Читать книгу The Sailor's Homer - Dennis L. Noble - Страница 13

CHAPTER 1

THE DESERT

In 1966 a Hollywood epic captivated moviegoers across the United States. Directed by Robert Wise and starring Steve McQueen and Candice Bergen, The Sand Pebbles ran a long 182 minutes. The production introduced many Americans to the little-known China Station of the 1920s by focusing on an enlisted sailor serving in a U.S. Navy river gunboat on the Yangtze River. The novel of the same name, written by Richard McKenna, is arguably the best fictional work about U.S. sailors serving in the Middle Kingdom. Historian George V. Traylor notes that McKenna’s book, although not a work of history, is “an excellent source for those who rarely read history to understand the 1920s in China and life as an enlisted sailor during those years.” Richard McKenna’s life was as interesting as his novel, which allowed a glimpse at a career enlisted sailor’s service in an era that ended at the outbreak of World War II. McKenna, however, served from the 1930s until his retirement in 1953 and then began a new career as a novelist, drawing inspiration from his experiences during his many years in the Navy.¹

Richard Milton McKenna was born on 9 May 1913 in the small southwestern Idaho community of Mountain Home in Elmore County. The county is bounded by two waterways—the Snake River in the south and the Boise River in the north—and encompasses more than three thousand square miles, more than twice the area of Rhode Island. Sixty percent of the land is mountainous, with altitudes ranging from twenty-five hundred feet to more than ninety-seven hundred feet, more than two thousand feet higher than any mountain in the East Coast’s Appalachian Mountains. The northern portion of the county is in the high country but slopes in a southerly direction to flatter land where cattle ranching, sheep herding, and other small agriculture predominate. Mountain Home falls into the climatic classification of semiarid.

In the early years of Elmore County, the aptly named Rattlesnake Junction, nestled in a mountainous area some seven miles northeast of the current Mountain Home, boasted a post office. People living in the settlement not too surprisingly changed the name of their town to Mountain Home, hoping to encourage more people into the area. When the Oregon Short Line Railroad entered the flatter desert area of the region in 1883, the post office moved to a more accessible location and thus began the present Mountain Home.

Mrs. Minnie Howard came to Mountain Home on 10 August 1890. Forty-nine years later, she recalled “the village . . . was a very desolate place, no trees or lawns and very little vegetation.” According to early residents, the town seemed to live up to the western frontier type featured in early dime novels or something the prolific western novelist Zane Grey might use as a model for one of his stories. Take, for example, F. W. Boyd, who journeyed westward from Ohio to California and eventually arrived in Mountain Home on 24 September 1893. Settling into his new home, Boyd attended a dance held in a bar and dance hall. He noticed a posted sign demanding cowboys leave their guns at the bar while dancing. “During the evening there were 45 [pistols] behind the bar at one time.”²

John Hiler, local historian of Mountain Home, points out that the town grew slowly, with the surrounding countryside made for “horse and sheep country.” Furthermore, the town sat at the crossroads for the mines of the region. Between 1911 and 1912 the population rose to twenty-two hundred. Mountain Home during this period could claim six churches, one school, four physicians, three dentists, eleven lawyers, and two newspapers. Located over a water table at a depth of twelve feet, Mountain Home used numerous windmills to pump its water and earned the sobriquet “the town of windmills.”³

Beginning in the 1890s sheep and wool became “one of the major industries” of Elmore County. This and the railroad assured Mountain Home of some importance. In the early twentieth century, wool had three major shipping points within the United States: Boston, Mountain Home, and Utah. “Buyers from Boston” undertook the long journey to Mountain Home to purchase wool. The raising of sheep required someone willing to spend long periods with the animals as they wandered through the sagebrush, foothills, mountains, and forests of Elmore County. Furthermore, the work involved periods of unemployment between when the lambs were shipped to market and when the ewes gave birth to a new crop of sheep. Although sheep herding paid relatively well, few cared to endure the loneliness involved and the periods of unemployment. Into this niche in Elmore County, and most of the western United States, came the Basques, an early sea people from Europe.

The first Basques in the area were bachelors who saved their money and returned to Europe. The bachelors stayed in hotels, establishments built for sheepherders, where they could feel at home among others speaking their native language. When Basque women came to the area, it was usually as domestic help in the hotels. Some Basque men managed to earn enough to own herds and married the daughters of the hotel owners or the women working in the hotels. Thus the Basques worked themselves into the fabric of Elmore County and Mountain Home.⁴

Mountain Home’s importance rose during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and World War I. The area helped supply the Army with horses and wool for uniforms, and warehouses for storing wool lined the railroad tracks in Mountain Home. Even after the end of the Great War, the town continued to ship its horses and sheep.⁵

Richard McKenna was born at his home at 204 East Fourth Street, Mountain Home. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Ertz, had left Germany to avoid the army and settled in Tennessee. Facing further conscription at the outset of the U.S. Civil War, “he walked all the way to Chicago to avoid serving in the Confederate Army.” Joseph married Mary Burkhard while living in Chicago but then moved to the Nebraska sand-hill country near Ogallala to avoid the Union Army. Anna Lucy Ertz, Richard’s mother, grew up in this rugged area when it “was still pretty wild Indian and cowboy country.”⁶

Richard’s paternal grandfather took land in the John Day Valley in eastern Oregon. The settlers “were still fighting Indians around there” when Richard’s father, Milton, was young. McKenna recalled his father “ran away from home when he was eleven and grew up in cow camps in Eastern Oregon.”⁷

Milton Lewis McKenna married Anna Lucy Ertz on 18 June 1912 at Mountain Home. Anna, who later in life began using her middle name more frequently, was a devoted Christian Scientist “for most of her life,” and this was the “only religious instruction” Richard received while living in Mountain Home. Richard was the eldest of four boys; Archie, the second son; Donald, the third son; and Roderick, the youngest, made up the rest of the McKenna family. The McKennas lived in Mountain Home but eventually moved to a five-acre farm in Canyon Creek, just outside town. Five acres in the high desert is not a great deal of land in the Mountain Home region, where the controlling factors are water and soil. The soils were calcareous, that is, overloaded with calcium, and crops on the McKenna holdings required “about 22 inches of water.” To put these statistics in perspective and understand the problems Richard’s father faced as a small farmer near Mountain Home, the rainfall records from 1 August 1948 to 31 December 2005 show only a mean of 9.98 inches of precipitation annually. Any farming by Richard’s father would have required irrigation to be successful, but the family had no good access to water. All this indicates the McKenna family would have been living on the edge if their existence depended entirely on the land.⁸

The realities of a hardscrabble farm may be why in 1917 Milton also worked as a contract freighter “all through . . . [the Owyhee Mountains] in the . . . days of tandem wagons and eight-horse teams on a jerkline.” At the time tall wagons containing a large amount of cargo were coupled together like a modern truck with a trailer. Instead of the driver sitting on the wagon and guiding the horses or mules with reins, as usually shown in western movies, the driver sat on one of the horses and had one line connected to the horses. The driver would jerk the line—thus “jerk line”—with one tug signaling the animal to the left. Richard spent one summer helping his father repair a ten-mile private road “about 30 miles back in the mountains from Horseshoe Bend” to fulfill a contract his father had to “haul lumber out.”⁹

While McKenna’s parents struggled to support their family, Richard entered the Mountain Home public school system. His daily route to school while he was in the first grade passed a building at 180 South Third Street that he thought of as “something like the courthouse and vaguely associated with God.” The edifice was in fact Mountain Home’s Carnegie Library, established in 1908, five years before Richard’s birth. The young boy had no idea a library contained books, even though books and libraries eventually played an important part in his life. His introduction to libraries had to wait, however, as his family had moved to the farm at Canyon Creek. Living on the farm required Richard to take transportation into Mountain Home for school, and he could see “Old man Beaman’s black, two-horse school bus crawling down what we . . . [called] Gaines Hill,” allowing him and his little brother “plenty of time to walk down the road [with me] carrying my lunch bucket before [the bus] got there.”¹⁰

McKenna soon developed “a great thirst for reading,” but his home contained only six books. Richard, however, “read anything,” even the Department of Agriculture’s 1902 Annual Report. This “thirst” became an important part of his character for the rest of his life.¹¹

After his success as a novelist, when older Mountain Home residents were asked to describe the young McKenna, they remembered him always reading and usually walking barefoot, with hands in pockets and eyes cast downward and seemingly in his own world. In a small community, this meant the boy received a reputation as a shy person. If those who classified the young man as shy had delved deeper, they might have learned of Richard’s great interest in the natural world around him. Today, it would probably be more accurate to describe the boy as introspective and imaginative.¹² The town and environs of Mountain Home provided another aspect of the young boy’s developing psyche. Richard’s hometown enabled him to move among lumberjacks, miners, cowboys, old Indian fighters, Basque sheepherders, and Mexican section hands. Into this highly diversified group of humanity, McKenna actively sought out elderly men of unusual origins or stories. All this became the foundation for his lifelong search for interesting people, new places, and different cultures.¹³

In the desert surrounding his rural community, Richard found a “special charm” in viewing nature devoid of humans. Lying on the dark lava rocks and looking out over the desert, he would smell the perfume of sagebrush and watched the rabbit bush turn to yellow in the fall. As he lay among the rocks, he looked out over the land and, like the Basques before him, began thinking of the sea, the mountains serving as islands in the vast “ocean” of the desert. While alone in the desert, he often felt “more purely happy at such times than I think I have ever been since.”¹⁴

When he was in either the third or fourth grade, someone finally explained to Richard what a library was. One can only imagine the feelings of an introspective boy from a poor farm family approaching something new. Nevertheless, one afternoon after school, with “much trepidation,” Richard paused before the doors of the library. He gathered his courage and pushed open the door, only to find himself in the Carnegie vestibule, with stairs leading up to another set of doors. Another stairway led down to the basement area. The young McKenna did not know this typical layout of a small Carnegie building, which allowed a library in the upper portion of the building and a community meeting area in the lower; some libraries even had small stages for community gatherings. The librarian could lock the upper doors in the evening and yet have the building open for community events.

As Richard stood in the vestibule looking up the stairs, he was struck by a strong smell “compounded of rubber matting, books and possibly some sort of floor wax.” For the rest of McKenna’s life, he always recalled the library with this “pleasant” smell, which brought with it the memory of the “greatest pleasurable excitement the world had to offer me.” Years later, Richard wrote, “I know now why incense is burned in temples.”¹⁵

McKenna continued to put off walking up the stairs from the vestibule by reading a marble plaque with the names of the women’s clubs that had worked to establish the library. He finally summoned up his courage, climbed the stairs, and pushed through the upper doors into the library. Coming from a home with few books, he was now surrounded by books on shelves higher than his head. The young boy did not realize “so many books existed in all the world.” Once inside the library, his next step was to find someone to help him obtain at least one of the many books surrounding him. Richard went up to “a pleasant and kindly [looking] woman,” who turned out to be the librarian, Mrs. Sessions. He quietly asked Mrs. Sessions permission to read one of the books. In response she explained the concept of a library card, telling the young boy he needed two property owners to sign for him. Richard did not clearly understand what the librarian said and thought perhaps it was a catch to prevent him from reading a book. Mrs. Sessions, clearly seeing the confusion and distrust on the boy’s face, said she would allow him to take away a book with him right away. “Instantly, I loved her,” McKenna recalled.

Richard now faced the difficult decision of choosing just one book. He found Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s novel The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; at just this time a billboard in Mountain Home advertised a movie of the same name. Richard asked Mrs. Sessions if there was a connection between the book and the movie. The librarian said the idea for many movies came from books, and this proved an interesting discovery for Richard; he loved both books and movies. Richard had on occasion attended the local cinema but rarely had the ten cents for admission; the information Mrs. Sessions had just imparted led him to think of books as movies. Therefore, Mountain Home’s library contained all the movies he would ever want to see for no admission charge. Richard’s reasoning illustrates how the young boy had begun to display a lively imagination that would be honed over the years.

Mrs. Sessions, knowing the Ibáñez book was too difficult for a young boy, discussed a variety of books with Richard until he finally selected Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. McKenna came away from his first visit to a library believing if he could read all the children’s books on the shelves, he could then move on to adult volumes. The young boy did not care if the books were for boys or girls; he “read them all.” He eventually read “nearly every book in the library” but admitted he did not completely understand many of them. Mrs. Sessions never said whether a book was good or bad; she just set aside books for him. McKenna’s mother, however, thought so much reading might be harmful and limited her son to two books a week. Richard, of course, “never once thought of obeying her.” With Mrs. Sessions giving him all the books he wanted, Richard took to hiding them in various places; a favorite hiding spot was a wooden structure behind the library. Interestingly, he continued to hide books later in his life when he served in the Navy. The discovery of the Mountain Home library allowed Richard McKenna to start to quench his great thirst for reading, setting him on the road to becoming a bibliophile for the rest of his life.¹⁶

A black-and-white class photograph of Richard during his elementary school years shows a boy dressed in bib overalls with light-colored hair, starting to show deep-set eyes. Perhaps to accommodate more children in the back row, he is the only person standing at an oblique angle to his classmates. The school records in Mountain Home are not available, but at some time in the elementary school years, Richard skipped a grade, as one might expect of a young boy who devoured books. In any case, in 1927, at the age of fourteen, Richard McKenna entered his freshman year at Mountain Home High School among a class of thirty-four other students. He is the only boy without a tie in the school’s yearbook, The Prophet, hinting at the family’s financial problems.

That year saw a traumatic event in Richard’s life when his father, for unknown reasons, abandoned the family. Like the boy’s shyness and socioeconomic background, his father’s departure was just another strike Richard brought with him to high school. Despite these social stigmas, Richard soon began working on the school newspaper, Hi-Way. He was in charge of stories. This experience led him to write a literary article for The Prophet titled “The Broken Broadsword,” which described a fictional battle between Scots and Saxons. Writing for the newspaper illustrates the boy’s first inkling of a desire to write. Richard joined multiple groups in high school and was known by the nickname “Richie.”¹⁷

At the beginning of his sophomore year in high school, Richie’s English teacher asked those who had read a book during the summer to raise their hands. Richard had finished all the children’s books in the public library and was now reading the adult novels. When called on to name the book he had read, the young man stated Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Mrs. Sessions had not mentioned anything about the book when she gave it to him, as was her typical practice. She certainly did not tell him the work was regarded in the United States as one of the best books of the year. Thus, McKenna did not understand why the English teacher was so pleased with his reading choice. A new male teacher at Mountain Home High School heard that Richie had read Wilder’s work and invited him to his apartment to meet his wife and discuss the book. The teacher said he had a number of recent releases that he would be glad to loan him.

Ill at ease, McKenna met with the teacher and his wife. The adult couple wanted to discuss the book, but McKenna could not understand what they were talking about. Furthermore, he could not articulate how he felt about the book. Richard had found Wilder’s work “just another novel and not a very exciting one.” The teacher tried to show how the novel delved into philosophy, fate, and “the tragic sense of life.” Completely puzzled, the young man fled the apartment.

McKenna reasoned that the couple probably thought he had only claimed reading the novel to curry favor with the teacher. He did not understand one could gather philosophy, fate, and tragedy from reading a novel. The incident gave him a glimmer of understanding about reading books for more than pleasure, but the final awakening came much later in his life. While McKenna understood the new teacher meant well, he avoided him as much as possible. Richie also never read Thornton Wilder again.¹⁸

Still working for the school paper during his sophomore year, Richard became the joke editor, and he even penned a poem for the yearbook titled “To the Freshmen”:

Oh, the Freshmen! How we love them!

With their sweet and innocent faces,

And their wide rounded eyes a staring

At a life so strange and new,

All their cute little mannerisms,

And their simple childish graces,

With their happy prattling laughter all,

Of Childhood ringing true.

Oh, the girls are Elsie Dinsmores

And the lads are Fauntleroys all

As sweet and pure as morning dew

In heart and soul and mind;

Yet a few more years of high school

And they, the girls and boys, all will

Be wise and toughened and their brows

By study seamed and lined.

Heigh ho! They’ll twit the Freshmen then

For being as now they are:

But glance around the Annual

And see them as you may.¹⁹

Richard did not limit his time in high school strictly to academic subjects and reading; he also was involved in athletics, playing guard on the Mountain Home High School football team. The team was originally called the Bunnies but was renamed the Tigers in 1928. Taking on the name of a ferocious animal may have fired up the team as it went on to a 6-0 season, “crushing Middleton for the District title, 84–0.” A forfeiture of an interdistrict game caused the Mountain Home Tigers to become the champion of Southwestern and Central Districts, Class B. They received a cup to display in the school’s trophy case.²⁰

McKenna entered his junior year of high school with twenty-five other classmates. On Christmas Day 1929 his family was evicted for being unable to pay “a $1,200 mortgage” (approximately $15,300 in 2010 dollars) for their five-acre Canyon Creek farm. The poor soil and lack of rain had finally defeated Anna McKenna. She and her boys moved into a tent while searching for a rental in the confines of Mountain Home. Anna broke horses, took in laundry, and cleaned houses to hold her family together. One woman recalled the “almost impossible early struggles [of Anna] hardened her fine determination to give her boys all she had in her.” It does not take a degree in psychology to imagine the trauma the eviction might have caused for sixteen-year-old McKenna. Yet the 1929 Prophet records Richard as being president of the student council and receiving a letter for his abilities as guard on a football team whose season had four wins, two ties, and three losses. He also excelled in his academic studies but no longer worked on the school newspaper.²¹

At graduation from high school in 1930, Richard’s class numbered twenty-five. His senior picture shows a determined young man with deep-set and remarkably blue eyes framed by the darkening hair of an emerging adult. Despite his poverty and reputation for shyness, McKenna had accomplished a great deal in high school. The Prophet lists Richard’s achievements: working on the school’s newspaper and the yearbook, playing football, and receiving honors in Spanish, English, and debate. He also received a science honor at the Senior Day Awards. His academic abilities earned him a year’s scholarship to the College of Idaho at Caldwell.²²

McKenna at the age of seventeen graduated into the Great Depression. In the 1920s, before the Depression, those living in rural areas did not see the economic benefits of living in urban settings. For Idaho at this time, one economic shock followed another. The Depression caused the income of average Idahoans to drop by 49.3 percent. Few jobs were available in cities; in rural areas they were almost nonexistent. Some believe that rural states did not suffer much from the Depression, as farmers could always eat. Historian Leonard J. Arrington points out, however, that Idaho’s economy “was in desperate straits during the 1930s.” The basis of the state’s economy—mining, lumbering, and agriculture—had grown during World War I, as new land, “which should never have been brought under cultivation,” was set aside for farms. Just as this boom moved toward its peak, the armistice ended the war, and Idahoans soon realized no one had planned for maintaining the state economy after the war. The result, in Arlington’s view, was “catastrophic.” Idaho’s famous potatoes, for example, commanded $1.51 a bushel in 1919; by 1922 the price had plunged to $0.31. Because of this, Idaho, along with other western states, did not realize the boom times of the 1920s seen in the East. Idaho, in fact, was second only to Montana in the rate of emigration of any western state during that decade.²³

By September 1930 Richard had begun at the College of Idaho, a liberal arts school some sixty-eight miles northwest of Mountain Home. His mother and brothers moved with Richard to 1514 Arthur Street, Caldwell. The move allowed Anna a better chance of employment, and Richard’s scholarship could also help. But at the end of his first academic year, Richard knew it was impossible for him to continue, for he lacked the fifty dollars required for his sophomore year tuition. McKenna much later wrote he had no great feelings about giving up the chance for a higher education and a professional career: “The problem was much more starkly elemental. How to escape the iron pinch of enforced idleness and poverty and the terrible sense of personal unworth they generated.” Most important, as the oldest son, McKenna decided he needed to help support his mother and brothers.²⁴

Thus, an intelligent, introspective, eighteen-year-old man with no discernable future ahead of him except poverty determined he had only one option open to him. He boarded a bus and made a twenty-seven-mile journey from Caldwell, Idaho, to the state capital of Boise. There he was accepted for enlistment in the U.S. Navy. McKenna was then sent to the Naval Recruiting Station, Salt Lake City, Utah, the first step on a journey that eventually led to Guam, the Philippines, Japan, China, and the eventual publication of The Sand Pebbles more than three decades later.²⁵