All for His Country

15 May 10, Kuna, Idaho

We drive out onto the Snake River Plain to see my old professor and friend EB. It's been a warm weekend and the maples, elms, oaks, and lilacs are in full canopy as the dainty flowers have wilted away. The anticipation of summer is mixed with a sentimentality of spring's passing. When we pull up EB is sitting on his front porch, in the shade of his birch and Russian Olive trees, enjoying the panorama of his five acre property with a view of the snow-streaked Owyhees to the south above his fruit trees. EB hobbles across the yard to greet us. The tough old bird, gone portly and half-blind with illness, gives us hugs and smiles and lights up like a kerosene lamp when Ada reaches her hand out to him. We install ourselves on his porch and get re-acquainted. It's been two years since Anna and I last saw EB, and while his wits are still sharp, his humor still playfully cutting, his spirit tough and independent as ever, his body has suffered from the mysterious ailments that have beset him since the week he drove his truck to New York City and volunteered to help in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Centers.

“Polymailgia is what the doc says I have. Many pains. Hell, I could've told him that,” quips EB. He shows me how he can move his left thumb like a flipper. “I broke it reaching for something that wasn't there. When the doctor looked at it, he said, 'I don't see it on your records.' That's cause I didn't come in. The doc wanted to know why not. I told him, 'You know, my dad used to say, if it doesn't hurt worse than a mule kicking you, walk it off.”

EB's story of late is an unjust one. Here is a man who flew reconnaissance flights over the USSR during the cold war, and over Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt during the years of struggle for self-rule in those countries, and who again volunteered his services for his country during 9-11, an effort that resulted in his present afflictions. Yet somehow he doesn't qualify for VA health care benefits and therefore must pay close to three thousand dollars a month for his health insurance and myriad medications, a cost that is fast eating away his retirement savings. Add to this scenario the temperament of its protagonist, an authentically independent Westerner, a man who's voted Republican his whole life and has rarely asked for help from anybody except when the orchard or fields demanded it (and then he paid for that help), and you get a very ironic study of the present state of health care in this country; of a society that promulgates the ideals of rugged individualism alongside heroic sacrifice for country, yet provides little or no reward, or social safety net, for those who act out those ideals. A man fights for his country, suffers for it, votes for a political party that is antagonistic to health care overhaul, and thereby must continue fighting the rest of his life just to keep alive. It's a story Anna has urged me to write, and one, as we sit around talking and catching up on our lives, I consider asking EB about. But the timing never feels quite right, and I holster the urge for another day.

After a little while we get up to walk around the property. I lend EB a hand to get him out of his chair. If he sits or lies still for more than twenty minutes, his body starts to seize up with pains. It makes for a rough night of sleep, he tells me, without a hint of complaint. We stroll through the tall grass down to the orchard. EB points out the tiny apricots starting on a bough and names all the different apple and apricot and nectarine trees. Every tree on the verdant property was planted by him, except for one big blue spruce, over the last twenty-two years. I hold Ada up so she can put her nose in an apple blossom. She's learning to smell flowers, artlessly breathing in through her nostrils as she clamps her mouth shut, her face pensive as if it were a vintage wine or cod liver oil being sampled.

“It's been a hell of a spring,” says EB. “I keep a weather journal, and this is the coldest, windiest spring I can remember. We used to pick cherries in early June. Now it won't be till July at the earliest. The farmers are all having to replant because the soil temperature hasn't gotten above forty-five. We're mid May, for cryin' out loud. Look at my roses there, died off from the frost.”

Anna asks when the fruit trees will be ready for picking, and EB tells her in August. He invites us to come out. “Hundreds of pounds of fruit that'll just rot on the ground if you don't come pick it. I can't do it anymore.”

“I'd like to can some of it,” says Anna.

“That's easy enough. Apple sauce is my favorite. Core, peal and chop, put it into a cooker, go off with a six-pack, and when you come back, apple sauce. Can it, and later you pour it into pies. That's what I like to do.”

I ask him about the plastic detergent bottles hanging from random boughs. “Fly traps. For the European fruit fly, also known as the … maggot around here. Put water and a little detergent in the bottles and the flies can't get out. Better than pouring pesticides everywhere. I don't go for all that. Besides, what's a little worm here and there? Cut around it, use what's good. The worm won't hurt you anyway.”

Listening to him makes me think of the summer afternoons I'd spend with my grandma cutting and canning fruit, and doing just as he described with worms or bad portions. Simple, practical, unsqueamish attitudes about food and making it.

The orchard is a serene and dreamy place, it's white- and pink-flowering limbs delicate against a pale blue sky marbled with clouds stretching above the Snake River Plain. Ada is as content as ever, and I want the feeling of the orchard to sink deep within her, to be there as a place, both of memory and of aspiration, a dreamy childhood sensation, and perhaps an artful hope and pursuit of her latter years. Speaking of pursuits, EB asks of our search for a property in the North End, and I tell him if we could find a place that had even a portion of his open garden space, we'd be delighted.

We make our way around the back of the house, past his bird feeders and the back porch that faces to the north, to his wide-open garage. There, among yard and hand tools and lawn mowers and old bicycles, EB shows us the project he's been working on the last years. From willow and other semi-hard wood limbs he's stripped and lacquered walking sticks of all proportions, fastening them with leather laces through a bored hole at the top and a rubber shoe at the bottom. He sizes us up each with a stick.

“You'll have to make one for Ada,” I suggest.

EB's eyes widen with the charge. He then instructs me to pick through some of his “redundant” garden tools, and encourages us to get to work planting. “At least tomatoes and peppers, in pots, so you can take them when you move.”

We sit again in the shade, and make plans to visit again when the fruit is ready, and soon it's time to go. As we say our goodbyes, EB hugs Ada and Anna, and reaches out shake my hand. There is a funny precedent here, one that EB and I have a habit of re-enacting. Nearly twenty years ago, after EB and I had first become friends at the University, I hugged the old codger after a long afternoon of walking out on the Plain. It took the man aback, and he said to me quite seriously, “You're the only man I ever hugged.” Since then he would bemoan the act, yet somehow expect it, whenever we parted or greeted each other. So now, after Anna has gotten her hug, I say to EB, “What about mine?” The old mule laughs, says, “You make fun of me every time,” and then gives me a warm embrace. “I don't hug men,” he re-affirms to Anna, “Unless they're gay. Gay men, I'll hug. That's what they do.”

As we pull out along the dirt road and drive around the back of his property, I give a couple taps of the horn, in lieu of the waves we used to exchange when he could make it to the top of the knoll in time to see me off through the olive trees.