Despite my stand on being a natural woman, I lopped off the weeds in the south forty and headed for the beach. I had to learn to do this before Jack and I took off for the French Riviera. Wrapped in a towel, I picked my way through the sea of exposed flesh like a wayward novitiate searching for a confessional. At last, a space that wasn’t cheek-by-jowl with an army of strangers. I sucked in my tummy and quickly spread my towel. Feeling stark naked, I dove face-first onto it, stretched out, head in my arms, and blotted out the babble.
Oof! My breath whooshed out. Gasping for air, I raised my head to see a screeching urchin tumble off me and sprint into the crowd like one of Fagin’s pickpockets fleeing a London bobby. Did the kid utter a simple “Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle”? And no one nearby batted an eye. Better to be an invisible American than an obnoxious one, I guess. But still!
That was day one on the beaches of Europe. Could I survive the French Riviera?
I mailed my third letter of the week to Terry the next morning, a feat that left me both pleased and hobbled by a nagging fear that I had forsaken my sense of common decency. I was in Europe visiting Jack and thinking about Terry. I had seen girls juggle more than one guy at CU and thought them contemptible. Now, I was dancing in the same soiled slippers.
I had first written to Terry on June 10, a letter I started the night I arrived and finished a week later. I wanted to share every moment with him, but I simply didn’t have private time when I was with Jack to dash off a note to Terry. Nor could I tell Terry about my best adventures: with Jack at Helmut’s café and Ludwig’s castles . . . roaming the streets of Füssen and sharing a finger-licking torte with Jack . . . Jack’s crystal factory tour . . . hiking with Jack in the forest near the Czech border. And obviously, I couldn’t tell Terry I had kissed Jack with the same passion we had shared in Boulder less than a month before.
I slithered past my adventures with Jack in a vague footnote crammed at the end of my first letter: “Suddenly went down to the Füssen area for a few days and didn’t get this letter finished.” As if I went there by myself on a last-minute lark. Worse, I ended the letter with “I don’t want you to forget I’m always thinking about you. I’ll write more tonight.” I didn’t write for another week. For shame.
In today’s letter, I wrote to him about the beatniks I had dinner with in Zurich. They were singing their way across Europe, living off their tips as street musicians. And the two elderly men who got off the Geneva train because I’d told them it wasn’t the train to Graf. I didn’t know that Graf was German for Geneva. I also told Terry about my new bikini, European cathedrals I’d seen, the relics of the war that were everywhere—all kinds of things we’d talked about. He had never been to Europe, and he thought himself lacking because of it. I had to give him a full accounting after all the time he had spent making lists of places for me to go and artwork to see.
I read and reread Terry’s letters—four by now, nineteen typewritten pages, single-spaced—which I’d carried with me to Switzerland, reliving shared experiences he so vividly reminded me of. Sunbathing together in Boulder Creek (naked—what in the world had I been thinking?), slurping ice cream and gooey chocolate at Charcoal Chef, reading the Sunday Denver Post in his apartment, and strolling the CU campus.
Meanwhile, in my three days in Lausanne, I’d stewed myself into a fine mess with my fixation on spending as little money as possible. I had opted for a hotel room with a shared bath because a private bath cost three times as much. So my bathroom was down the hall. “Shared” did not mean “No, please, you go first.” I lurked in the hallway, trying to outrace a bevy of shadowy competitors, all of whom needed an hour or more to complete their duties.
By my final night in Lausanne, I had spent three nonstop days getting up at dawn, running around all day, and working up a sweat that would have embarrassed the racehorse Man o’ War. For three days, I’d been outhustled at the shared bathroom. My need for a shower was dire. I had to be at least halfway embraceable for my reunion with Jack in Landshut. The final morning, I launched my attack well before dawn, captured the bathroom, barricaded the door, and got down to business. What was my reward? No hot water, barely enough cold drizzle for a birdbath and certainly not enough to shampoo my stringy hair.
Worse, dyslexia struck. I twisted the 7:24 a.m. departure time to read 7:42, missed my train, and wasted my tiny reserve of energy cursing my stupidity.
Terry
Thursday, 25 June 1964, Silverton. I arrived in Silverton last night at dusk and dove immediately into the yearlong BS session in the Grand Imperial bar. Today, I pitched in at the Silverton Standard, twelve hours’ worth, helping Allen publish his paper on time.
Friday I pulled an all-day stint at the hand-fed letterpress, knocking out an order of 2,500 envelopes and letterheads. I also printed up twenty-five envelopes addressed to Annie in care of her brother in Germany—in red and black ink, which meant I had to scrub the press rollers after printing the black, re-ink them, hand-feed each envelope through again, scrub off the red, and re-ink the rollers in black. I jazzed up the envelopes with five one-inch-high dingbats, each depicting an 1880s policeman in a different pose. Ha, everyone in Germany would know Annie had a guy back home.
After a full day Saturday, Allen and the gang from the Grand Imperial bar jeeped fifteen miles up the canyon to Animas Forks, an 1870s ghost town. We gathered around a fireplace in a long-abandoned house, gobbled down beans and hotdogs, drank beer, serenaded ourselves with Pete Seeger favorites, and, as the temperature plummeted, pulled on our sleeping bags like thick lap robes and applauded the two among us who recited their own poetry.
When the full moon cast eerie shadows through the broken windows, we switched to ghost stories, let the coals die, and, huddled like spent puppies, drifted off to sleep. Two of our six were women, both spoken for, and neither of them Annie. I spent half the night trying to conjure her up inside my sleeping bag, luscious thoughts to be sure, but achingly unsatisfying, especially given the muted moans from the married couple not two feet away from me.
Monday, 29 June 1964, overlooking Silverton. The previous afternoon, I’d hiked the seven-mile jeep trail up Kendall Peak, clambering up the riprap to the summit, and then camped alone in a mini-valley below timberline. No designated campsites, no toilets or running water. Just my sleeping bag and a spot of hillside I claimed as my own. I scrounged firewood, built a fire ring of stones, charred a couple of Polish sausages from Snarky’s Market, slapped them into hunks of sourdough bread, and washed them down with a can of lukewarm Olympia beer. Breakfast had been the same, minus the beer, but with an orange as a chaser. I hadn’t seen another person in two days.
I was lonely but not alone, perched there on the Silverton face of Kendall, shirtless, resting against my backpack. Silverton was 3,500 feet below, as tiny as a Monopoly board from atop a high-rise office building. Even from there, the half-block-long Grand Imperial Hotel dominated the town like a giant among pygmies.
I was lounging on a hillside as plush as a Persian carpet—a mosaic of thousands of tiny white, red, and yellow flowers, each no larger than the head of a nail. Around me, a brigade of bumblebees was on a mission to frisk every single flower. I focused on one guy for ten minutes. A workaholic, he crawled up to a flower, latched on with his forelegs, pulled it to him, and dipped his snout in. He lingered only a second before buzzing on to the next one and the next. No rest. Obviously, he got paid for volume, not by the hour.
Private Bumblebee was too busy to bother me, but earlier, as I tiptoed into this botanical Shangri-La, his mates had buzzed me like a security force, circling and returning for a second opinion before buzzing back to work. They were slow, like cargo planes droning, not fast like fighter jets, and they were curious, making sure I wasn’t a threat.
My only other companions had been the marmots, popping up on the rocks as I worked my way down from the summit. Neighborhood sentinels, they darted out of sight at my slightest twitch. Three seconds later, they popped up again, s
ounding the alarm—squealing really. Some people called them whistle-pigs. Until I cleared their territory, they rat-tat-tatted the hillside with warning calls, a constant barrage that charted my every step through their homeland.
Last night on the mountain, I remembered two things I’d forgotten since hiking up here the year before. One was the night sky, a canopy of brilliant stars, not only above but around me, a scintillating geodesic dome. Up here, above thirteen thousand feet, it was stars and moon, not a hint of civilization. I lay in my sleeping bag, marveling at the expanse, pondering the magnificence of this universe. Annie would have liked it too.
My other memory was the cold, even on the cusp of July. Yesterday, I clomped around the abandoned mine in the saddle at the base of the peak. Winter lived on there, in the form of a massive snowdrift hardened into granulated ice. In the predawn light this morning, I finally gave in to the need to pee. Outside my sleeping bag, in my briefs, teeth chattering, I expected my stream to freeze into instant icicles.
Now, nearing noon, the tourist-filled narrow-gauge train from Durango chugged into view, wending its way along the river, nearing the end of its forty-five-mile, three-and-a-half-hour run up the canyon to Silverton. From Kendall Peak, it looked like a miniature model train. Its coal-fired steam engine puffed black smoke, but it was too distant for the sound to climb the mountain. I couldn’t see inside the engine, but I knew that beside the engineer, a shirtless, muscle-bound, sweat-drenched fireman shoveled coal into the blast-furnace-hot firebox.
As the train entered town, it whistled a long, mournful howl that echoed off the mountain peaks. It transported me into the Old West, a time when men as tough as that train fireman carved the railroad bed out of the mountainside with picks, shovels, and dynamite—no heavy equipment. Between October 1881 and July 1882, they laid these tracks from Durango to Silverton, winter snow be damned.
Men mined year-round up there. At one mine, they finally built a tram to haul the ore down, and in midwinter when the trail lay buried under fifteen feet of snow, miners rode up in open ore buckets. The temperature would plummet to thirty-five or forty degrees below from December through January. How many of them lost fingers and toes to frostbite? On an earlier hike, I found a hoard of sealed ore samples stamped “The Omaha & Grant SM. Co, Durango, Colo.,” dated December 28, 1877. That meant they shipped ore on pack mules to Durango for at least five years before the railroad reached Silverton.
Below me, the train arrived and sat wheezing a half block from Greene Street, the town’s main drag. Some five hundred tourists poured out of the open-air cars and fanned out like explorer ants through a town that had only 849 full-time residents. They were besieged by teens shoving restaurant flyers at them. A phony gunfight in one dirt street would end when the “dead” gunmen jumped up and begged the tourists to eat at the Bent Elbow Café.
The visitors would have two hours to pick among the restaurateurs pitching them for their lunch money, window shop the six blocks of stores along Greene, and buy their souvenirs. Shop after shop peddled tourist kitsch, like key rings, mugs, shot glasses, redwood knickknacks, and mounds of cheap imports from Hong Kong and Japan.
By now, the air would be heavy with the stink of cotton candy, butter-drenched popcorn, and sizzling burgers. Last summer, in my editorial “Missing: One Ferris Wheel,” I decried the hucksterism but also made the plea for a sober look at how to showcase Silverton’s uniqueness—its moun tains, its mining and railroad histories, its potential for winter sports. In the ensuing full page of responses from irate locals, my plea for sanity got swept away by attacks on my carnival analogy. Fortunately, they didn’t tar and feather me and run me out of town on a rail, an Old West tradition that had been long abandoned, though one reader offered to revive it.
The real problem with my editorial wasn’t so much the content as timing. It followed my July 4 editorial from the week before, “Old Glory: Only a Symbol.” I entreated Silverton’s citizens to commit themselves to the ideals America stood for—equality, justice, and fair play, for example—and excoriated those who would define patriotism as merely flying the flag, shooting off fireworks, and guzzling beer on the Fourth of July. A raft of locals interpreted it as treason. Marshall should go to Russia if he didn’t like it here, one reader wrote. Another called me a Communist.
Despite the hassles, I realized after I returned to Boulder for my senior year that I’d fallen in love with Silverton—and that Allen and I shared a dream. As publisher, editor, printer, pressman, photographer, journalist, clerk, and businessman, he would succeed or fail on his merits alone. I wanted the same, my own small-town newspaper. That summer had given me a real-life taste of what that meant. I did write passionate editorials, but also dozens of news stories. I covered town meetings, made friends with politicians, teachers, miners, store owners, and plain folks and immersed myself in the town’s conflicts as well as its history.
Silverton had its problems: long, isolated winters when no tourists came; the threat of avalanches that could block the single highway to Durango to the south and Ouray to the north. One did in March a year before. It swept a local minister and his two daughters to their deaths over a cliff on Red Mountain Pass.
Silverton also had more than its share of substandard houses, alcoholism, unemployment, and grinding poverty. I embraced them, not as deficits, but as challenges to confront and resolve.
But I never imagined when I left for my senior year at CU that my charming new ally from the weekend talkfests at the Grand Imperial would soon ensnare me in a life-altering moral crisis.
6
Le Grand Tour
Ann
Tuesday, June 30, 1964, en route to Paris. Today marked liberation from work for Jack, freedom from the prying eyes of his troops, and the beginning of a two-week road test of our budding romance.
But rain clouds hovered. He seemed awfully pensive, not the chatty companion I’d discovered in his audio letters. Probably still stewing about Terry. How could we move past this?
Jack waylaid my thoughts. “Our first stop is Dachau. Not the happiest spot to begin this great vacation of ours, but it’s a somber reminder of my life as a soldier.”
So that was it: a Nazi concentration camp. Even on vacation, the specter of war had hitched a ride.
At Dachau’s main gate, a wrought-iron sign proclaimed, “Arbeit macht frei.” Jack translated: “Work makes you free.”
Inside the barracks, the beds for the prisoners were wooden platforms arranged like warehouse shelves, as if the humans housed there were miscellaneous packages to be sorted, stacked, and stored. Achingly painful photos documented the grim history: no mattresses, sheets, or pillows, despite rough-cut boards and subzero winters. I shivered, wondering how long I could have survived packed in with strangers. I’m not claustrophobic, but I nearly choked right there at that exhibit as I imagined trying to avoid the hot, foul breath of fellow prisoners, none of whom, I was sure, had the luxury of a toothbrush.
Next to me, Jack whispered, “Initially, the Nazis went after ‘undesirables,’ like Communists, intellectuals, homosexuals, and Gypsies, and put them to work as slaves in their weapons industry. Later on, when they started arresting Jews, they sent many of them here.”
The prisoners had no place for their belongings, but there was no need. The Nazis had confiscated everything—jewelry, watches, silverware, shoes, clothes, coats, hats—all of it piled high in a macabre artwork. I stared at the emaciated prisoners in other photos, their skeletal frames outlined under their prison-striped garb, faces gaunt, eyes haunted. How could the guards look into those eyes and sleep at night? One of the exhibits said more than 200,000 prisoners were subjected to barbaric extremes at Dachau and more than 41,500 men, women, and children perished.
When Jack and I entered the low-ceiling gas chamber, images from the movie Judgment at Nuremberg came to mind. I conjured up my own private horror of 1944. I would have been two years old, but I pictured myself as a teenage Ann Frank arriving at that c
amp:
The train squeals to a halt after a ghastly five long days in a stifling, windowless boxcar, my fellow prisoners and I crammed in so tightly we can’t sit. No food or water. Our “toilet” is a kerosene can, its foul contents overflowing and sloshing on the floor. The boxcar doors swing open. Guards wave their guns and order us out. We stumble from the train, blinded by the bright sun. But not all of us. When our mass of humanity thins out, the standing-up dead slump to the boxcar floor.
Shouting guards march us women and girls to a building marked Brausebad (bath/shower). They order us to take off our clothes. I’m naked among strangers. But at last we can wash away the sickening stench of sweat, vomit, excrement, and soot from the train. Cowering, we are crowded into the shower. The doors lock behind us.
And then an odd hissing sound. Instantly, my nose and eyes burn. I’m coughing, gagging. It’s gas, not water. Impossible! I’m faint. My nose is bleeding. We pound at the door, yank the handles. No escape. Scratching and flailing, the women press in, clamber over me. I trip on a fallen child. I collapse. They climb on me, press me down, suffocate me. . . .
I gasped.
“You okay?” Jack asked.
“Not really,” I said, returning to the present.
“Understood . . .”
Peering into the horrific cramped building at Dachau, I mourned the people who died there and at the other camps, along with their family members forever denied parents, siblings, and friends.
At the far end of the exhibit, a small display said that this gas chamber, unlike those at other camps—death camps—wasn’t used for its intended purpose, that Dachau was a work camp, not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka. Really? Was this small notice a whitewash or the truth?
As though Jack had read my mind, he said, “Many prisoners were executed by guards in other ways. They were hanged or shot when they tried to escape or when they committed minor offenses or, who knows, just because.”
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