Remembrances: Fugitive Days

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One of my daughter Laura's friends has asked to interview me about my experiences as a draft resister in the Vietnam era. Toward that end, I went spent some time this morning searching my archives for any graphics that might contribute to the project. The ones below are all that I have.

The b&w set were taken on my short-lived run to Canada. With my wife accompanying me, I traveled from Ann Arbor, Michigan on into Canada from Minnesota. We traveled in the vintage Mercedes of our friend, Steve Nasisse, later an officer in the Merchant Marine. We drove that old car across the great plains provinces of Canada, over the massive Rocky Mountains, eventually rendezvousing with some people in Vancouver, BC who had fled to Canada before us.


But I had already made up my mind, long before we got to the Pacific coast, that I was not going to allow myself to be run out of my own country, and that I would return to Ann Arbor to fight the draft as a conscientious objector. So the drive into exile turned into a kind of vacation. After spending a day or two with the people in Vancouver, we crossed the border, back into Washington state. My wife and I stayed with my friend and former roommate, Jim Rutherford, who was living in Seattle at the time. Steve went on down the coast to California to visit other friends.


The taller man standing by the car is Steve, who is also pictured driving below. The other shot is of Steve and me on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota:



While in Seattle, we bought a car--a used Plymouth Valiant--and headed for Athens, Ohio, where my parents were now living. We arrived in Athens just in time for me to accompany my father down to the College Green, where he, along with the rest of the faculty, had been asked to patrol in order to protect the infrastructure from vandalism by demonstrating students during what is known locally as "the Troubles," in the wake of the Kent State shootings:



After visiting with my parents in Athens, and resting up for a spell, my wife and I returned to Ann Arbor. I took a job in a Ford Motor Company plant in nearby Saline, Michigan, while I hasseled with the local draft board in an attempt to become reclassified as a conscientious objecter. We stayed with my wife's parents in Ann Arbor until I got paid by Mr. Ford, at which time we rented the second floor of a frame house on Packard Road, above the offices of a pediatrician. There we stayed until I won my final appeal with the Selective Service System. I am pictured below, chilling out in tie-dye shirt, Frye boots and jeans, on the couch of that furnished pad on Packard Road:

Once I had been reclassified, I had to find myself a job with a charity organization that would qualify as "alternate service," of which I was obligated to do two years. Through a friend living in New York City, I found both a job--at Planned Parenthood-World Population--and a cheap apartment in this building on Greene Avenue, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn:




And that's what I did on my summer vacation.
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Photo credit: The Athens scene above is from the Ohio University Alumni Journal, August 1970 Special Edition
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Update: The interview went off, pretty much without a hitch, yesterday afternoon. Around fifty minutes of reminiscing will be boiled down to a three-minute presentation to fulfil the assignment for Kristen's multi-media class. I've been promised a copy of the final product. I imagine that viewing it will be cringe-making--like the first time you hear your own voice on tape: I SOUND LIKE THAT?!?!?X

Remembrances: 520 Linden Street

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The following piece of juvenilia is distinguished by having inspired the primitive watercolor sketch which accompanies it on the page. The picture was, in turn, inspired by the neighborhood in Ann Arbor where I lived for three or four years as a grade-schooler. The house was at 520 Linden Street. Linden ran between South University Street, where my school, Angell Elementary, was located, and Geddes Avenue, which ran alongside the cemetery. The street was lush with tall elm trees then, just before the great Dutch elm disease plague that swept them all away. The backyards of many of the homes were graced with fruit trees; cherries, apples, pears. There were at least a dozen kids around my age living in homes on Linden, and also on South U. and Geddes. In the summer, we had it made in the shade, playing all day beneath a canopy of green. My several years on Linden Street were the happiest of my childhood. They ended in the summer following fifth grade, when we moved to Muncie, Indiana.

The house at 520 Linden still stands, apparently little changed. The families are all gone, however. Due to its close proximity to the central campus of the University of Michigan, the neighborhood has long since become a student ghetto. A look at the contemporary Linden Street, is provided by Google Maps.



Hymn

There are gray days when the trees drip crows
And the cries of dark birds fly over the hills
And into the towns, like the words
Of the locust eater, out of the wilderness.

Roaring seas of boiling black tumble in
To fill the empty bowl of the morning.
The belly of the sky is green with storm.
Shadows of branches, shivering with leaves,
Twist at our feet, writhing in the lightening flashes.
Then rain combs the grasses.

Afterwards the ground is wet
With the waters of the broken storm.
The odor of worms rises from the loam.
For all this praise the empty sky.



Amen, amen.
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