Kleinwalker

His name was Kleinwalker.  I’m sure he’s dead now – it HAS been more than 30 years.  He was the first mate on a tiny ferry I worked on as a deckhand in the summer after I turned 16.

He had an enormous belly, a great pendulous chunk of thick, hard flesh that closed so low over his overstretched, sagging belt, the bottom lip seemed to curl back under to touch his thighs.

He smoked roll-your-own cigarettes, the curly brown frays stained wet on short and stubby fingers burnished hard to tones of oak to mahogany.

I’d never seen anyone smoke a cigarette like Kleinwalker.  He had no teeth, but wore no dentures, so that when he took a drag, the burning ember would plunge to the back of his mouth as if pulled by an invisible string, the smoking ember almost disappearing before sprouting forward, spring-loaded.    The first time I saw him suck in that butt, I thought I was watching a cartoon.

He didn’t pay much attention to me.  As a two-month summer relief hire, my job was to make a good pot of coffee in the morning, clean the heads with a rag mop once a day, polish the brass fittings once a week, and stay out of the way.  That and raise the bar upon docking to release the cluster of workers leaning forward, impatient to drive home.  At the mill side I’d have to haul the chain across in preparation for departure.  It was a brain-dead easy, overpaid union job, but at 800 bucks free and clear in one month – a huge sum for a 16-year-old in the mid-70s – I wasn’t complaining.

Standing around the dock one morning with three other colleagues before the first shift of pulp mill workers stepped aboard, Kleinwalker was holding court.   Suddenly, he came out with this:

You know, this morning gettin’ up, I gave the wife a nudge ‘cuz I felt a little bit of a rise comin’ on, just a sec or two, but then I had to get up to take a piss and it was gone.  Damn.  I haven’t felt what that was like in years.

Just as I was absorbing the fact that this man was spilling to his colleagues things I’d never heard spoken of in my own home before, he turned to me and growled out: What about you, you young cunt?  You gettin’ any on it?

No, I wasn’t getting any on it, but I was too stunned to even stammer out the words.

The moment passed and we were soon taking up our positions on the ferry.  As he walked away to climb the steep metal stairs to his office, wheezing as he walked and straining to lift his enormous bulk up the narrow passageway, I remember thinking: no adult, not even – or perhaps, especially -  my father, has ever asked me that.

A life in a box

I’ve been carting around a chaotic jumble of ribbons, string, paper, plastic and metal in a ratty old box for most of my adult life. Entirely useless yet absolutely essential, it sits in a closet waiting to be hauled out and dusted off whenever I feel like a wallow through the muddy ruts of memory lane. It’s way better than a photo album. It’s my life in a box.

A sampling:

Most have a story behind them, some of which I might even get around to one day.

1 New Year noisemaker, ca. 1968

1 metal sugar scoop made in Grade 8 metalwork shop, 1972. I hated that class. The teacher was two metres tall and had a horrible temper he let loose with a booming voice. He once humiliated a classmate to tears by smashing his work flat with a sledgehammer.

4 gold Molson Mostar ski racing pins won at Whistler Mountain, BC. They were fun ski races. A ski instructor or patroller would weave through the gates, with his timing used as a benchmark for yours. If your timing was less than 10% slower than his, you got a gold pin.

1 Canadian flag, made of cloth and sewn on backpack for trip to Europe and Middle East in 1980 – 81.

1 square of leather cut away from the long-discarded boots I wore on that trip.

On the Pyramids at Giza, with sweaty socks:

1 Eurail Pass. Expiry sometime in September, 1980. After first validation two months before in Calais, France it became worthless in Lisbon. Not a good idea if you want to get to Greece.

1 Melkweg membership card, valid until Nov. 1, 1980 – from Amsterdam nightclub memorable for what I probably don’t remember of my only evening there.

1 t-shirt remains from Mount Hermon ski area in the Golan Heights, Israel, where I worked as a first aid ski patroller in the winter of 1980 – 81.

1 can of Elite instant coffee, bought in Kiryat Shmona, Israel, 1981.

1 exploded nose cone cover of a Katyusha rocket which hit our Kibbutz in the north of Israel in Spring, 1981. Nothing much has changed.

1 shell casing from the Boer War, picked up by my maternal grandfather and passed on to me.

Spare keys to the only three cars I’ve ever owned. All bought used. The ‘85 Honda Prelude was the best of the bunch.

1 Canadian Ski Instructors’ Alliance pin. Best and worst job I ever had. Low pay, deep tan.

Via Rail uniform buttons, lapel and a souvenir pin from definitely the worst job I ever had. I still refer to it as Vile Rail.

1 roll of splicing tape and razor blades for editing tape for radio reporting. I can’t believe it was only 15 years ago they were teaching this in journalism school. Now it’s all done digitally, of course. A bit of a loss, really.

1 photographer’s press pass to see Canadiens hockey games at the old Montreal Forum, 1993. Never got to go interview the players after the game, but free entry to Canada’s most revered hockey shrine was priceless.

1 deck of Donruss original 1992 Toronto Blue Jay Championship Season baseball cards, sealed. A press package gift. Is it worth anything?

1 deck of Donruss original Montreal Expos 25th Anniversary Edition baseball cards. Opened. Another goody-bagger for journalists. Please ignore the McDonald’s logo.

1 Little Red Book. Bought in Beijing, 1997.

1 book of postcards depicting glorious and commendable revolutionary dance drama theatrical production Red Detachment of Women flying the red flag.

1 Hong Kong cent note. Value: next to nothing.

About 20 Hong Kong dollars worth of bar coupons to the Hong Kong Press Club.

A slew of identification cards, including:

1 Vancouver Expo ‘86 season’s pass. I swore I would never go to that circus, but ended up actually working there for a time.

1 University of British Columbia library card with some longhair who must have showed up for the picture sometime after 4:20pm.

1 Concordia University library card.

Not shown: 1 Whistler Mountain season’s pass. Price in 1978? $165. You might squeeze two days out of that much today.

1 Quebec driver’s license, expiry 1994. No photo required. Guaranteed to induce derisive laughter in California Highway Patrol cops.

1 Canadian Association of Journalists membership card

2 Vancouver Polar Bear Swim Club buttons, Jan. 1, 1990 and 1995. Best hangover cure other than waiting 36 hours.

1 guest membership card to Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

2 Canadian National Railway pins

1 Queen Elizabeth silver jubilee medal. I really do love the queen. Honest.

1 Canadian Red Cross blood donor card, now useless. Because I lived in France in the early eighties, they think I might pass on Mad Cow Disease to recipients, so I am no longer allowed to donate blood in Canada.

Moo.

See those coins in the sugar scoop? I used to collect coins, and so people gave them to me from time to time. I’ve got piles of them, hundreds from all over the world. I look at them and tell myself I should find out if any of them have value or at least put them in an album instead of having then crammed in the bottom of a box, but I’ve been dragging them around forever and never get down to doing it.

I will retire someday, though.

Part 8: a dive into nostalgia and things we didn’t do

If you permit me one short indulgence in pure nostalgia… On the train from Istanbul to Kayseri there were two backpackers from Devon, England a couple of doors down who brought back memories. The fellow was very tall and lanky, soft-spoken, his girlfriend bright-eyed, friendly and chatty without getting too up front about it. I envied the way they were travelling – heavy backpacks, open-ended plans and easy way of talking about their days on the road: Oh yeah, we heard Diyarbakir’s something to see, we might head there or beyond depending on the situation – which of course got me launching into the seductive beauties of Lake Van and how they absolutely must go further than Diyarbakir if they want to see the most fascinating parts of the country beyond the well-trampled tourist trail.

I suppose the days when we got the notion we were the first and only foreigners who’d ever been through some of those remote mountain towns because that’s the way the people treated us – so special, so different – are gone forever, but do you remember the feeling of being on the road with no set return date and just letting yourself be driven by the urge to GO GO GO – see what’s beyond the horizon, dealing with things as they come up, stopping to rest when you needed to and moving on? That’s what I saw in that lovely English couple: the freedom of the open road.

I think it’s dangerous to bring a delicious guidebook to a country the size of Turkey if you’re only going to stay for two weeks. Leafing wistfully through our Lonely Planet one evening, I read aloud to K. the routes we took through the far east of the country – they still say it’s very remote, not easy to get to, and that few take the trouble to visit – and wished we’d had a whole month. Maybe next time?

Do you remember being in Kars and having to forgo a visit to the ruins of Ani because the red tape of having to get a permit merely to approach the Soviet border was just too daunting a hassle to bother with? The former Armenian capital of a quarter million strewn across the plain is open now. You can get there without a permit.

I believe in doing things right, after all – even 30 years later. One day I want to see Ani, because it’s still there waiting. We were so close, but didn’t go.

Approaching Kayseri I noticed something which, again, made me think I was walking around blindfolded last time. How on earth could I have missed the sight of that enormous volcano looming over the city? Mount Erciyes is nearly 4,000 metres high! When we finally made it to Uchisar 70 km away – we didn’t stay in Ürgüp – it was still the most dominant feature of the distant countryside. We loved watching the sun rise over it in the morning and paint it gold in the evening. For some reason I have no photo of it from those days. We had good weather, didn’t we? Why don’t I remember it?

If you look at the extract from my journal back then I did mention the mountain, so I wasn’t walking around blindfolded. On the same page I wrote that we’d seen a working steam engine in the switching yards there – imagine, a steam engine still plugging away on the rails in the 1980s!

As our taxi – crammed with our loveable English couple, a Spaniard who spoke German and the three of us and all our gear – up loomed what else but a steam engine, proudly restored and on display at the road entrance to the station area. I wondered aloud if it wasn’t the same one we’d seen back then. Who knows?

I do remember being stared at, but back then all golden-haired, and now… didn’t really expect it this time. But just as we were getting off the train and figuring out where to grab a taxi, a couple of Turkish women – mid- to late-twenties I guess and dressed in traditional clothing with headscarves – were slowly walking past us down the platform. I realised one was looking straight at me, so I looked at her back. And looked. And looked some more. Normally by then I’d have averted my gaze but I kept looking deep into her eyes because I though OK, I’m not breaking any laws here or even making eyes, I’m not afraid to look back at someone even if it is some sort of intercultural taboo, so I’m just going to keep looking at you until one of us blinks. Then I smiled at her and she smiled back, which I thought was the most natural thing to do, really, and then she went back to talking with her friend and was on her way. I’m still wondering what that was all about.

In Kayseri we were also greeted with a reminder on the way into town of how militarised Turkey is. Right beside the tracks and practically in the centre of town is a huge military barracks, base and ammunition depot – stacks and stacks of arms, weapons, materiel of all sorts, guarded by mean-looking soldiers who look like they’d shoot if you looked at them cross-wise. At another point on the way back we saw a whole trainload of new tanks headed east, convoys of military vehicles on the roads. We also passed a couple of enormous radar bases.

Remember the chaos of bus stations back then? A muddy corner lot with hulks parked any place they could find a spot, touts yelling at you to take their bus, hello-English-where-you-go? where-you-go? I can still hear in the chaos of the Ezerum station a man spilling out the itinerary of that magical route we took near the eastern border, at one point the road hugging the side of a canyon with cliffs a thousand feet vertical above and a raging river ten feet below. Ezerum – Savsat, Savsat – Artvin, Artvin – Kars…. Do you remember that? It seems like such a banal moment, but for some reason that whole scene has always stayed with me.

The bus station in Kayseri, by contrast, looks like a modern airport. An extremely high ceiling, white, fluted support columns, and so clean I thought this couldn’t be the centre of Turkey.

Part eight in a series. Part seven: Knife fights, confusion and a freezing cold night; Part six is here, part five – underneath Istanbul; part four: the Blue Mosque smells like cheesy feet; part three: Sleepwalking through Turkey – was I even there? Part two: Istanbul memoir, and part one – the intro.

Letter to my friend about Turkey – Part 6

In which we have arrived at mid-point of perhaps the longest letter I’ve ever written.  It’s OK, she’s a special friend, and the trip back was wonderful.  This section is a bit of a ramble.  Please bear with me, or read part one here, part two here, part three here, part four here or part five here.

The only time I have ever taken a photograph of a meal was the time in France when I ate roasted sheep heads for dinner with the family I was living with as a student.  Or was it goat?  Anyway… not about to start taking phots now just for a blog, but I will mention…

Food! I haven’t told you about the food yet!  Trish, the food is the one big improvement over the time we were there. It’s simple, honest fare and outside the tourist areas, still a great deal. Ten euro will buy three people a good lunch, dinner around 15 or 20. Even in the areas with higher tourist traffic, we felt prices were reasonable. And no worries anymore about falling ill. We were also smart this time around, drinking only bottled water, which is cheap and sold everywhere. Sometimes I think back then that for a few more dollars a day we could have saved ourselves a lot of grief in the long run.   Remember how sick we were?

I was going to say you shouldn’t go to the Topkapi Palace unless you’re a masochist, but I still have to post the section on Turkish trains.

But if hanging out with hordes of people in line-ups starts to turn you off and you’re prepared to pay yet another entrance fee once inside the place just to see the Harem, where you’ll be treated to the most interesting part and be sheltered away from the crushing throng. I found the idea of seeing all that wealth and religious relics kind of enticing – who wouldn’t want to see a whisp of the beard of Mohammed himself? – but having to stand in line to do it just turned us off, so after a while we just didn’t bother.  The Harem, by contrast, proved to be quiet, sheltered and full of gory little details about palace intrigue and death.  Great fun for the kids.

I hate to harp on about the tourists, but they kind of ruined our visit to the Chora Church as well. Although we marvelled at some of the most well-preserved and beautifully restored Byzantine mosaics anywhere, the tour groups just wouldn’t GET OUT OF THE DAMN WAY long enough for you to stand back and really appreciate the setting and feel of the place.

I wanted to collectively bash together the heads of this particularly annoying group of blue-rinsed Greeks, who seemed more interested in yakking on amongst themselves about the weather and taking pictures of each other than really seeing what was in front of their blabbering gobs. I’m starting to feel the annoyance leading to aggression I felt at that moment, so will stop now.

Except to say the Little Hagia Sophia and the Mosaic Museum were ours to enjoy all to ourselves. Little Hagia Sophia is what they call a smaller mosque down on the southern shore of Sultanahmet coloured the same ochre as the Aya Sofya. It’s newly restored, and a jewel that had me holding my breath after walking in and turning skyward. The Mosaic Museum wasn’t even around when we were there because the actual restoration work didn’t start until a few years after, and wasn’t completed until the mid-nineties. Wonderful pieces, not all complete but when you think of the number of invasions and the looting that must have gone on, it’s a miracle they’ve survived at all.

We also had the pleasure of enjoying the amazing autumn weather on a Bosphorus cruise, taking an old tub from Eminönu right near the Galata Bridge way up to a small town on the Asian side very close to the Black Sea entrance. It stopped at several little ports along the way, giving us a great look at the grand old houses still left, what hasn’t burned down over the years. Those old wooden buildings are disappearing fast. Apparently if you buy one they have a law which says you have to restore it to its original look,which of course is too expensive, so people live in them and one day, a candle happens to fall over, or be given a nudge…

Speaking of fires and the Bosphorus, do you remember that huge, black, half-sunken shipwreck dominating the harbour back then? For the life of me I can’t figure out WHY I never took a photo of it, and I’m kicking myself still for not having done so, but I remember being so dumbstruck that amidst one of the busiest and most important waterways in the world this wreck should be even there.

On the outside of the Haydarpasa station there is a mention of the accident on a placard. We MUST have also seen it close up, because it was only 500 metres offshore from the station we had to have taken if we took the train going east. Again – no memory of it close up, but the view from afar I’ll never forget. I found this on the net:

1979–The Greek cargo ship Evriyali spears the Rumanian tanker Independenta offshore of the major Haydarpasa railway station, shaking the city with an explosion and causing pollution in both the Marmara Sea and the Bosphorus. About 95,000 tons of oil were spilled into the water and the wreck burned for nearly two months before the fire could be extinguished. Out of the 44-strong crew, only three survived. The wreckage of the tanker affected the area for many years.

So I’m not losing my memory after all.