Thursday's Columns

July 27, 2023

Americans in Europe

Part 7

Culley Jane had it all mapped out. After a direct flight on Lufthansa from Denver to Frankfort, we would spend three days in Germany, then twelve in France (including four in Paris) and then back to Germany to spend the final night near Frankfort before flying back home to Colorado. She had lodging reserved for each of our stops, including a couple days at the homes of old friends of hers in France. Car rental. Exchange rates. International communication links. A logistical performance. A dance. She’d been there. She took care of all of it. I was along for the ride.

I’d never been to Europe, so I didn’t know what to expect so before leaving I tried hard to not expect anything.

The one thing I know for sure is that no matter what you expect, it will be different.

I first heard that when I was a young reporter on the way up in Belleville, Illinois, around 1975. It was Jim Elner who told me. He was one of the locals I had gotten to know and hang out with there.

You’d think we were two parallel lines that could never intersect. I was on a post-collegiate professional career path. He was on a path that was harder to define. While I was going to city council meetings taking notes or at obscure bars making contact with “informed sources,” he was still living in the upstairs bedroom of his mother’s house reading Ginsberg and the Beats, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti, Burroughs and D. T. Suzuki, who introduced them all to the Zen perspective.

We met at an IHOP late one night. He wanted to get a thing going with the waitress. They’d gone to high school together. She always thought he was interesting, but he’d never been able to keep a steady job. While I was in college in the late 60s, he was hitchhiking back and forth across the country, seeking shelter beneath an overpass or on somebody’s couch. He said he once met Bob Dylan out there. I would come to realize that Jim Elner was a great poet, but every time he got drunk he burned his work.

The night we first met I’d been out drinking Stroh’s with shots of cheap whisky and told the IHOP waitress that I’d like a pot of hot coffee, please.

Elner was in the booth across from mine and spoke up first. “Aren’t you a reporter for the local newspaper? I’ve seen your picture there.”

I noticed that he was reading Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels.” I asked him about it.

I didn’t read Kerouac in college. My professors were more into Hemingway and Steinbeck. I’d heard of him, though, and some things about him – “On the Road” and the “rucksack revolution – but never knew he was into Zen (whatever that was) and Catholic mystics until I met Jim Elner.

We had lots of adventures together, Jim and I, and we became friends for life. We gradually lost touch with one another over the years, but we had been friends for life. He may still be alive somewhere. I’ll never forget the night he told me: “No matter what you expect, it will be different.”

In the 90s, after I got exiled from the press and before I became an over-the-road trucker, I went to nursing school at a community college and became a VA nurse, midnight shift on a long-term care unit. Most all the guys were WWII vets. I’d enter their darkened rooms just after midnight. Piercing their parchment-like flesh with the tip of a needle, I waited for the question I knew would come. It had become sort of like an inside joke on the ward between me and the old vets. As the morphine evaporated into their bodies, they would always ask me: “Hey, nursie, wha'da'ya know for sure?”

I always told them the same thing: “No matter what you expect, it will be different.”

Sitting in the Denver airport terminal waiting for the plane that would take me and Culley Jane and our 15-year-old granddaughter to Europe, I entertained expectations, although I knew better, but it’s hard not to do it.

Europe was at war. Again. Would they ever stop? Probably not as long as we kept egging them on and sending them money to keep doing it. Hundreds of thousands were being killed and maimed in Ukraine. I’d been a VA nurse. I’d seen the scars that never go away.

Millions of Ukrainians were fleeing their homes.

The disharmony was spreading. On inside pages, even the Denver Post was reporting widespread rioting in Germany and France. I was starting to expect an encounter with heightened tensions, nerves on edge, roadblocks and delays. I thought to myself: “What were we doing taking our teenage granddaughter into the middle of a scene like that when we could be cruising the Virgin Islands on a luxury liner. Were we crazy?"

Of course, it didn’t turn out the way I’d expected.

Sleep deprived and molded into a single uncomfortable position after our ten-hour flight, we stepped off the plane at the airport in Frankfort and stepped into a virtual reality.

It was the 17^th century. The people were as surprised by us as we were of them. Seeing the three of us in tennis shoes, jeans and t-shirts, peasant women screamed and hid their babies. Men on horseback armed with pitchforks and hammers charged up to us, but halted, analyzed the situation and then retreated. Somehow they knew that we meant no harm.

But there was panic in the air.

Everybody was grabbing what they could carry and were rushing in the direction of the fortified castle in Heidelberg, a dangerous day-long journey through enemy lines to the south. There was no time to waste. The Catholic armies were arriving and grouping for a final assault.

On September 19, 1622, the stone walls of the castle were breeched by Spanish soldiers under the command of the ruthless Cordoba. There was a forced capitulation. Dead bodies lay everywhere.

Like the lands of ungodly tribes in the far-away Americas, Spain claimed the Rhenish Palatinate as theirs, to do with as it wished.

Things looked bleak for the young couple who had so recently called the castle their home, Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart, the now deposed and disinherited Elector and Electress of the Rhenish Palatinate. They had managed to escape, but were exiles.

Eight years later and still in exile, Elizabeth gave birth to their twelfth child. A girl. The parents had run out of princes and duchesses they wished to honor with a namesake, so they named the baby Sophie... just because the mother liked the name.

Of course, Sophia's life didn’t turn out the way anybody could have expected at the time. That's one thing I know for sure.