aluminum (al-u-min-i-um, Gramps) shell on tufted seats that ran parallel to the sides of the train and moved wet glasses around narrow tables different from the others and left myriad rings on which our drinks slid a little or did a dance to the motion of the train, which was always traveling fast.  The club car admitted a great deal of light because of the dome that ran along the top; in snow country, which we were in now and for the next day or so, the land broadcast the snow to the sky and back again, and we were flooded with a sparkling shine that, when the sun came out from its low-lying cloudbank, made us blink and shade our eyes with our free hand, as though engaged in mass salute.  It was but for a moment, for this was mountain country, with its clouds and often drifting flakes of snow engaged in a whirling dance and not following regular lines of descent.  Instead they rose and floated and then slowly settled again, like the ersatz stuff inside the glass dome that Edmund brought back from New York City and the World's Fair in 1939 and which contained a pyramid and spire, surrounded with snow that rose and fell according the motion I gave it by inverting it and raising it quickly, then turning it back with its base side down and letting the snow gratefully fall again to the ground to rest.  (And if it didn't do it just right, in my opinion, I would punish it by more inversion and shaking until the flakes fell obediently or to my precise liking or else I grew bored with the exercise, put down the snowy globe, and went on to something more interesting.)

            It was like that outside now, but different, and I used to annoy everybody by opening the door that led to the observation platform and exiting to it, submitting all to a degree of cold barely tolerable and not lasting long, and letting the odd flake clasp my hair and even go so far as catching one on my tongue, if I could, the wind biting, the cold penetrating my body and robbing it of heat, staring out at the trees (firs, hemlocks, blue spruces, cedars, I know now, but saw collectively then) racing away from me, often in the direction of the tunnel we just come through, which was diminishing in size and content and soon became to my eyes like the dot ending this sentence.

            All the while I kept wondering, could not help but wonder,  about my tongue and that frost-sparkling rail that circled the observation platform.  It held my mind and attention for days, the duration of the trip.  What if. . . .  Maybe if I just touched the tip lightly, once, not even a true touch, you understand, but a kind of fleeting kiss—wouldn't I be safe from the dire result?  Wouldn't I?  Please?

            But was too chicken or whatever to do it, thankfully, had too much of that resident common sense and self-preservation instinct already to do something so foolish and whoever did it was dumb, dumb, dumb, in the literal sense of the word, as in deaf-and-dumb, meaning he could hear well enough into the vague future but he would only be able to utter those previously untouched-on sounds:  uhh, unnh, ugh, enh, etc.

            As I said the country fled before my eyes and it was similar to my life in the sense that I could only see and understand what went before, not what was presently happening or was yet to come, like Dickens's Christmases.  Consequently my most recent past was most visible and fleeting, and what had occurred vague seconds earlier was more easily graspable and comprehended, and off in the far distance was ten minutes away of intelligibility and loss, all that I could understand.  Chicago was gone, past, and so was Highland Park, and as it so happened Deer Park and Whitefish, Montana, and soon we were where the rivers flowed ahead, that is, West, to the very obscure and inexperienced but pressing Pacific Ocean.

            And finally too cold to endure it any longer and my resolve to experience life directly with my tongue on that iron rail weakening, chicken, shivering, I would return to the warmth and security of the club car and suffer all its inhabitants to a second blast of wintery breath that moved the women's skirts and made them bunch their shoulders and shudder, while the men cast me looks of such disgust that I was secretly flattered that I could inconvenience so many people by such a small effort so quickly.  That was power; power directly applied, which is the only way to do it.

*   *   *

            This great country of ours, I discovered, is divided longitudinally roughly into thirds—the Eastern seaboard, the Middle West and attendant Plains States, and the Vast West.  Beyond the Continental Divide provided by the Rocky Mountains lay a secondary mountain range, the Cascades, and after it a narrow green shelf which was the coast.  It is where the Pacific met the land and the land surrendered its sovereignty.  It is where we all (we train travelers) were headed.  Mom, Dad, Dicky, me.

            Meanwhile there was this snowbound rolling countryside to be endured, plus another night of it.  Montana.  We saw nary a soul except at five-minute-long  train stops made to discharge cargo and no people, none of us dismounting for longer than a quick look-see.  We entered Idaho, the Panhandle, and I saw how in some brochure the state was inverted, with its narrow part or handle up at the top and being practically Montana to everybody except a Montanan or Idahoan, or whatever they called themselves, but the bottom of the state spread out and was the frying pan, so to speak, with the width of a normal state that was not shortchanged in its division or formation.  On the other hand, if you wanted to move from, say, Montana to Washington with a minimum of wasted time or dislocation, it was where you might want to be--up on top.  Otherwise you might choose to reside to the South in a place of normal width and routine traveling distances undertaken to get outside its boundaries.

            When we entered the Palouse country it was to my new eyes what I had already experienced where the Dakotas (the Badlands) merged imperceptibly into Montana and began their broad sweep and roll.  A Palouse was, I was led to understand, nothing more than an elevated farming plateau presently buried in snow and not recognizable as such, except where fence posts rose lonely and isolated from each other, the wires connecting them all erased out but still there to the mind's eye that would restring them to gauge distances and ownership lines.  This I amused myself with doing in between approaching smudges of towns, most of which we passed through without so much as a whistle of warning.

            Traveling fast, we would not slow for crossings or even honor them with the ringing of our bell, and the whistle from the engine they provoked was a long way ahead of the true crossing so that it was forgot by the time we got there and saw the blinking red light and lowered standard, sometimes, and a car or two with its exhaust pluming, waiting for us to pass, and I would wave (for I was only ten plus one year, and could afford another rebuff) at the occupants and grin idiotically and they behind fogged windows would never wave back, or if they did I could not see them because of their interior obscurity or because we were moving so swiftly and imperially away that they would not visibly honor us with such a salute.  And were soon forgot.

            The world is mostly country, with its cities inconveniently bunched together at remote locations and of surprising density, to what purpose I could never discern, though I could detect smoke stacks with crooked columns of gray rising into lowered clouds and grain elevators that looked abandoned and unoccupied by any vestiges of corn or wheat inside, and sad little cafes with red neon in their window proclaiming to all within clasp what they blandly were, just that, "Cafe," usually without a name but sometimes somebody's appended, and often that being "Mom's," she the universal mother of all of us, now serving lunch.

            There would be the cars of the era parked along the curb at distant towns, all the car there would be for anybody until the war ended, whenever that would be, and there would be people again walking to and from cars, into stores, out of shops, heading for groceries of the small family variety because there were no supermarkets yet, nothing that could be true to the name and not be accused of pretention.  Always the drug store on the corner not yet the variety store it was in the process of becoming but if you looked closely was certainly headed in that direction, with its racks of Hallmark cards for all occasions you could hurt your head with thinking about and a soda fountain that invariably served malts and shakes (a shake being a malted with the malt left out), mostly ice cream and milk all whirred together with flavoring added and served in a Mae West glass with an al-u-mi-num mixer container alongside from which you would help yourself as your glass emptied until, finally, you took your sodden straw and mopped out the corners and slurped the last of the dregs into your gut, along with a lot of air to be burped out later.  And along the wall behind the counter a row of mixers, unvaryingly pale green, with their powerful beaters standing idle, each awaiting its next container or canister with its same contents and perhaps a different flavor added from a push-type dispenser, the contents of which you could easily discern from the spills left below the spout on the counter.

            On the wall of each drugstore was of course comicbooks, which were my domain, though fading fast, because I was becoming too sophisticated to be either amused or entertained by them and was seeking (thought I did not yet know this) sturdier stuff, books of some intellectual content.  Albert Payson Terhune material, with real life adventure stories concerning the heroics of collies with superhuman sensibilities and intelligence who daily or weekly at the least rescued babies and boys and sometimes even mere girls from trains, rabid dogs, rattlesnakes, drownings in bogs, and the like.

            And Agent Nine, I believe he was, who was half spy, half detective, and whose talents turned loose on the Japs and Nazis would surely end the war in half its allotted time and who was available in flimsy little books with yellow boards and flashy paper dust jackets, often used books, well used, cheap, and quickly devoured, like chocolate-covered peanuts.

            All evoked by passing through some burg of a town from a train traveling at say sixty miles an hour, which is a minute to a mile, and you can count them off on your wrist watch, which you had one of up until the time it broke.  But you can count to sixty almost as precisely as a second hand does on its sweep of the watch's face, so you know about when a minute is up and you have traveled—think of it, the miracle—a country mile.  The seconds accumulate, the minutes fly by, the hours pile up and mount in volume and pretty soon it is night and to see whatever there is to see, that little, you must pry open the stiff shade of your window and peer out the narrow wedge of exposed glass and see the countryside scudding by against night's dark shadows or else the land flooded by roaring moonlight, stark and magnificent, broad and bright, and then lower your head to the Pullman pillow and pull up your stiff, sweet-smelling blanket to your chin and be clacked to dreamless slumber and not awaken until seven the next morning, with the porter softly rapping at your steel door and whispering, "Station.  Ten minutes."

            You hope it is Seattle, mystical city, doorway to the Orient, all that jazz and excitement, but it only turns out to be Ellensburg and there is yet the next and final mountain range looming over the beef cattle that regard you with less than amusement, with the lowest form of estimation and interest, from where they are ferreting brown grass from under last night's unsubstantial snowfall.  You more pause that stop, then begins that laborious climb that is half-halted and tells you your engine is demoralized by the task ahead and dreads it, worries the mountains, but you are a veteran, a friend of the peaks, trained by the Rockies and the Continental Divide and eager for more, more mountains, and here they come at you.

            Snow rises as you do, that is, it piles wetly on boughs and breaks them off or, when it doesn't, threatens to and bends them so they will assuredly shatter at the shoulder and drop their snowy arms into the excess of snow at their base.  You wonder at the black-green of the underside of the boughs which pyramid upward and diminish in size until they reach a crest or top and the very tree ends in a spiral, but the snow settles down to the ground, and when the wind comes up, which is often in the mountains, the trees seem to shudder, working their shoulders like athletes, and the snow comes showering to the ground in a wonderful white explosion and the air is briefly filled with a powder that is unlike the fall of snow, its exact opposite, a veritable dusting off of what it can no longer accumulate and endure.  Puff, and down comes the white powder in a plume and it is thrilling.

            It is thrilling anyway if you are a boy of twelve minus one, and should be thrilling as well if you are a male of any age, or have any of the boy left in you, which if you don't have, pity on you.

*   *    *

            As I recall, so many years later that I cannot separate what I heard about from what I saw, what I know from what from what I was told, what I experience and what I observed in, say, a movie or in the Movietone News, we came to Seattle by way of Tacoma, but I'm not sure.  How many times each have I been to both and either?  Now the Great Northern Empire Builder comes from Wenatchee over Stevens Pass, but the Milwaukee Road is gone, as is its roadbed and tunnel, and I think it came via a southern route over Snoqualmie Pass, then bore into Tacoma.  And again I might be wrong.

            We lumbered into King Street Station, I am absolutely sure, and four of us unlimbered into the morning air of sodden January, thinking perhaps this steady fall of rain was an aberration, not routine, and it would soon stop and we would experience dry cold and perhaps snow, which was the common denominator of winter, or so we all believed, we Chicagoans.

            Think again.

            On the other hand the winter of 1941-42 was abnormal, with true snow arriving and lingering for much longer than usual, and when it came on the heels of a Chinook wind, the temperature soared and the old Middle West young habitue walked around in his shirtsleeves, luxuriating, bragging.  You call this winter?

            We were delivered by taxi to a district of the strange city that lay North by about ten miles from the train station and hence to a hotel there, the Edmund Meany.  (Here is yet another Edmund to confound and enrich my history.)  It was the University District, bounded by the University of Washington and the large, conspicuous lake of the same name to the East, and if you had told me then that I would spend most of my life living in that small unimportant neighborhood I would have laughed in your face.

            Today I do not.

            The hotel is still there today.  It stands opposite the Safeco Tower, sometimes called Dork Tower by snide students who resent it; formerly the Edmund Meany dominated the skyline and was the district's chief landmark.  Now the Safeco monolith overshadows it and prevents over half of its windows from ever receiving direct sunlight.

            The Edmund Meany Hotel advertised itself as "every room a corner room," and it was true, for its modernistic design was roughly octagonal, and each room was slightly bayed, fluted with windows on three sides, two of which could be opened part way but not far enough to permit a body to exit and fall to the pavement often many storeys below.  I suppose those windows have long since been sealed and the only air available to the occupants is piped in, sanitized and warmed, designated for people who never go outside or wish to.

            It was possible then and is indeed possible today to enter the Edmund Meany (now University Towers) and never leave it until they come for you with the body bag and basket.  There were two restaurants, one for formal dining and the other the coffee shop where most everybody had his three squares whenever he or she wanted them served.  It closed a little before midnight but opened again before more than a few hours had passed and began serving breakfasts to people who had to be downtown and at their desks at seven.  This did not include my father in his new job as Fur Buyer for Frederick's, but since he was fresh and eager he got there at only a little after eight and not at eight-thirty or nine, when the others did, for the store did not open until ten, but only the laggards and dullards I was led to believe came to work so late.  And of course nobody went  home until six.

            It was still a five and one-half day work week, Saturday mornings included and Monday nights always, which made for a true six days, though nobody except the union people (a growing number, including some assistant buyers) used his or her fingers to tick off the time with.  Managers instead saw their days as belonging to the company, along with their present and their future, inextricably intertwined to the point of being the same, so it did not much matter the hours that you worked, only that the work got done.  And since the store was closed only on Sundays, up until the end of his career, anyway, you often ended up working 60 hours a week but, hey, who is counting?

            Certainly not me, a kid, not yet in school, for I had no home, no school district, no identity.  I roamed the hotel corridors, ate by myself in the coffee shop, walked out on the streets of University District Seattle and saw me what there was to see.  There were two nearby movie theaters, the Neptune and the Egyptian, both ornate and splendid, plus a little hole-in-the-wall hobby shop that sold airplane models, both solid and flying.  I tended toward solid ones because they could be made to stick together quickly with glue and get hastily painted, while the flying variety were intricate beyond measure and necessitated fitting slender balsawood struts into notched templates that made them look like dedicated bridges and afterwards you must cover them over with colored tissue paper of the right color and sprinkle it with watery stuff called airplane dope to shrink out the last of the slack to look like the skin or real airplanes, which was nearly impossible to do for little careless hands.

            I would rise early and, breakfastless, walked East on Northeast 45th Street, past the northern edge of the sprawling campus (though I only vaguely knew it to be the University, bordered as it was with trees).  To my left were the massive houses that comprised the world of fraternities and sororities, and whose degree of complexity did not enter my mind for an instant.  I would walk a course due East until came to the crest of a hill that plunged to a broad flat that skirted and prescribed the University of that day, where I could see the lake spreading out in its self-induced mists and—most importantly, the prime reason I had walked here—the sun coming up over that white wonder, the Cascade Mountains.

            I mean, for a boy from Chicago, used to his featureless lake and sprawling flats that never seemed to end, it was special, those mountains all laid out in a row, peaks of varying heights and different degrees of peakedness, ragged and raw, and the splendid sun just coming up and breaking over them like an egg I suppose over them and I, with my empty stomach, reminded of my own breakfast to come, as soon as I had filled my eyes with my visual meal and had returned to the Edmund Meany which was just opening its coffeeshop doors for something more substantial.

            Such colors to the sky.  Red, especially, and all its variants, plus gold and yellow and a kind of orange produced by the cloudy mixture, as upon a watercolor palate attended by some inexpert person just learning how much water to add to his mix and overestimating it badly.  If you could catch the sun breaking from behind its peaked obscurity (up many hours in Chicago already, I knew, and in Chicago, New York City, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, hours earlier yet) it was most brilliant when first glimpsed, wondrous, but as it rose in its pallid sky it waned and so lost its colorful content as to be nearly non-existent in winter.  The sun always seemed to go behind the low grey clouds on its horizon and . . . disappear.  Only a thin gray light was left, diffuse and distant, broadly dispersed.

            Where had its beauty gone?  Wherever, it was lost to me, once briefly captured, a rare thing, only to be taken away, a gift snatched back, the gift of an Indian giver, a people who were reported to thrive on such selfish and irresponsible acts.

            Gramps would have frowned at the disloyal sun and Edmund would have shrugged his shoulders and remarked on how it was of no practical use to grieve over what could not be recovered, but both of them and I knew that tomorrow the sun would put in its brief appearance again and I would be there to behold and contain it, until time and experience inured me to sunrises, but never, never, to mountains.

*  *   *

            My father soon found us a house.  The precise way he did this was not disclosed to me, a mere kid, and I did not hear the discussion that took place guardedly (as all such processes did, during my youth and later) when my brother and I were in bed, presumably asleep, and even if we were not the conversation was conducted in suitable low tones and far enough off in the house that it would be impossible to be overheard.  But I know my mother exerted an iron hand in the decision and my father, Edmund, bent to her will and, you might say, succumbed.   It was a way that physically frail women have.

            Remember that it was the second house that they had ever had, the Highland Park house had been theirs less than two years before the store bid my father relocate, and our previous homes had been a series of Chicago South Side apartments, all of them adequate but none of them exuding that special pride of ownership.  So this next one mattered greatly.  It was, they believed, the new house to go with the new job in the new land.  New, new, new.  That's us.

            It was our first house, the same one towards which I had headed on the start of my stroll, that cold December day in 1994, upon being diagnosed in severe need of having my body penetrated, let us say, from behind by a colonoscope and thus meriting enough of a dire situation to return me to the scene of my youth and my growing into my majority and mentally rehashing all that was contained within the rather narrow boundaries of my world for about ten years in this not inexpensive place, Carleton Park.  My father and mother dead now for years, myself estranged from my brother, Richard, the neighborhood was solely mine, though occupied by strangers who had not been informed of my ownership and who lived here in houses spread out among our four residences only at my pleasure, by my leave, as it were, and whom I could easily banish at a moment's notice by a wave of my hand; lackeys and vassals of mine would rush forward and poke them with spear points until they bolted and fled, me forevermore rid of them.

            For now they might occupy their houses and live on there, their lives and livelihoods spared.  But beware my power, the power of the pen.

            We left the unreal world of the Edmund Meany Hotel for the real world of Edmund Arnold's house on 39th Avenue West.  A boy has no say in the matter and it is probably best, for he has no judgement yet, only crass opinions and they are, especially in my instance, of small value.  Still it would have been nice to have been asked how I liked the place.

            I would have said, "Let's go back to Chicago."

            Impossible.

            Then Highland Park.

            Impossible that too.

            Then I guess I like it here.

            But I didn't.  I was miserable for years.  I didn't enjoy my little school chums, nor they me, and soon we were broad enemies.  A daily misery like mine soon becomes a personality trait and then one of character.  It occupies your mind like too tight a hat and you develop a perpetual frown that might pass itself off as concentration by all who are not daily exposed to it.  I entered the Magnolia Grade School, up on the 28th Street West crest, which is now the Afrikan-American Academy, one of life's little ironies that if put forward by an experience writer of fiction might cause his readers to cry out, en mass, "Stop!  Too much."  Too much symbolism of too obvious and too ostentatious a nature to be acceptable by less than the least sophisticated of readers.  But nonetheless true, true as grass.

            We had no blacks in the school, on the hill, in the valley, in Carleton Park, in the vast and self-contained neighborhood that needed nothing from the outside except its income requisite to our being there.  So it is only weirdly fitting and appropriate that nowadays young black children should be bussed in great yellow vehicles by black drivers male and female to attend classes totally black, even without a token white to provided visual contrast (as they once were for us), and to learn about black values and civilization separate and distinct from those common to all of us Americans spelled with a small c.

            I mean, if I had seen, or we had seen, a black kid, we would have gathered round and stared and perhaps poked him with a rigid finger of curiosity bereft of anger, prejudice, contempt, or hate--curiosity of the same kind with which we might behold a gazelle, say, or a flamingo, or a butterfly with eyes on its wings and a color so spectacular that it took our collective breath away.

            Our due desserts, of course, but why does life have to be so vindictive, so extreme, so mocking, so deserving?

            I remember the house's address as being 2828, but it was 2827, less symmetrically but with a mathematical nicety that is superior, I am sure, to anyone who knows anything about such things, which I do not, and that indicates at least to me the imprecision of memory.  And if my memory is lacking in this department or, if present, is wrong, then everything I remember or know (the sum of my life that lies behind me, considerable) is wrong and meaningless.  So I refute this thesis and acknowledge that I was only off by one digit, and it could have been worse.

            How could it have been off by any less?

            It was a great white house that today would cost a bundle and in 1942 cost a lot, too.  It had its own little knoll to elevate it and give it loft, not that it was lacking in that regard.  It accented the status it deserved and already had on its own, being white and shuttered ornamentally (we could not have closed those green slatted monsters if all four of took up prybars and bent our back to the task) and contained a wonderful dormer that looked out on the street.   It had a bit of a territorial view (as we call it here, if it does not include water) over the roof of the house opposite of houses beyond, houses numerous and not much different from our own.  Still, to me, it remained a privileged house.