A TASTE FOR IT: A FAMILY WITH A POWERFUL THIRST

On my mother's side I come from a family of drinkers: boozers, dipsomaniacs, drunks, lushes, sots, alcoholics of various stripes and even a few pill poppers. My aunts and uncles were all short people and that probably compounded things. But the real problem was alcohol.


Lives were wrecked, people died - a besotted favorite aunt and a couple of innocent and sober strangers died in alcohol-bathed wrecks. One uncle went without a driver's license for

much of his life and booze was involved. Another uncle loved to get drunk, get insulted (he made sure that would happen), start fights in bars and end up in jail from time to time. His violent streak sometimes extended to family members, but they all insisted they still loved him because that is what people in that kind of family do. And they were that kind of family.

Some were loud and angry drunks. Others drank prodigiously and passed out quietly. Some married drunks. And one or two were private drinkers. My mother was one of those and probably angrier than the rest. She didn't begin drinking until I was grown and gone, but she drank her way through anger toward sleep for years. None seemed like happy drunks, but they all drunkenly, enthusiastically, splashed around in the shallow puddles of their own misery. Marriages suffered. Children suffered the way the children of drunkards always do and most of us have lugged it into adulthood in one way or another, never quite escaping no matter how far away we went or close to home we stayed. 


My mother loved wallowing in the family mess with her brothers and sisters. And there always was plenty of it. Their mother encouraged it and made sure they always had something to wallow in. After she died most of them didn't know any other way to live and kept on wallowing. They were a family rich in secrets, lies and liquor. A few slipped away eventually, but not many.

I do not like the wallow of family mess and stay far away from it. And after growing up around those people, I have a complicated relationship with the whole idea of family, particularly extended family, and it took many years of my life to escape my own secrets and lies (I thought that was the way life was supposed to be lived. Why wouldn't I?) and enjoy family life.

I have always been wary of family but I have never been wary of alcohol. In spite of everything, I do not have a complicated relationship with alcohol. I like to drink. I've spent my entire adult life proving how much I like it.

Beer is where I started when I was old enough to drink legally (18 years old in those days). There were only beer bars where I grew up and I was a regular at several. I don't remember drinking much whiskey back then, but I must have

because I remember puking so much bourbon and Coke out of car windows that I didn't drink bourbon - or Coca Cola - for years. I couldn't even stand the smell. Beer was my drink of choice. I even carried an opener - a church key - on my key ring until poptops came along. After training on Pabst Blue Ribbon for a few years (a good training beer if ever there was one) I moved on to tastier, sturdier fare. Budweiser. Tall cans. Imported beer. Dark beer. Guinness stout. The stronger tasting the better. If I drank whiskey it was scotch, but that was rare.

I like to drink but I do not like to be drunk. It happens but not very often. And I have a very low tolerance for drunks and staggering drunken behavior. Both of those things are no doubt linked to the people I grew up around. But the way I see it, I drink the way I do in spite of them, not because of them. I have a taste for it, but I do not have a thirst for it. I do not crave alcohol or develop a mighty thirst if I quit drinking for a while - and I have quit at times. I do not get drunk and go looking for a fight; I do not get drunk and descend on some unsuspecting friend or relative like the raging, weeping drunks who showed up at my parents' house in the middle of the night too frequently when I was growing up - usually after the bars closed or the bottle was empty; I do not get drunk, pass out on the floor and have to be dragged to my bed by friends or relatives. I do not get drunk and behave badly. I do not drink alone or early or instead of doing other things. Drinking and driving used to be a way of life (we all did it), but I don't even do that any more.

And nowadays I particularly like to drink bourbon. I guess the beer years washed the pukey bourbon memories away. A few years ago I bought a bottle and enjoyed it. I like the taste.  Bourbon, a little ice, a little water. Several of those each evening. Along with a little conversation with my wife. Drinking has been part of the rich conversation we have kept going for approaching 30 years and I have to admit I even offered her a little bourbon the first time she came to my house (not a social visit, but I was wishing it was), which she rejected with the promise that she would come back and we would have that drink later and she did and we did and still do. Add a little music, some TV, a book, a movie, a sunset, a fire in the fireplace, a starry sky. Add whatever you like, but don't add anything to the whiskey but a little water and a little ice.

I drink but I am not an alcoholic. I am confident of that fact. It allows me to go on drinking. And every drink I take proves I am not like them. I do not do any of the things I watched my mother and her brothers and sisters do. If I did, I would quit drinking tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. But the truth is I have no plans to quit at all. Happy hour starts at five o'clock around here.

 

QUARANTINE: THINKING ABOUT EBOLA

Our house was once quarantined because I was sick.

I had a sore throat and a fever, but I was a child prone to strep infections, so a sore throat and fever were nothing new. But this sore throat rapidly became worse than it ever had been before, my fever went higher, my tongue coated white, I had chills and broke out in a sand-papery red rash. My mother took me to the doctor. We rode the bus because we didn't have a car back then. The doctor said I had scarlet

I understand this look.

fever and that my mother shouldn't take me home on the bus. He said scarlet fever was a dangerous, contagious illness and that it was his job - and our job - to make sure other children didn't catch it. He said go home and stay home and said I had to stay in bed and rest. My mother took me home - I don't remember how we got there - and tucked me in, pulled the shade, turned out the light, kissed me on my feverish forehead and told me to call her if I needed anything. She went to take care of my baby sister, who could not visit until I was well. The county health department came by not long after that and tacked a big yellow quarantine sign on our front door. It was a serious sign. And we obeyed it. Other people obeyed it too. We stayed put and they stayed away. No questions asked.

I was six years old. I would remain in bed for the better part of a month before the sign came down. Scarlet fever is a childhood disease that once killed many children and left others with damaged hearts and other disabling problems. It also is an illness that could panic whole neighborhoods, towns and schools when it turned up. Antibiotics eventually calmed both the illness and the fears - though the illness remains a danger without early treatment - but not in 1950 when I was sick. So the quarantine sign on our front door told the neighborhood - and the world - I was sick but not to worry, things were under control, a line had been drawn, a perimeter set up, their children were safe. 

I was confined to my bed in a darkened bedroom and could only leave to go to the bathroom. I am not sure why the room was kept dark, but for days I was too sick to care. Nausea, fever, sore throat, headaches, the rash. The doctor came to check on me from time to time. My mother fed me soup; I drank ginger ale (our family's traditional nausea remedy). 

And there was medicine. Awful tasting. Probably penicillin. Liquid. Several gagging doses a day. I hated it. I resisted. Finally I hated it so much I hid my red and white plastic dart pistol under my pillow and when my father came in with my evening dose and turned on the lamp, I jerked the pistol out and said, "If you try to make me take that I am going to shoot you."

My father, who had been a soldier in Italy in World War II only a few years before, took shooting and threats of shooting seriously. He also knew taking your medicine was serious business. He came down with rheumatic fever a few weeks after the Salerno invasion, spent a year in a hospital and barely survived. He calmly handed the medicine bottle and the spoon to my mother, snatched the little pistol out of my hand, jerked me up by the arm and, as I dangled over the bed, smacked my butt several times so hard that I never had trouble taking my medicine again. Ever. He said nothing. He spooned, I swallowed, he left the room. My mother dabbed at my tears with the corner of the sheet, tucked me in and turned off the lamp. I never saw the little red and white pistol again.

Years later I met a guy who was a kid down the block I never knew back then. He remembered those quarantine days,

My sign was yellow.

remembered being told by his parents to stay away from my house, to cross to the other side of the street when walking past, remembered boys daring each other to sneak up to my front door and touch the quarantine sign, remembered touching the sign himself, the thrilling feeling of tempting death, and running home to await his fate.

I recovered and infected no one else. The quarantine sign came down and no others went up.

I have been thinking about all of that recently. About the quarantine. About the way we stayed put and others stayed away. About how I took my medicine. About how I lived and the rest of the kids in the neighborhood went on living too. And about the deadly seriousness of Ebola and the dangers of playing at tempting death on a dare, like neighborhood children.


 


 

MAKING PLANS FOR GETTING HIGH AGAIN

I will be going to Zion National Park in a couple of weeks for a hike to Angels Landing. The last time I visited Angels Landing was October 1974, two months before my 30th birthday. This time I will be two months shy of my 70th birthday. It's been 40 years. I never intended to wait this long to go back.

I first arrived at Zion this way:

After spending the first 29 years of my life as an often unhappy (and occasionally unhinged) southerner, I decided to go somewhere else. Somewhere west. So I took a leisurely 16,000-mile drive to places I had never been. It was a trip without a plan or a timetable to wherever the next place was on the map. Or maybe somewhere else. That's the kind of trip it was.

Zion was supposed to be a stopover on the way back to Santa Fe to close the western loop of the trip. One night, then hit the road. But it became much more than a stopover. I fell in love with the place. I ended up spending a week there on the trails - short ones, long ones, easy ones, not so easy ones, flat ones along the valley floor, wet ones up the Virgin River and steep ones up the sides of the canyon. The last hike I took was to Angels Landing.

But before that there was a treacherous long-closed trail to the top of Lady Mountain. An old guy from Arkansas who had visited the park years before told me about it and told me where he thought it was. Park rangers said the trail had been closed for years because it was so dangerous. That was all the encouragement I needed. I searched out the unmarked trail. I started up. It was more than a hike. A couple of ladders and a chain cable to hang onto while scaling the cliff were part of it, but I made it, stayed long enough to view the 360-degree view (the only one in the park), peel and eat one last orange and head down in the late afternoon.

The ladders and the chain cable are gone now due to what the Park Service describes as "deaths and bothersome rescues" on Lady Mountain. Both ladders and 2,000 feet of hand chain cable were removed in 1978. Obviously bad things happened up there in those four years after I made it to the top. But not to me.

I was invincible.

I was not quite 30 and already had a long trail of wreckage (what I would later learn to tidy up and call "experience"), human and otherwise, behind me in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I had a very good job (with a future). I come from a long line of dedicated employees. My father thought quitting a perfectly good job in Atlanta and going for a drive with no plan for the future was too dumb a thing for a grown man to do. But I was not a very mature 29-year-old and I certainly was not a dedicated employee.

Besides, I was in great shape after traveling, hiking and sleeping in a small green tent for months on end. My hair was long, my eyes were blue, I had a great tan, I had a cowboy hat and expensive Italian hiking boots, I had walked on glaciers, been to the top of Medicine Bow Peak in Wyoming (John Denver was there the day before), driven over Beartooth Pass in Montana in a late July snowstorm, been swimming in the cold Pacific Ocean, drunk beer and mai-tais with the crew of a salmon boat at the the Sea Hag bar in Ilwaco, WA (while one of their crewmates, an Apache guy named Ernie who was going home because his grandmother was dying, played drunken boogie-woogie piano until his midnight bus to the Arizona desert arrived), been to San Francisco, Big Sur, Disneyland, sailed the Santa Ana Wind from San Diego to Mexico and back on a teak-decked sloop, saw whales and a nuclear submarine, driven the Mojave Desert at night, been inside Hoover Dam. I had been to Mexico and Canada. I had been places and done things.

And just the day before I had been to the top of Lady Mountain.

I was so ready for Angels Landing that I never gave the hike a second thought. Up I went. Invincibility on the move. A long way up, through 21 switchbacks called Walter's Wiggles and out along the narrow rocky spine to the end. After Lady Mountain it was a bit anticlimactic. But standing there nearly 1,500 feet above the valley floor with sheer drops all around seemed like the place I belonged.

Now it simply seems like the appropriate place for a man in his 70th year to go. Again.

My wife loves the beautiful cliffs and canyons in southern Utah, but she does not like hiking to high, narrow places. There are other Zion trails for the two of us and we will hike them before and after Angels Landing. I had hoped to make the hike with my sons Eric and Nick, but Nick can't make the trip. Eric will be hiking with me. He agreed to go months ago. He called the other night and asked me if I knew people have died hiking to Angels Landing. It's true. The Park Service says five people have fallen to their deaths over the past several decades. I told him we will be careful, we will consider the wind and the weather, we will turn around if we need to. He knows and I know we have been dangerous situations before and come home safely. Angels Landing will be a test in more ways than one. But we will not hike it like we are invincible.

I have nothing to prove by doing this, but the one thing I know is that I will be hiking up the trail to a place I have been before, but not back in time. Nostalgia is a crippling disease. I have no desire to relive those old days because a lot of them were bad old days and there were more bad days to come after I hiked down from Angels Landing in 1974. My good old days started years after I last climbed the trail and they have gone on being good days for more than 26 years now. At the age of nearly 70 I finally have acquired some good old days and they keep accumulating. I like that.

I don't feel as invincible as I did 40 years ago, but I feel pretty good. So I am getting ready. Getting in shape. Making plans. Booking rooms. Counting days.

By the time I came down from my sneaky trip up Lady Mountain and returned to camp back in 1974 it was dark and the old guy from Arkansas was nervously apologizing to the rangers for telling me about the hidden trail and asking them to organize a search party. When I walked in the rangers were angry, the old guy was relieved, I was smiling. I suppose I could have died up there that day, but what kind of life would it be without a hidden trail to a high, narrow place and a search party in it from time to time?

SUNSET OUTSIDE ZION PARK, OCT. 2013