A Review of Richard Bach's "Travels with Puff: A Gentle Game of Lifeand Death"

Richard Bach is a writer who is serious about his privacy, but he is also a man most generous in spirit and on the page. In this his latest (2013, Nice Tiger), Richard opens by saying, "Destiny brought us together for this flight, and for love of you, dear reader...." 

I felt welcomed along on this particular journey.

Hawk

My father was captain of the militia and men was saddling up. I could hear horses snorting in the dark and the jangle of bits and bridles. Mother lit a lamp as my father pulled on his boots and had words with his corporal.

The Piankeshaw had attacked again, this time at Hardin’s farm. The corporal lowered his voice so my mother might not hear the worst of it.

“They cut ‘im down, cap’n. Scalped him and set the cabin afire and took captive Missus Hardin.”

My father asked how many they were. Number of muskets. Their direction of travel. Whilst the corporal told what he knew, my father gathered up his kit, his long rifle, powder horn and shot, and his tomahawk.

Don't Call Me Buckwheat

If you were any good as a bouncer at the Vogue Nightclub, you could usually get the job done without having to put your hands on anyone. 

A drill-field-worthy command voice with a haircut that said “recently-discharged Marine” goes a long way toward establishing alpha-dog status. It's all attitude and presentation.

Since its opening in 1938, The Vogue has screened the films of Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Carole Lombard -- and even Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems when the place was an X-rated theater for a couple years in the 70s. As a concert venue, its stage has hosted acts like Willie Nelson, Keb' Mo', and Kings of Leon.

Running from Abaddon (Conclusion)

Jon Wertjes and I left Yaoundé later that year, toward the end of 1983. Jon was off to New Zealand and I was headed to my next duty station at our embassy in the Bahamas. I said goodbye to Ken on the weed-lined tarmac of the Yaoundé Ville Airport.  

He was looking forward to his upcoming transfer, taking his wife and two boys to his next assignment at the US Embassy in Beijing. I shook his hand and we promised to keep in touch. Ken was 32 years old.

Running from Abaddon (Part VI)

In his 2013 Washington Post travel log, Christopher Vourlias wrote: “In free-wheeling Douala, young hedonists danced until the wee hours to the latest bikutsi club tracks.” Thirty years earlier, Douala had no less music and was no less hedonistic or free-wheeling.

After a day of high-speed logisticizing, our consulate group gathered at a portside bar to debrief. It was there that I came as close as I ever came to getting hit by a flying beer bottle. A certain lady of questionable character... okay, the place was full of hookers. 

A hooker expressed her interest in my remunerating her for the pleasure of her company. I declined in my elementary French.

Running from Abaddon (Part V)

A team of us from the embassy traveled to the coastal city of Douala later that year to coordinate logistics during a port visit by the USS Portland (LSD-37), a “dock landing ship.” The mission of an LSD is “to transport and launch amphibious craft, vehicles, crews, and embarked personnel in an amphibious assault.” That is, an LSD gives Marines a ride into the fight. 

I recently looked up the USS Portland to remind myself of her appearance, her lines. I found that “The Portland was decommissioned in 2003 and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register in 2004. It was sunk as a target during an exercise off the Virginia coast later that year.” 

I had no idea. I admit a twinge of sadness, like hearing that an old girlfriend you hadn’t seen in years had met an early and untimely death. She wasn’t much over 30.

Running from Abaddon (Part IV)

Despite any first-day-of-school hazing, the Marine Embassy Guards knew Ken Welch as a solid friend. An Army officer with Defense Intelligence, Ken had longish hair for a military guy. He was tall, maybe 6’3”, and somewhat softer around the middle than the Marines expected from its officers. But he carried it well. I never counted how many packs of Kools he smoked a day, but he was rarely without one burning within arm’s reach. And he never turned down a guy who said, “Hey Ken… gimme a smoke.”

He treated us younger Marines less as “officer to enlisted” and more as “older brother to younger brothers.” Ken’s own brother Mike had, he told us, been assigned to the Marine Barracks in London.

Through his military career, Ken seemed to have kept one step ahead of the bad shit. He was stationed outside of Saigon and traversed the combat zones of Vietnam as a classified courier from 1972 to 1975. He got out shortly before Saigon fell in April of ‘75.

Running from Abaddon (Part III)

We landed in Yaoundé after sunset. Cpl. Steve Moye met us at the airport with a Cameroonian driver named Ambrose, who piloted a Chevy Blazer with diplomatic plates. At 2500 feet above sea level, it was cooler here than at the coast, and smelled less of dog. We drove north into the African dark, up the winding N2 highway on a bouncing three-mile trek from the airport to the embassy.

We were tired, dehydrated, and hung over – not only from our recent night at Quantico's Command Post pub, but from the half-dozen Bloody Marys we’d had on our flight. I believed that vodka, tomato juice, and celery was the perfect prescription for a genius flying into central Africa with an open head wound.

Running from Abaddon (Part II)

The place still shows up in my dreams. The roads crowded with Russian Ladas, Fiat taxis, and Mercedes trucks – only about half with working mufflers. Walking the crowded markets, the air was ripe with the sour bite of Cameroonian sweat mixed with the smells of diesel and woodsmoke and roasting meat. In a Washington Post travel log, Christopher Vourlias described it:

“Pavement chefs presided over small propane burners,

Photo: Ludwig Troller, Creative Commons

dishing out avocado salads and spaghetti omelets to crowds of hungry laborers. Stocky women in colorful dresses arranged their mangoes and oranges on sidewalk blankets, calling out in a cheery singsong. And young men wove through all the clamor selling secondhand shoes, a high-top sneaker or loafer balanced precariously on their heads."  http://wapo.st/ZIU6PU

Running from Abaddon (Part I)

Ken made it out of Saigon just before that city fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975. In 1979, Ken flew out of Tehran a couple weeks before Iranians climbed the walls at the US Embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. He always seemed one step ahead of the bad news. 

In the spring of 1984, Ken reported for duty as a Defense Intelligence officer in Beirut. Somewhere in between, Chief Warrant Officer Ken Welch was our friend.

Dee Felice Café Would Turn Santa into a Duck Dynasty Fan

Dee Felice Café, a Cajun-Creole joint in Covington, KY, stands in a historic building near the site of the 1856 slave escape that inspired Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved.

About 130 years later, the late jazz drummer and band leader Dee Felice started his restaurant in this building at the corner of 6th and Main. Three decades after that, his daughter Shelly now runs the front end and her husband Patrick Nelson runs the kitchen.

Patrick is a writer buddy of mine and I’ve read his stories. After a day herding ourselves through the maze at IKEA (where the Swedes apparently stole the color scheme from the US Navy Blue Angels and then mocked up a floor plan to approximate the layout of the children’s game “Candy Land”), Jill and I went to see if Patrick is as skillful in the kitchen as he is on the page.

Shelly greeted us at the hostess desk like we were old friends. She seated us at a table near the big picture windows that overlook MainStrasse Village.

What if the kid writes back?

Say you’re writing to your 12-year-old self. What do you do if the kid writes back?

I’m not the first guy to wonder, “If I were to meet another version of myself, my kid self, what would I say to him?” Richard Bach explored the idea in his novel, One. A couple a' Joes battled it out in the movie, "Looper."  Amy Pond in "Dr. Who."

I’d dreamed up my own version. In a bubble of overlapping timelines, I met my boy self on a winding road in rural Marion County, the summer before his 8th grade.

Call Signs

When he was a nugget, his first squadron tagged him with the call sign “Magua.” He earned this name not through prowess or by any resemblance to a warrior from The Last of the Mohicans, but rather to the tale of his being cornered drunk by MPs outside a strip club in San Diego and his inability to pronounce his own name: Mark White.


Thirty years later, combat ribbons and the silver star of a Marine

brigadier general sit framed in a small shadow box on his desk in the Oval Office.   A different tag now, his detail calls him “Tecumseh.” Shawnee for “panther crossing the sky,” the code name suits a former Hornet driver and sitting war-time president.

Grouseland Rifle Connects Our Past and Present

As appearing in "Muzzle Blasts" (October 2012), the official publication of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A sheriff’s deputy stands watch over the 209-year-old muzzle loader, the newly christened State Rifle of Indiana. The Grouseland Rifle, on display at the NMLRA Education Building in Friendship, was crafted around 1803 by Vincennes gunsmith John Small, who among other occupations had been named Indiana’s and Knox County’s first sheriff in 1790. Two centuries later, John Small might be pleased to see a descendant in his line, lean and tough and wearing the modern badge of a Knox County Sheriff, standing guard over one of the few remaining firearms that Small had crafted.

William Small wrote that his father stood 6’1” and weighed precisely 184 pounds, which was not unlike the stature of the young deputy now on over-watch. For a moment, time seems compressed and it doesn’t take much to imagine the presence of John Small’s spirit.

How Did You Get Here So Fast?

Her head was pitched back against the driver’s headrest, her jaw slack as the Lexus SUV idled through the intersection. If Jill and I could have seen her eyes, we’d have seen only the whites. No hands appeared on the steering wheel.

“Holy shit,” I said, leaning forward to the windshield. “I think that driver’s unconscious.”

A Boy on Sargent Road

Friday’s rush-hour traffic has me looking for a path of least resistance. I exit the interstate in favor of side roads. Driving home toward Fishers, I turn onto Sargent Road -- a shaded route that lazes its way northeast through Marion County.

Settlers first entered the Mud Creek Valley here in 1824. The farmhouse with chipped white paint and a latticed porch still stands where Johnny Sargent's father built it in the 1880s. 

Across the road and obscured by overgrowth, a sagging barn guards the entrance to the fallow field where Johnny flew in and out with his J-3 Piper Cub in the mid-1950s. 

Muzzle Loaders and Biker Bars

Jeff probably has writer’s cramp from signing twenty copies of his book, John Small of Vincennes:  Gunsmith on the Western Frontier (http://www.redaviscompany.com/1242.html). Writer’s cramp is also called “scrivener’s palsy.”  But scrivener’s palsy sounds nasty and incurable and medieval, and not something you can relieve by flapping your hands at the wrist. We’ll just call it writer’s cramp.

We’ve left the grounds of the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association in southeastern Indiana, where Jeff has spent the day answering questions and autographing books for visitors who’ve come to see the Grouseland Rifle. This newly named State Rifle of Indiana was crafted by gunsmith John Small sometime around 1803.

Small was Indiana’s first sheriff, a colonel in the territorial militia, and a master craftsman who made long rifles, pistols, and tomahawks for many of the great figures of the period, including George Rogers Clark, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark.

His Indian name was “Big Knife.”  John Small was pretty much a pioneer action hero.

Pathfinder as Destrier

A Fishers patrol car blocked the road at 131st Street. I pulled alongside and the officer leaned out his window. I pointed to the accident scene -- a head-on collision.

“One of the drivers,” I choked it out. “My wife...”

He softened and gestured to a second cruiser. “She’s in the back of that one.”

The passenger door opened and Jill climbed out. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked in her eyes. She was scared, but uninjured. I looked past her to the Pathfinder she’d been driving.

The front end was mangled. Airbags hung from the dash like deflated lungs. A seat belt draped out the driver’s side door like a protective arm now dangling limp toward the pavement. Our truck was bleeding fluid onto the street. It was dying.

Most Valuable Player

Eliminate the titles of valedictorian and salutatorian, the high school proposed.  "We'll recognize all good grades equally and have an essay contest to pick a speaker.  This should 'promote less competition and more collaboration,'" the speaker continued.  My friend asked an opinion and I gave her one.

Life is competition, all the way up the chain.  Sacrificing this truth on the altar of popular opinion and political correctness and you deny nature.

T-cells tackle a virus.  Crabgrass competes with Kentucky bluegrass.  Bull elk joust for mates during the rut.  Siblings rival and a toddler resents his mother’s breast being given over to a new infant sister.  Young men flex their biceps to win the favor of a girl.  Darkness encroaches on light.  Good battles evil.  Competition permeates it all.

Ash Dive

Slyde arrived at Franklin Flying Field, right on schedule. He sat in the grass as his friends gathered in a circle and plotted how best to dump him from a Cessna.

“How about me and Ed hold him from both ends and you let him go?” 

“We could get under canopy and then drop him.” 

“Cathie, you were married to him. You should do the honors.”

It was a hot Saturday in August and weather threatened from the west. Cathie and Ed and Kivett and Ralph planned Slyde’s final skydive as Slyde sat patiently by –  in a box and all five cremated pounds of him.