Amsterdam is the perfect European city for Americans. Almost everyone speaks English, and making it even better than London, the accents are more exotic. We arrived at Amsterdam’s Schipohl Airport early on a gray Friday morning, dragging our luggage to the light rail line that would take us from the airport to the city’s Centraal Station. We had agreed to try and do our unaccompanied, seven-day, two-city, Amsterdam and Paris trip without resorting to taxicabs.

The initial confrontation with the complexities of public transit in a strange city is almost always a painful process. It usually takes me several hit and miss encounters with ticket kiosks, exact fare rules, or pressing buttons to open subway doors. While we did manage the light-rail connection into the city. Finding our hotel, just blocks from the station, proved a minor ordeal with the inadequate, schematic tourist maps we were carrying. Jet-lagged, confused and over-packed, we wandered around trying to figure out where we were until a busy woman setting up a produce market stand grudgingly pointed us in the right direction.

The hotel, modern and crisp, was located in, gasp, “the Red Light District.” Ah those liberal Dutch. While it was still the morning rush hour when we wandered in search of our hotel, I noted that the numerous “Coffee” shops we passed were in full swing, with customers lounging on sofas, and I suppose, inhaling to their hearts’ content. I thought, “hey is this a great town, or what?”

Refreshed after a brief nap, we went out to discover the charms of Amsterdam. The rings of tree-lined, interconnected canals, the bow-to-stern barges and houseboats, the eccentric, centuries-old Dutch architecture, cobbled streets and the bicycles everywhere combined to create a wonderful sense of being in a one-of-a-kind place. In a comfortably down-to-earth café, I ordered my lunch, a roast-beef sandwich with egg and mayonnaise, and a large draft of Heiniken. We’d been told that Dutch cuisine was less than stellar, but with my comfort-food palate, just about everything we ordered suited me well. Thus fortified, we began walking, a process that barely stopped for any of our waking hours during the three days we stayed in Amsterdam.

The canal-side streets, block after block of them, flow with the canals themselves in concentric rings defining and demarking the old city of Amsterdam. Each turn of the head is another photo-op, another perfect Netherlands motif. I began snapping and had to exercise a force of will to cease, to say “enough.” The day was sunny and there were shopping streets, book-stalls, street musicians and cafes with outdoor seating for coffee, pastries or wine. We were in search of the St. Nicklas’ Boat Club, a non-profit, cooperative canal boat tour service, an open-air alternative to the larger, glitzier glass-covered canal tour launches. But like so many cooperative ventures, the enterprise had run aground and was no longer operating. More wandering, more pastry, more wine and back to the hotel for a break before dinner.

One residual piece of three centuries of Dutch East Indies colonial history is Amsterdam’s array of Indonesian restaurants, a cuisine I’d never experienced. On a recommendation, we selected a “Rice Table” offering at Indrapur, one of the tonier Indonesian eateries. Rice Table meals are an Indonesian version of Chinese Dim Sum or the Iberian Tapas. In deference to my Irish heritage, we chose a “mild” (a misnomer) selection of over twenty different and exotically flavored small dishes, every one of which was a treat. Returning from our East Indies meal, we caught a tram to a mid-town carnival and rode a giant Ferris wheel up and over the lights of the city. There was a brightly lit, ten-story swing with seats for two that swung out over the carnival below. I dared my wife to no avail. Two nights later we were on it.

Our second day in Amsterdam day came on cold and wet. With rain jackets, umbrellas and our new competence at navigating the city’s tram lines, we arrived early at the already crowded van Gogh museum. As a lifelong fan, I was thrilled to discover, along with so many favorites, a couple of stunning landscapes I’d never before seen. More walking in the drizzle through a half-dozen block street market, more tram riding and then a surprisingly very good lunch in a pretentious restaurant with annoyingly indifferent service. Much more walking, window and actual shopping until exhaustion and the proximity to our hotel got us back to our room for a break.

Relatively restored, we headed back out into the rain for dinner. We were to have a meal of traditional Dutch cuisine, another recommendation. When we arrived at the address, the Dutch eatery had been replaced by an Italian restaurant. At a more Dutch place down the street, we were told we could be seated in fifteen minutes and that we could wait in the bar. After a half hour, we left. Back out in the rain and several streets away, we passed a small bistro named Prego. Why not? We were seated and began what was to be one of the best meals of the entire trip. Two aging gays were running the place and the vibe was a pleasant as it was unostentatious. The food was first rate and creative. I had wild boar, my first ever, and my wife a fish dish. Everything was just right and the dessert more than just right. After warm farewells from our host and our waiter, we headed out once again into the chilly drizzle and toward our king-sized hotel bed.

Sunday, our last full day in Amsterdam, began with the Hotel’s inclusive and first-rate buffet breakfast. Then, a one-hour canal tour on a glass-covered boat accompanied by a large group of Chinese tourists. Strangely enough, my canal photos taken from water level proved less pleasing than those taken ashore. The loop of the city by boat and the accompanying sound track was instructive.

One of the sights from the boat was the lineup of visitors waiting to tour the Ann Frank House, an Amsterdam attraction as famous as the canals and the van Gogh Museum. For better or worse, I opted to pass on the Ann Frank house, feeling as I do that I’m already too well aware of the horrors of the all too recent past. Prior to this trip, a friend had given me tourist information on Amsterdam that included a brochure from the “Dutch Resistance Museum.” The brochure rightly celebrates the heroism of those who dared to actively resist one of the most brutal terror regimes in human history. On the other hand only a single allusion notes the existence of the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist Party, the active collaborators with the Nazi Occupation. Over 100,000 Dutch Jews perished during the war, the highest death rate per capita in the occupied Western European countries, that and the fact that 100,000 Dutch citizens volunteered to serve in the German armed forces, mostly in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, speaks for itself. And finally, the Frank family, like so many of the resistance heroes, was betrayed to the Nazis, it seems, by a fellow Dutch citizen.

More shopping, a lot more walking, some lunch, dinner, more photo taking and finally back to the hotel and bed. On our way back through the Red Light district, I noted that by comparison, the coffee shop scene with its stoned college kids and dreadlocked skateboarders appeared downright wholesome.

In the morning, I managed one last stroll around the canals before leaving to meet our noon train for Paris.

Driving through cold rain and heavy traffic to pick up some lunch, I overtook an old barge of a car waddling along doing about twenty-five in what was a forty-five zone. A disheveled early 1980s station wagon, its flashers were on and its read-end was plastered with “Right to Life” stickers. As a card-carrying subscriber to The New Yorker and the NYRB, my opinions can be largely predictable. I shook my head as I sped past the crawling low- end heap and what I reflexively assumed was its yahoo driver.

Given all of the above, I am caught between a willingness to doubt all, my own opinions included, and the dangers of doubt’s smug certainties. While I remain instinctively predisposed to support a woman’s right to choose, I have no illusions about the reality of what an abortion entails. Having become of late a doting grandfather probably also undercuts the clarity of any absolute position on so volatile an issue. Moreover, I suspect that my antipathy to so many of the Pro-Life advocates and their fanaticism is reaction based upon style, upon reasonableness, upon taste. The not-so-easily dismissed truth that enters my mind is the fact that even the worst of assholes are not of necessity, wrong.

To state the obvious, one shouldn’t judge the merits of a case by the nature, behavior or even the stupidity of its adherents. A self-styled Left Libertarian, a leveler of sorts, I like to believe that where I feel compelled to choose sides, I do so after having listened to what’s being offered. And even when genuinely convinced that a position on an issue is the work of what Mencken would have called “serfs, goose-steppers and poltroons,” my conclusions are too often tempered by reference to Cromwell’s words to the Church of Scotland in 1650, “I beseech in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.”

In coming to grips with an issue as disturbing as abortion, the most powerful touchstone against any kind of certainty could be the case of John Brown, the anti-slavery John Brown of Russell Banks’ novel “Cloudsplitter,” the absolute fanatic Pottawatomie Brown, the unrepentant murderer Osawatomie Brown. Deemed a deranged psychotic by most of his fellow Americans and executed by his government, poor, mad John Brown, in his time and in his place, just may have been the only sane man in The United States of America. His example is one to give pause to received, hasty or unexamined opinions.

I am a captive to the evocative and iconic aspects of vintage military aircraft, particularly those from the mid-1930s through the mid 1950s, the period from the Boeing P-26 “Peashooter” through the F-86 “Sabrejet.”

In the company of several other knowledgeable and similarly afflicted aficionados, I left for a local airport where a non-profit outfit, “The Collings Foundation,” had flown in several of its vintage aircraft; a B-24 “Liberator,” A B-17 Flying Fortress” and a P-51”Mustang.” For a nominal fee of twelve-bucks visitors can go out on the tarmac and get up close to the planes, even clamber aboard.

For those with deeper pockets, much deeper pockets, a couple of hundred bucks will get you a group ride in one of the big bombers, and for a couple of grand you can get a seat in the Mustang fighter, even get to handle the stick in flight. We choose the twelve-buck option.

I’ve seen restored Mustang fighter planes up close, and I believe that they are in fact one of the most beautiful aircraft ever to fly. And in their later modifications toward the end of WW II, arguably the high point of propeller-driven aviation. The big, four-engined bombers have become a more rare species. Static, that is non-flying versions of the once giant craft, can be seen at some of the major air museums around the country. But to see working, flying, sixty-five-year-old heavy bombers is well worth a short car trip and a modest entry fee.

The beautifully aerodynamic B-17 is probably the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War, made famous by the USAAF’s, Eighth Air Force for the daylight bombardment of targets in Europe. Postwar movies like “Twelve-O-Clock High” with Gregory Peck and “Command Decision” starring Clark Gable, himself a veteran Eighth Air Force combat air crewman, established the B-17 as the face of the nation’s air war.

The rather ungainly, if not homely B-24 actually saw wider global service in the war, and was produced in greater numbers, over 18,000. The more comely B-17s numbered 13,000. With passage of over six decades, I found myself struck more by the physical presence of the rather dowdy and less famous B-24 “Liberator,” a solid manifestation of pure function.

Seeing both of the heavy bombers in the flesh, triggered some contradictory perceptions. On one hand, compared to today’s sleek supersonic jets, the F-22 Raptor for example, the WW II bombers appear hopelessly primitive. They came into being less than four decades after Wilbur and Orville first took to the air. At the same time looking at the two large multi-cylindered radial engines on each wing, and at the maze of cockpit instrumentation, navigation, communications equipment and the weaponry, the dominant impression is one of an almost overwhelming complexity.

Scrambling through the head-bumping maze-like interiors was like trying to move through a series of eccentric, poorly connected closets, spaces designed purely for the function of aerial warfare, oblivious to the simplest of human needs. What must it have been like to fly missions in one of these? What must it have been like to actually engage in high altitude combat in something like this? My own reactions were feelings of awe and a respectful humility. I remembered reading that Eighth Air Force aircrew casualty rates exceeded those of any other category in WW II, including combat infantry and submarine crews.

While we debated where to go for lunch, an announcement was made to clear the tarmac, all three of the planes were about to depart for a show at some distant airport. One after another, nine great engines came to life, belching black smoke before settling down. As they turned to taxi toward the runway, we braced against the prop wash until they disappeared down the runway to prepare for takeoff. One by one they roared past and then circled slowly overhead before fading away to the east. I wondered what it must have looked like and sounded like in the 1940s when these then giant planes rose in their thousands to do battle all over the world.

To end on a more realistic note, an extensive, in-depth study of the entire strategic bombing campaign conducted after the war implied that the game really had not been worth the candle, that the resources expended in strategic bombing could have been more effectively deployed elsewhere to shorten the length of the war. True or not, that conclusion in no way diminishes the epic heroism and absolute wonder of the whole enterprise.

Time to take a break from twenty-months of blogging. Time to finish up a long-delayed project, that of seeing a book, completed over five years ago, into print. Hope to be back to the Compost Heap before the end of 2009, maybe dropping something into the pile occasionally between now and then.

At one stage of my grown-up period when I was attempting to pass for a serious corporate type, I found myself in a conference room of a Harrisburg Holiday Inn, a last-minute, substitute delegate at a committee meeting of a statewide trade association.

I’d never before met any of the ten guys in the room, and had no clear idea of what I was supposed to be doing or not doing at the meeting. I knew only that I was there to show the company flag and to get through the day without embarrassing myself. The other committee members, this was 1976 and they were all men, were a good deal older than me, each representing utility companies from around the State, and they all seemed to be on easy, familiar terms with each other. I felt like a crasher at a private party. There was little serious attention paid to the meeting’s prepared agenda, and I figured that for most of those present, it was a day out of the office with best of all, a free lunch.
And it was to be good lunch indeed.

Deserting the Spartan accommodations of the Holiday Inn for a high-end, overpriced streak joint, we entered a dining room filled with state legislators drinking and chowing-down, all accompanied by smiling lobbyists. In an “aha!” moment, I concluded that like the politicians, we were about to dine well on somebody else’s money. The understanding among my fellow committee members was that the association’s marketing consultant, who had been chairing the meeting, would be putting the lunch tab on his expense account. I watched as my fellow committeemen ordered from the top of the menu. There were drinks all around, a hearty lunch and lots of good-old-boy jocularity. I did my part, smiling, grunting, eating, drinking and nodding.

After lunch and over coffee, one of more outspoken of the group, the association staffer, a big stuffy guy, self-important and decked out in full Ivy League drag, lit one of the cigars offered by the generous consultant, almost everyone still smoked in those days. “Mr. Big Deal” as I’d christened him, sent out his first clouds of smoke and began what would be a long monologue about his wartime years, all spent in the peaceful environs of Hawaii. “Best days of my life,” he went on. “Plenty of booze and horny women everywhere…,” and on and on. After a few minutes of that and looking for any escape, I turned to the guy seated next me, a guy from a gas and water company in Reading. I knew his name was Bernie. He looked about the right age. So I asked him, matter-of-factly, “hey Bernie, were you in the war?” Bernie was a little guy, even shorter than me. He wore one of those waffle-weave polyester blazers that were sold on the premise that they’d never wrinkle. It was mustard yellow. He too was puffing on one of the consultant’s freebee cigars.

Pausing as if to consider answering, he slid the cigar from his mouth and gave me a slow, flat, “yeah, I was in the war.” Willing to do anything to maintain an alternative to the “Remember Pearl Harbor” soliloquy going on across the table, I followed up with an equally disinterested “what were you in.” My new friend Bernie barely acknowledged my inquiry. In fact he actually turned his head away from me as he quietly said, “the air corps.” He said it like it didn’t really mean anything to him. It was my serve again, and I was beginning to tire of the whole thing. “Did you fly,” I asked. “Yep,” was all he said. Approaching terminal tedium with Bernie and his one-syllable answers, I asked what I thought would be the requisite and final question of a dead-end conversation. No longer at all that interested in Bernie, not in his war, not in his hideous sport coat – his necktie was worse – I threw out a casual, “what did you fly.” With a studied slowness, he pulled the cigar from his mouth and for the first time in our little back and forth, looked me in the eye. It was a look to say, “you really fucking want to know, don’t you.” Deliberately, slowly, and enunciating every syllable, he smiled for the first time and said, “P-38s.”

My outburst of “no shit” was involuntary and turned every head at the table in our direction. Catching myself, I allowed Mr. Big Deal to resume his Hawaiian rhapsody before trying to recapture Bernie’s attention with another “no shit, Bernie. Did you really fly a P-38?” He knew he had my attention. I got another sly smile and a modest, softly stated, “sure did.”

I was eight years old when the Second World War ended. Coming into awareness in the excitement of the biggest war ever fought, the content of the imagery inside my head anticipated the entire film library of the History Channel. My default settings for action, for excitement, for cool were all referenced to the photojournalism, the newsreels and the movies that had covered the war. I hadn’t cared a damn for sports, for cowboys, for cops and robbers. Nope, it was all tanks, Iwo Jima and John Wayne. I had spent the first conscious years of my life devouring the data, the statistics, the trivia of everything that came my way related to World War II. I knew that the .30-caliber, M-1 rifle, gas-operated, semi-automatic Garand was clip-fed, and had superceded the 1903 bolt action Springfield, that the Thompson submachine gun used the same .45-caliber ammunition as the Colt .45 automatic pistol, and that the Japs were real bastards.

On an unconscious level, too many of my aesthetic paradigms were weighted toward the imagery of the Second World War, toward the gracefully lethal. And of all the internalized configurations; the silhouettes of destroyers, of the Schmeisser machine pistol, even of the shark-toothed Curtis P-40 of Chennault’s Flying Tigers, it was always the supercharged, 400 mile-an-hour, double-boomed, twin-engined, Lockheed Lightning P-38 single seat fighter with its nose full of firepower that came closest to defining the absolute embodiment of deadly cool.

In “Populuxe,” his treatment of the design concepts that came to define the postwar consumer culture, Thomas Hine pointed out that Detroit’s addition of tail fins to American cars was a direct lift from the profile of the P-38. But that came later, after I’d let my enthusiasm for things military burn itself out while marking time for two years as a draftee in an army motor pool in Germany. In that expensive steak joint in Harrisburg, my brief conversational gambit with Bernie “whats-his-name” had struck and unearthed something primordial, something on which I was compelled to follow through.

After a couple of “wows,” and a “really,” I began pumping Bernie about what it had been like to actually fly one of those Harleys of the sky. The intensity of my enthusiasm seemed to disarm the laconic stoicism of my tablemate. “Well,” he said, “it’s not something you quickly forget about. I was only twenty-years old at the time.”

I got him warmed up, and I found out that he had flown in a fighter group based in Italy during the final months of the war. He had flown combat missions. He had been shot down. And, yes it had all been exciting, most of it anyway. He told me that it had been like hanging out with your high school friends. “Hell, we were all kids, really. Six or eight of us would go up together, loaded for bear. That plane had six fifty-calibers and a 20-millimeter cannon in the nose pod. “Christ,” he said, “you could cut a tree down with one burst from that sucker. And, it was fast, I mean really fast.”

He went on to tell me that the first time he was hit, a German plane had gotten behind him before he knew it. And that it wasn’t until the enemy plane shot past him that he realized he’d been fired on. “My one engine was smoking and he’d shot away most of one side of my tail.” He said he’d been at about ten-thousand feet and had had to bail out. “I didn’t have time to be scared until my chute opened, and then I worried all the way down.” He was over Allied lines and before he could gather his parachute, there was a jeep coming across the field to pick him up.

The second time, he told me, he hadn’t been as lucky. “We were shooting up trains and railroad tracks along the Inn River in Austria,” he said. “We were low, and I took a big hit, anti-aircraft fire, flak. I started losing control of the plane.” He told me that was too low to jump and had to ride the burning plane down, crash landing on a farm road, going through a hedge and finally stopping just short of a herd of dairy cattle. “It’s funny,” he said. “The last thing I could remember was those goddamned cows. One of them turned its head and looked at me. I can still see the big bell it had around its neck.” He said that was when he passed out. “I was pretty banged up,” he went on, “and I guess I had a lot of shrapnel in my legs. The local krauts must gotten me out of the plane before the fire reached me,” he said. “And that was the end of the war for me.”

“Boy! Bernie, that’s an amazing story,” I said. “I guess everything since must seem kind of flat after going through stuff like that.” “Well, not quite,” he said. “Looking back, I could have just as soon done without the whole thing.” A pause and then, “I didn’t get out of the hospital for almost a year and a half, Christmas of 1946. I’ve had nine operations on my legs.”

The waiter was clearing the coffee cups. Mr. Big Deal had finally finished the saga of his glory years, and the consultant was looking at his watch. Time to go back to the Holiday Inn and the conference room. Leaving the restaurant, I noticed that Bernie lifted each foot with the studied concentration of a man who wasn’t too sure he would actually be able to make the next step. I served on that committee for another four and a half years, for one six-month period I even chaired it. Bernie, his last name was Penowski, almost always got to the meetings before me, and he always saved me a chair next to his.

1. Like a Hurricane – Neil Young Unplugged
2. How to Live Alone – The Pernice Brothers
3. Desperate Man Blues – John Fahey
4. Whether or Not It Matters – The Kingsbury Manx
5. All You Hide – Lenola
6. Wonder Struck – George Shearing
7. Red Dust – Calexico/Iron and Wine
8. Medication – - Son Volt
9. Down Colorful Hill – Mark Kozelek
10.Live Wire – The Meters

Sitting on the warm, sunlit rock, Eddie hugged his knees. Still shivering and still dripping, he looked into the flat green current of the river as it sped past. Everything seemed so peaceful, the surprising near silence of the rapidly passing river, the lazy desert heat of the late morning, the opening in the canyon walls that let the sun pour down on him.

He knew David was safe. He had caught sight of him perched among the low rocks just below the last set of rapids. Upriver, in the muted colors of the shaded canyon, David’s bright orange life jacket had signaled his presence. The raft would be coming downstream any minute now, stopping along the way to pick up each of the seven swimmers who had jumped into the rushing water just minutes ago. Eddie was distracted by the sensation of his feet cooling under the wet straps of his new sandals. Another vanity, only the best. The high-end tech gear he wore was performing as promised, rapidly drip drying, while he sat trying to make sense of what had just happened to him in those last – what – ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

Neoprene O-rings. They had come in a little zip-lock bag along with the sandals. Cautionary copy offered step-by-step instructions for installing the rings over the velcro closings of the sandals. “Jumping feet first into deep water or fast moving currents, without properly checking your O-rings…” warned that you could lose your new sandals, and suggested implicitly that you might then compromise the safety of the entire expedition. “Yeah right,” Eddie had thought. “Me and Tenzing Norkay” He had been much amused at prosperous suburban types like himself having to have only the best in authentic outdoor gear. He thought of the sleeping bags certified to forty degrees below zero. Looking again at the O-rings, he felt a tiny shudder. He was back in that first set of rapids feeling the force of the moving water, a force beyond appeal, a force that came close to sucking these same sandals from off his feet.

Turning his head upriver, at the approach of the raft, he could see David standing near the front. David was not smiling. Eddie knew he now had acquired a story to dine out on for a season or two. But he also knew he would probably never tell the whole story.

A Colorado River rafting trip, like so many things in Eddie’s life hadn’t been much more than a throw-away line. One of those, “Hey, wouldn’t it be neat to take one of those white water rafting trips?” When Lynn presented him with the trip, the airline tickets, everything arranged by a friend in the travel business, Eddie had been caught utterly off guard. Not wanting to appear ungrateful, he had had to improvise an enthusiastic response. As the trip approached, and as he and David got into planning what they needed, he didn’t have to feign anything. This was going to be really neat, he thought.

Initially, Lynn had thought it would have been Eddie and both boys. The hope being that Michael would successfully complete this, the latest rehab, that things might be different. They weren’t. Michael was on the street again, somewhere up near Albany or Troy all winter, and Eddie was taking it hard. He and David would be together for almost a whole week, getting away from everything. It had to help.

Eddie loved David without qualification. He loved him in the lightest of ways. They were friends. Eddie simply enjoyed just being in David’s company. Maybe it was compensation for the awful mess with Michael. Maybe it was all the time they had spent together in the car in the years when David was younger and playing ball on traveling teams. Eddie loved to talk, to riff on a theme and then connect to another theme and another and another until neither he nor anyone could figure out how they had gotten to the current subject. He always felt that David was one of the few people he didn’t bore. David was just finishing up his third year at Skidmore, and the rafting trip was set for the first week after he got home.

They spent the first night of the trip at an old, dumpy motel in Moab, Utah. The itinerary called for a group meeting the night before in one of the rooms, Eddie’s first look at his fellow travelers. He figured it would be close quarters for nearly a week and he knew how to grunt, nod and keep his head down until he had scoped out the scene. He and David were a self-contained social unit. He didn’t need or want any instant buddies on this trip.

A couple of college kids, staffers from the rafting outfitter, were already in the room helping themselves to beer from a large cooler and chatting up the paying guests. While they waited for the trip crew leader to arrive, Eddie learned that there would be nine other people in the raft, plus a crew of four.

Eddie said hello and introduced himself and David to an older couple, a wheezy, overweight retiree named Phil and his wife Louise. They seemed like nice people. A distracted guy in sneaky Gucci loafers came in with three kids. Eddie figured it was custody for the week. The two preteen boys had sullen faces and the girl, about sixteen, was difficult not to notice. She wanted to be noticed and bouncing across the room in cutoffs and a bikini top, she succeeded. Sleazy but funny words like “pneumatic” and “whoopee” flashed across Eddie’s brain. He made an immediate decision that the kid would remain invisible to him for the duration of the trip. He watched David watching the girl. That alone should prove entertainment enough. The last threesome were a bit more interesting, a hard looking couple in their late fifties with a grown son. All three of them looked like drinkers. The son had a lot to say. He had done these kinds of things before and wanted everyone to know it.

A tall thin guy, maybe in his early thirties, sauntered in and without a pause shouted, “OK everybody, Listen up!” “Uh Oh,” thought Eddie. He had seen this type before; the Eagle Scout, the acting sergeant in basic training, the facilitator, the middle school assistant-principal. The guy’s short sleeve dress shirt complete with pencil pack sealed the deal. Probably a Mormon too, thought Eddie, a no-brainer in Utah. There was something else about the guy that struck Eddie, a hint, just a hint of a kind of manic energy, the controlled craziness you met with evangelicals or saucer freaks, not quite a touch of madness, but close.

“Let’s get something straight right from the start,” he said. “This is not a theme park vacation. This isn’t going to be Disney World or Sea World.” He paused for effect, ”This is a wilderness adventure, and we want to make sure everyone comes out safely. It’s critical that you all pay attention, that you listen to and follow instructions.” Life jackets would be worn at all times on the raft, no wandering off, etc. etc.

At a little after nine the next morning, they assembled in the motel parking lot under a sun that was already making serious claims on Eddie’s attention. “John Boy,” as David had christened the thirty-something guy traveling with his parents, looked like he had had a bad night. They had been told that there was storage on the raft for a reasonable amount of beer. Eddie had bought two six-packs of non-alcoholic beer for himself and a twelve-pack of Heineken for David. John Boy and his folks had stacked up four cases of beer next to their duffels. Eddie figured there was stronger stuff stashed away.

Two Chevy Suburbans hauled them to the riverbank just south of town. Standing on the landing and seeing the river for the first time, Eddie wasn’t all that impressed. The mighty, mythic Colorado wasn’t more than fifty yards wide, flat surfaced and the color of pea soup, the kind you get in a diner. All those TV documentaries and magazine shots had promised something more than this.

One of the crew told him that the dense vegetation, improbably green, that lined the banks separating the river from the desert, was another bright idea gone awry. The plants had been imported to control bank erosion but like so much else out here, they had gotten completely out of hand.

The group leader, “River Guide” his official title as he told everyone again for the third or fourth time, showed up wearing a baseball cap with a dramatic sun skirt that covered his neck and shoulders, like an actor in a B-grade spoof of Beau Geste. The rest of the crew was busy with the raft, a huge contraption on a trailer backed up to the river. It was maybe twenty to twenty-five feet long and about eight feet across and made up of two inflated pontoons, one on each side of an open-work steel deck. A canopy covered the seating areas and a small outboard motor, with just enough power for steerage, hung from the back. It didn’t take long for Eddie to figure the pecking order. The “River Guide” was clearly the honcho. A burly guy with a black beard was the helmsman, and the other two guys would do all the loading, unloading, setting up and taking down camp and most of the cooking. All four were local school teachers and this was just a summer job.

Under a bank of trees, Eddie, David and their fellow passengers ate a picnic lunch of cold cuts and potato salad as the crew, aided by a half-dozen kids working for the outfitter manhandled the raft into the water. Eddie realized that he hadn’t taken a very accurate measure of the river’s current. What he had thought was a sluggish flow suddenly grabbed and pulled at the raft with a strength that was challenging the efforts of nearly a dozen grown men. Once in the water the raft shot downstream until the crew recovered and began pulling on the lines to bring it back to where they had launched it. It looked like they were working at it.

With a lot of waving and shouting from the raft and from the riverbank, they moved out into the current. The guy with the beard, Doug, took his position at the helm using the small outboard motor for control. After some brief shuffling, everyone settled into what would be their positions for the rest of the trip. Eddie watched the banks speed past, the flow so much faster than he would have suspected had he been watching from shore. They moved with the wind, and even under the canopy the desert sun dried out whatever moisture there was in the air and in their bodies. A half-hour into the trip, Eddie had helped himself several times to the water and lemonade stored in big coolers near the bow of the raft.

The guide, his name was Bill, began pointing out the geological and other natural facets of the river’s course. It was starting to turn into a school outing. “Now what kind of strata is that over there on our left? Anyone?” Eddie felt he had better establish some ground rules here. He turned away from Bill, asking David to hand him a beer. The two six packs were not going to go far in this heat. Canyon walls, rising to what he figured must be heights of several hundred feet, began to close in and shade the river. It’s all right out of a Wylie Coyote cartoon, he thought.

“If you want to cool off, go ahead and jump in,” said Bill. “The current will keep you up with us. Just be sure your life jacket is on right, and sound off when you go in the water so we don’t lose anyone.” The water was wonderful, just cool enough to banish the intense heat of the desert air. Eddie felt light and free, propped up by his life jacket with the river banks rushing by and the raft just a kick or stroke away. There were games. David and the kids taking turns trying to stand like water skiers on a plank towed by the raft.

They camped that night on a gravel bar under a sheer wall of orange and purple rock that towered above the riverbank. The crew prepared an edible dinner of steaks, fried potatoes and canned vegetables. Lots of bread and butter and a layer cake for dessert. They slept on cots, in sleeping bags under the open sky. Darkness came slowly, the desert air carrying the aura of the sunken sun on into the night. For almost an hour, Eddie tried not to fall asleep. The night sky was filled with swirls of stars he had never imagined possible. It seemed more light than dark.

Morning came with a damp chill, another surprise, thought Eddie. Breaking camp after a minimalist breakfast, they took their now accustomed places as the raft slid out into the current. “In about an hour, we’ll reach the confluence of this river and the Green River” Bill announced. “From there, the river will enter Cataract Canyon. That means rapids, boys and girls. And that’s what we’re here for. Right?” Eddie couldn’t quite bring himself to join the orchestrated cheering.

Now well into the second day on the river, Eddie realized that they had not seen a single other living thing. Not a person, not a bird, no wildlife at all. He knew from years of watching public television that the desert supposedly teemed with life, but they could have been on the moon.

The raft came to a stop just ahead of the first set of rapids. Bill, another of the crew and a couple of the kids jumped out on to the rocks and went ahead to scout out the scene. Bill’s job was to pick a path through for the helmsman. “OK guys,” Bill said, “this is a good practice run for the big ones that are ahead of us. Stay in your seats and hold on tight to the lines along the top of the floats. Whatever you do, don’t try and stand up or move around once we get into the white stuff.”

Eddie gripped the loop of rope beside his seat and checked to make David had a good grip. The raft slid back into the stream. They heard the rapids before they got a good look at them. The water had gone from green to brown. Ahead of and below them small standing waves marked their spots with tufts of white. Eddie felt the raft drop slightly as if it were going down a step or a bump. As they picked up speed, the bumping began to increase, both in intensity and in frequency. Eddie felt himself being lifted up out of his seat. He freed one hand and pressed down on David’s shoulder. Water splashed up from the sides of the raft and then in waves from the front. Eddie was drenched. His sunglasses blurred with water. Somebody began yelling, rebel yell style. Others picked up on it. By the time Eddie felt like yelling, it was too late. The noise had begun to recede and the raft had begun slowing down as they turned a bend into a shaded canyon of what now seemed to be almost still water. Even in the shade, they were dry within minutes. “Well, how’d you like that,” shouted Bill. His grin was proprietary, like he had something to do with all of this
.
Each set of rapids was a set of variations on the first. Some more bumpy. Some more wet. A couple of them, thought Eddie, were just about over the top. He found himself joining the others screaming, wondering if the intensity of the moment was accelerating or fading. And just how much more intense could it get without turning ugly. Eddie realized he was scared. It wasn’t an emotion he sought out. He watched David and realized that the idea of a bad outcome, a disaster, a catastrophe were not yet a part of David’s core beliefs. Good for him, he thought.

The rest of the afternoon was a mix of pleasant drifting on the smooth current of the river, drinking lemonade and laying back in the shade of the canopy. Eddie enjoyed talking with Phil, the older guy. The wife would smile, but didn’t have much to say. Eddie learned that Phil had been a gunner on a B-17 during the war. Eddie, a kid during the war, loved hearing someone who could talk about the war without laying a line of shit on him. The tranquility of just chatting away a day on the river would be interrupted again and again by short bursts of noise and chaos as they dropped through yet another patch of violent water.

Again, they camped under the open desert sky. The river rushing past like traffic on a nearby interstate. Up again at first light, Eddie walked a little downriver to take a leak, brush his teeth and throw some water on his face. That was it. The canyon was a carry in-carry out area. A portable toilet with detachable zip-lock bags was set up each evening. Everything was put back on the raft for disposal at the end of the trip. One of the kids who had to take a dump during the day was dropped off on the shore with a plastic bag. He was told to leave nothing behind. He didn’t look like this was what he had expected on his vacation.

The morning was a repeat of the previous afternoon. By now Eddie, like almost everyone on the raft was having a great time. Not the guy vacationing with his three kids. He looked less than happy, and each time the call went up of “rapids ahead,” he would begin to lose the color in his face. By the time the raft dropped into the first gully, he would look ill.

Just before lunch, the raft slipped up to a bar and the usual people got off to scout the rapids that could be seen and heard in the distance. After a few minutes, Bill came back and said, “this is a little one. If you really want to get the feel of all of this, you can jump in here and float down through it in your life jackets.” It would provide a taste, he said, of what is known out here as “canyoneering,” or going down rapids by being in them. “You might swallow a little water, but nothing more than that.” That was all Eddie needed to hear. One of his least favorite feelings, aside from being afraid, was involuntarily swallowing water. “No thank you,” he thought.

David joined the group jumping in. John Boy, the two brothers, Bill, two of the crew and David, splashed into the current and quickly drifted downstream. Eddie watched them move downriver until their heads were just dark dots above the water, the scene broken by flashes of orange as the tops of their life jackets bobbed above the surface.

At the foot of the rapids, their heads suddenly disappeared. Eddie realized that they dropped down into the first of the gullies in the water. They were already past the big standing waves and wouldn’t be seen again until the raft went downstream to pick them up. Eddie felt he had made a prudent decision. He wished now that he had looked up the elevation drop between Moab and the end of the trip at Lake Powell in Arizona. If he had done that Lynn, in a perfect deadpan voice, would have said, “Gee Ed, that’s really interesting.”

With the raft feeling nearly empty, Eddie hung on as they followed the floaters into the rapids. Bill had been right, the water, turbulent for a few seconds, quickly settled down to a dull roar, diffusing its energy into a large placid pond that opened out into the shadows made by the canyon walls. As each of the swimmers climbed dripping, sputtering and coughing, up into the raft, it was “Wow! That was wild. That was so cool.”

The raft had turned to face up river. In the calm of the pond, the little outboard easily held its own against the softened pull of the current. A still wet Bill, addressed all on board. “Look, the next one is real piece of cake, maybe about half as strong as the one we just went through. Last chance to try it guys.” There were several cries of “OK” and “Let’s do it!” Eddie looked at Phil who shook his head and silently mouthed the words “no fucking way.”

What the hell, thought Eddie. He felt he might regret having come all this way and not fully experienced all that the trip had to offer. ‘You going again David,” he asked. “Sure Dad,” he answered.

Again inside Eddie’s head, it was all “what the hell.” The same seven were going again, Eddie the only newcomer. He checked all the strap closings on his life jacket, left his hat on his seat and joined the gang lining up at the stern gangway of the raft. One by one, they jumped off into the air, dropping noisily into the water. Eddie, holding his nose, plummeted below the cool green surface, staying under the few seconds it took for the buoyancy of his life jacket to overcome the force of his drop from the boat.

They began drifting away from the boat and from each other in an ever-widening pattern. Eddie could see David’s head below and to the left. David had already entered a stream of current and was moving fast, opening the gap between them. Eddie rocked back, resting on his life jacket as he was pulled downstream. His position in the water, he thought with amusement, was almost like being at home in his recliner watching a football game.

The river began getting serious as Eddie and the others, he couldn’t see any of them now, were carried into a narrower section of the canyon. Steadily picking up speed, Eddie was aware of the strange, impersonal power of the moving water. It pulled at his life jacket, at his trunks, at his shirt and at his feet. The sound of the rapids ahead was no longer the distant gurgling he remembered hearing from the raft. With each second, the sound became louder, more clear, more distinct, rising and building into a roar that complemented the growing rush and turmoil of the water that swept him along. When he realized that within this flow, nothing he did or didn’t do mattered, he began to be afraid. “Oh shit,” he thought. “Why in God’s name did I ever do anything so fucking dumb as get off that raft.” He could no longer control anything, not even his position in the water. Ahead, he could see the initial drop where the unbroken surface of the river fell into the rapids. From this vantage point, the river was terrifying. The whitecaps they had been tearing through in the raft, laughing and yelling, were now immense towers of roiled, angry water.

Eddie also had to deal with an unanticipated companion to his fear. His pounding heart rate had sped up his breathing until he was now gasping for breath. Not a good mode of being, he thought, when your head was being pushed in and out of water. He was already breathing in more water than he thought possible, and he knew that the rapids themselves were still to come. For the first time in years, maybe for the first time in his adult life, Eddie began to fear for his life. He had no illusions that the life jacket would keep him alive in water like this, not if he kept inhaling it in with every gasp. He had seen the news footage of people drowned at sea, bobbing in their life jackets, heads face down in the water.

The drop into the rapids was a heart stopper. Eddie didn’t really have time to reflect on anything. He was swallowing water when he went face first into the standing waves. A whirl of underwater turmoil grabbed at him and pulled him sharply down. “This is it, I am going to die,” was all he could think. In the swirling darkness, that one thought raced through his brain like an electronic loop. “This is it, it’s over. It’s over. I will die here.” At what he felt was his final instant, another force shot him like a toy to the surface. He broke through into the light, choking and crying for air. In a careening whirl of water, he spun in circles as the rock walls of the canyon sped past.

Eddie just wanted it to be over. Soon the pace of the water would slacken. Soon, maybe in seconds, he would muster enough strength to overcome the current and pull himself out into calmer water. He would have time to compose himself, to stop choking, to conquer the need to vomit up all of the water he had swallowed. The river should begin to slow down. The current should start to weaken. The canyon should be opening out. But none of that was happening. If anything the stream was again accelerating, and in the distance he again heard the roaring sound of falling water. “Oh Jesus Christ, No,” he prayed. Somewhere in front of him was David. “What a fucking way to go,” he thought. “I don’t think I can get through anymore of this. What about David? What about David? Jesus Christ, No.”

“That fucking Mormon asshole,” his mind screamed. “He doesn’t have a fucking clue. We’re into a string of rapids.” That clown.” Eddie realized that Bill must have mistaken the spot where they had gone into the water for another place, an easier place on the river. “Too late now,” he thought.

The second set of rapids was as difficult for Eddie, if not more so than the first. At several points, he believed with all his heart that he would not survive. But he did, and after a third run of white water, he was able to pull himself out of the river’s slowing rush and into a side pond of nearly still water. Staggering out on to a gravel bar and then falling down, he lay on his side and fought back a retching cough while he tried to get his breathing back under control. Over the sound of the river, he heard shouting and watched as John Boy’s head and one that probably belonged to one of the kids as they went bobbing downstream at a speed that startled and amazed Eddie.

In the half-light of the canyon, Eddie sat up and looked upriver. The raft should be coming downstream at any minute. “Jesus Christ, that was awful,” he thought. “But, I am alive. I didn’t fucking die.” In fact, Eddie realized he had never felt quite this way in his entire life. Without knowing why, he stood up and looked across the still water of the eddy at the moving current. His first step surprised him. “What are you doing, you simple son-of-a-bitch,” he thought. The second step, like the first came almost of its own. He could feel the bottom slipping away from under his sandals. He could feel the first pull of the current and a sense of being carried away on something primal, something beyond anything he had ever known. He could even think that his going back into the river had something to do with David being out there ahead of him. But he knew it didn’t.

This year’s Stanley Cup finals went to a game seven, defining a razor’s edge difference between the winner and the loser. Only an overtime win could have shaved the outcome finer.

In the days since Crosby and Company hoisted the Cup for their Pittsburgh Penguins, I’ve been trying to understand why what appeared to be a superior hockey team, the Detroit Red Wings, hadn’t been able to do a reprise of the previous season’s series. I use the term “superior” in regard to the Wings because throughout the series, it seemed that in basic execution – breakout plays, passing, puck possession, puck protection – the Wings had the Pens scrambling. And yet…

The Pens pretty consistently out-shot the Wings, but most of those shots were low-percentage tries. The five-year average age gap between the two teams was cited with statements that the Detroit players looked tired. They never looked all that tired to me. And with the exception of the Wings 5-0 blowout of the Pens in Game Five, the series was marked by low-scoring, relatively close games. Over the series, Detroit actually outscored Pittsburgh 17-14.

Here’s what I think happened. In Games One, Two and Five, Detroit was able to play their Cup-winning system, effectively shutting down the Pens. Pittsburgh was out-skated, out-passed, smothered in the neutral zone and continually bottled-up in their own defensive zone. But in Games Three, Four, Six and Seven, Detroit’s allocation of resources, matching both Lidstrom and Zetterberg against Crosby, began to appear counterproductive. While Crosby was kept to a single goal in the series, Maxime Talbot was able to score three times, accounting for over twenty percent of Pittsburgh’s total scoring. For the series, less than half of Pittsburgh’s goals came from the starring triumvirate of Crosby, Malkin and Stall. It might be that Babcock’s emphasis on Crosby was what allowed journeyman players like Letang, Fedetenko and Kennedy to get under the Wing’s radar and score. It also might be argued that the Wings commitment to what had proven to be a winning system left them at a disadvantage against the more nimble and opportunistic Penguins.

Finally, goaltending – Chris Osgood is a competent NHL goaltender. That’s to say, he is a superb and gifted athlete, but his success as a Cup winner might have had more to do with the defensive skills of his teammates, and to the Mike Babcock defensive system, than to his being a true money goalie. Osgood made big saves, but he didn’t have to perform throughout the series at the same dazzling level required of Mark Andre Fleury.

It seems to me that on the whole, the Detroit Red Wings were a more accomplished and possibly a better hockey team than the Pittsburgh Penguins, but as two-time Cup winner Bill Clement once put it, the nature of the game is that a lesser team can beat a better team if they are willing to pay the price. The series certainly could have gone either way, but from what I saw, the entire Pittsburgh Penguins team stepped up and paid in full for their Stanley cup win.

1. Hockey is played on ice skates

2. Hockey is a contact sport

3. Hockey is the only team sport other than polo that’s faster than a man can run

4. Hockey is continuous – five or more minutes of unbroken play can occur

5. Hockey player substitutions can take place without a stoppage in play

6. Hockey rule infractions result in the offending team playing short-handed

7. Hockey players control the game – within defined limits fist-fighting is tolerated

8. Hockey has the impact and violence of football

9. Hockey has the grace and beauty of ballet

10. Hockey has dynamic complexities of quantum mechanics.