Читать книгу The American College of Switzerland Zoo - James E. Henderson - Страница 4

The remainder of the summer was fantastic! I had my first German beer with my parents, in a restaurant next to the Landstuhl castle. This was a collapsed ruin of a castle said to be haunted that sat across the valley from our new home, the Landstuhl Army Medical Center. I was eighteen years old, soon to be nineteen; and in Ohio, I could drink 3.2 beer but I didn’t like its bitter, watery taste. I would just as soon drink a root beer. However this German beer was another matter; Bellheimer Silber Pils seemed to flow smoothly down my throat. But more important was my dad’s recognition that I was becoming a man. I had been away from home since I was fourteen; four years at a Quaker boarding school, Olney, in southeastern Ohio, and a year at a Quaker college, Earlham, in Indiana. My life was my own, but I still felt like a kid at home, wherever that home was.

My dad bought a beat-up Opel station wagon from a departing soldier, and my newly minted friend, Gary, a fellow army brat living on the Landstuhl base, and I camped on the French Rivera in hopes of finding beautiful women and nude beaches. Hopefully at the same time! As it turned out, in 1966, the French despised Americans. I guessed that it had something to do with our going to war in Vietnam after they gave up. On the beach in Marseilles, the only nude person we saw was one rotund, hairy guy with dirty clothes who stripped as he walked from the street to the Mediterranean. He wallowed for a short while in the shallow water, scrubbed sand in his armpits and between his butt cheeks, splashed off and walked back in the opposite direction while reclaiming and donning his filthy clothing.

We managed to spend time with a couple of girls our age after we claimed that Gary was from Canada and I from Mexico. I was not tall, five foot nine and a half in the right shoes. I was in good shape from playing JV soccer and doing gymnastics at my college. I also had a nice tan, dark curly hair, and spoke school-learned Spanish rapidly enough with a Mexican accent I had picked up from one of my soccer buddies. I easily confused the young, raven-haired, dark skinned beauty who claimed to know some Spanish, and we rapidly retreated to English and hand signs. It all worked well until later in the afternoon when we started to go to a movie. That was when the German Opel with the big green USA military plates gave us away, and the girls rapidly retreated. The next day three guys on scooters tried to run us down while we were crossing the road to the beach. One scooter hit Gary’s ankle, spraining his Achilles tendon. We left soon after to head home. I drove all the way back north with Gary’s wrapped ankle propped up on the dash.

Back in Germany, sometimes with my parents and sometimes with Gary, I finished the summer by going to various wine and beer fests across the Rhineland Pfaltz. Each little city had a festival for baked fish, or pretzels, or whatever, and we hit all of them – drinking, singing, and peeing with the best of them! Although the drinking was fun, the resulting vomiting and massive headaches, and my father’s quiet, patient voice quickly taught me moderation.

The American girls on the neighboring bases were also fun. There were stolen moments at the teen club dances, and necking in the back seat of the Opel; nothing serious, just fun. I even had a run-in with twins at the swimming pool, or swimbad; both had shoulder-length light brown hair that curled up at the end. They were attractive in a cute Gidget way. I followed my usual pattern of choosing the more thoughtful, less rowdy one, Kathy. Besides, at the pool, she said I had the strongest back she had ever seen and thought that I looked like some country singer. I hoped the singer was someone she liked because I had no clue who he was. Four years at my boarding school with WWVA Wheeling West Virginia as the only reliable radio station and I had no desire to hear any more country music or keep up with their stars.

Kathy and I got very close that month, or was it only three weeks? One night, we got extremely close, and if it hadn’t been for a Quaker teaching flashing through my overheated brain, which I had compressed down to, “if you want to marry a virgin, you should be a virgin,” I might have lost it. Somehow in the heat of that night, that thought came to me, and we slowly cooled down. Soon after that, the relationship also cooled down. Teenage summer relationships, especially between army brats, tend to break pretty cleanly. Besides it was nearly time to go to my newfound college high in the Alps.

I drove my family south through Germany in our burgundy Buick station wagon. My dad and I were in the front and my sister, Millie, and mom in back. The Autobahn traffic was amazing. With our V-6, I was cruising at eighty mph and being continually passed by a white or a black Mercedes flashing its lights and flying by at one hundred plus. At first, passing trucks was a challenge. They went about seventy mph, so I needed to pass them, but pulling into the passing lane was taking my family’s lives into my hands. A Mercedes did not slow down for anyone! As an example, south of Heidelberg we saw a series of accidents on the opposite lanes that extended at least ten kilometers, called K’s. The beginning was a pile of at least five cars, and from there back at the crest of each hill another half dozen or so cars were folded into each other. After a while I settled into a routine of passing trucks in the open spots between the Mercedes. In order to perfect the timing, I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror more than I looked ahead. Eventually I felt like a medium speed cog in the machine that is Autobahn traffic. It was challenging but fun!

At first Switzerland was a bit disappointing. The land was wide and flat as we traveled south from Basel and the only visible mountains caused the distant horizon on our left to appear jagged. Then, as was our habit in Germany, we started stopping at castles. You know, before Germany my only experience with castles were the castle at Disneyland, and those in Disney cartoons. In Switzerland, when we visited the Château de Chillon, perched on the side of Lake Geneva, which I would soon know as Lac Léman, images of knights and damsels in distress flashed through my mind. But these were the ghosts of real people, not the fairy tale heroes or Disney cartoon characters of my youth. This castle was dirty and old. The shields and swords on the walls were real and may have been used by some real knight. It even had dungeons and ancient toilets, or rather, holes in the wall that emptied into the lake. It was intimidating to realize how old this land was. These castles had been built before Columbus discovered America. Hell, I had stayed in hotels that were built in the 1300s! The Château de Chillon marked the beginning of the trip up the mountain.