May 19, 2025

In early 1940 the novelist John Steinbeck embarked with a friend, biologist Ed Ricketts, on a cruise through the Gulf of California, also called the Sea of Cortez, to collect specimens of marine life. While German forces rampaged through Europe they chartered a boat, hired a crew, and set out from Monterey, heading south.

Steinbeck was enjoying the payoff for his great novels, The Grapes of Wrath and Tortilla Flats. Ricketts had published a well-received paper entitled Between Pacific Tides. After the cruise they teamed to write the book that eventually became The Log from the Sea of Cortez. In an early chapter Steinbeck wrote:

“We were coming now toward the end of our day-and-night running; the engines had never paused since we left San Diego except for idling the little time when we took the langustina. The coastline of the Peninsula slid along, brown and desolate and dry with strange flat mountains and rocks torn by dryness, and the heat shimmer hung over the land even in March.”

They chartered a 76-foot work boat named Western Flyer in Monterey, owned by Tony Berry, who sailed with them as master, and hired Tex, the engineer, and Sparky and Tiny, seamen. “All three were reluctant to go, for the whole thing was crazy,” Steinbeck wrote. “None of us had been into the Gulf, although the master had been as far as Cape San Lucas, and the Gulf has a really bad name.”

They named the boat’s outboard motor the Hansen Sea Cow, a “mean, irritable, contemptible, mischievous, hateful living thing.” They called at San Diego to buy gas then sailed for the Gulf. The boat entered Magdalena Bay, two-thirds the way to the tip of Baja California, where the men started collecting specimens. They paused at Cape San Lucas, guarded by giant rocks called “the Friars,” then Pulmo Reef, La Paz, and Angeles Bay. And so on for those six weeks.

At the same time I picked up Cortez we started our own pilgrimage, back to Fort Valley, Va., where a 100-mile trail race is staged in mid-May every year. For the 11th time in 12 years I showed up in this thickly rocky, densely green paradise, either to endure the pain of the event or to help others endure it.

Our journey began in the same rollicking way as Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’, also through water, but the monsoon kind, the atmospheric river of mid-May above the mid-Atlantic. The rain fell laterally much of the 11-hour trip, which should take eight hours.

No detail of our experience is similar to the Western Flyer’s cruise. What mattered to us, and to Steinbeck, Ricketts, and their men was the breaking away. We knew what we were about better than they, but they outclassed us in grit and flair. With a gruesome war consuming nations week after week, one skilled scientist and five amateurs (plus Steinbeck’s wife Carol) explored a near-God-forsaken strip of ocean six thousand miles away from the carnage.

For us, the monsoon abated somewhere along the spine of Virginia, but the rain never stopped. It swept again in blinding sheets across the highway as we passed Natural Bridge and Lexington. The heavy wet clouds moved away around New Market, where the western ridge of the Massanuttens is broken by U.S. 211. We visited friends in Centreville and Sterling, then headed for Fort Valley, to a place called Caroline Furnace.

Volunteers walk the trails the day before the race, hanging ribbons and luminescent markers from trees to mark the course. Bill, Gretchen, and I, doing our part, tramped along a south-inclined stretch called Duncan Hollow, which a little rain turns into a streambed and swells the actual streams into swamps. We had done this before, the three of us, seniors who now leave the racing to men and women decades younger.

The forest was thick and marshy, the Massanutten rocks slick and sharp. We moved deliberately, pulling our shoes from thick mud, swatting bugs, breathing sweet mountain air.  In four miles the trail turns west and climbs torturous switchbacks up the western ridge then descends, the descent just as wet and rocky. I thought again of Steinbeck and his adventurers, staring across the water at the brown slopes of Baja California.

We finished Duncan Hollow and started climbing. We paused to gasp and stare back at the eastern ridge and beyond, across miles of farmland to the Shenandoahs 20 miles distant. A thin Blue Ridge haze across the mountains conveyed a sense of the permanence, the immutable, calming power of this quiet world.

In late March the Western Flyer called at San Jose Island and then Puerto Escondido, where the crew continued collecting specimens: crabs, sea anemones, other creatures. They moved on to Concepcion Bay and San Lucas Cove, San Francisquito Bay, and Bahia de los Angeles. They visited Estero de la Luna, Agiabampo Bay, and San Gabriel Bay, then headed home.

Steinbeck and Ricketts initially co-published the book as a travel journal. It didn’t sell well, we can imagine why. Ricketts died in an accident in 1948, Steinbeck republished the log in 1951.

They touched, in their own mysterious way, something of the essence of life in an obscure place, in sun-baked little settlements few if any of their readers had heard of. The act of collecting and studying living things, humble sea creatures, also was an act of assent, acceptance: that God’s creation, His world, is a sublime gift.

Nearly nine decades later Bill, Gretchen, and I also touched that world, as we tramped through cool fast-moving streams and struggled up the ridge. We all are up there in years, this was not the first time. The trek, in our tired, measured steps, affirmed truth about our lives and our beliefs. We find it, as Steinbeck and Ricketts found it, in being present as witnesses to the miracle of this rugged, serene, consoling corner of our world, revealed in completing the journey.

May 12, 2025

It was time for the ophthalmologist. He comes after the optometrist, like the orthodontist comes after the dentist. The point is cataracts, the mysterious film that, over years, develops on the lens of the eye. I have the years. An optometrist found the cataracts. Get it done, he said. We found Southern Eye.

Meanwhile, some things come to a purely felicitous ending. We have a new Pope. We, that is, everyone, need Leo XIV, a math major from Villanova, a guy with hard executive experience who speaks five languages not counting Latin, and paid his dues bringing the Gospel to obscure places.

It was more than a month ago that we set out to take care of the cataracts. Experience sharpens your skill at making doctors’ appointments. Medical practices, like other businesses, are intoxicated with the shallow freedom from personal engagement offered by text messaging. Phone recordings demand texts. A human being answers only if you choose the “billing” option.

Eventually we got a choice for an appointment: the local office two months out or the Clemson office, a 60-mile roundtrip. It had just opened, slots were available. We picked Clemson.

People who have had the cataracts work say it’s quick and easy. Still it’s surgery and your eyes. It involves sharp instruments. Things can go wrong.

The Clemson trip is a trek through downtown Greenville out into the western industrial and commercial suburbs. Eventually the road opens into pretty country, but it’s still 30 miles one way. Southern Eye is in a just-completed pseudo-colonial townhouse subdivision that accommodates both residents and businesses. The streets were quiet. The Southern Eye office was quiet.

A technician, a young guy dressed in black, led me to a treatment room and fitted my head in his device, my chin propped on a ledge, the eyepiece against my left eye. He flashed a line of five block letters at me, I read them, he reduced the size, once, twice, three times, until I just guessed. We went through the drill for the right eye. Without a word he left the room. I waited.

Dr. Dave walked in. He asked a few questions, then fitted another device over my left eye. He turned a knob, a bright light blinded me. He moved to the right eye. “Cataracts, both eyes,” he said. “We’ll take care of you.”

The doc gave a primer on cataracts. They develop over time and if not removed can lead to loss of sight. The process takes 30 minutes, usually, under local anesthesia, but it’s major surgery, requiring cutting into the eye. I winced.

We got an appointment for “alignment” a week later at another Southern Eye site, this one in the medical ghetto near the downtown hospital. The waiting room was crowded with oldsters, everyone wearing glasses. I didn’t have to wait, a tech called me. She fitted my chin in a machine and did a few more tests. I got the appointment a month out for the right eye and for the left two weeks later.

A thick FedEx packet arrived, full of paperwork and two vials of eyedrops, one vial for each eye: start the drops three days before the surgery, four times each day. I struggled to remember the schedule then had trouble finding the eyeball. The medicine mostly dribbled down my cheek.

On surgery day we headed for yet another Southern office, this one near the big suburban hospital complex. Convenient in case things go wrong, I guessed.

At 9:30 AM several patients waited ahead of me. A nurse, Laura, took me to a cubicle. I lay on a cot, she took my blood pressure and readied her IV needle. She tried my wrist. “Well, that didn’t work,” she said. I gritted my teeth. She tried again, again, the needle passed through my vein. The third time was the charm. I exhaled hard.

An anesthesiologist stopped by to ask how I tolerated anesthesia. I’m okay, I assured her, lots of experience. Dr. Dave entered the cubicle. He asked how I felt. Then he asked, “Would you like to have a quick prayer?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. He placed his hands on the rail of the cot and whispered a short ecumenical prayer.

It was the day after Pope Francis died. I didn’t think Dr. Dave was thinking about the Holy Father, but who knows? This is the Bible Belt Southland. Public prayer is off-the-cuff, extemporaneous, not my style, yet still prayer. No doubt he prays for all his patients. I appreciated it.

An hour later I was first in line at Cataract Central.  Dr. Dave and a colleague were hard at work relieving folks of their cataracts. It’s highly precise surgery, and no two patients have exactly the same situation. But it is repetitive.

 Around 2 PM Laura pushed my cot into a surgical space. Someone well practiced at this squirted a drop of medicine in my right eye, then a drop of local anesthesia. I saw Dr. Dave’s silhouette above me, then an intense white light. I felt nothing. It was over in twenty minutes.

Sandy drove home. I wore a plastic shield over the eye at night. At the post-op the next day Dr. Dave said the eye looked good. “Keep wearing the shield at night, keep taking the drops, no exercise, no bending, no lifting more than ten pounds,” he warned.

I sat around the house for a week. No pushing a lawnmower. It rained, the grass grew longer and thicker. Sandy carried the trash out to the curb. I kept up the eyedrops and taped the shield over the eye each night.

At the second post-op Dr. Dave explained what happened. “I made two incisions and inserted instruments into the eye and lifted the cataract from the lens.” He showed a video of the incision, the probes, the cataract torn away and pulled out. I gulped. But the eye felt okay.

“Thanks for helping me,” I said as I stood up. He grinned. “God gave me the skills to help people,” he answered. “See you in a couple of weeks for other one.”

So far my vision is no better. I’m still squinting. No miracles, even with Dr. Dave’s God-given skills. But while inserting his cutting tool in my eye he lifted my spirits. Maybe that was the point.

May 5, 2025

We sat in the bar of the Officer’s Club at Camp Courtney, a Marine Corps base on Okinawa, Japan, watching the news. It was early February 1973, a few weeks after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords that formally ended the U.S. role in the Vietnam war.

As part of the agreement the North Vietnamese began releasing American POWs, many of them imprisoned for years. As we sipped our beer we saw the Americans, some still dazed and disoriented, deplane at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Over the next two months, during Operation Homecoming, nearly 600 POWs emerged from the hell of North Vietnam.

North and South Vietnam continued that savage little war. On April 30, 1975 the North Vietnamese People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) overwhelmed the South’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam. As PAVN troops entered Saigon, American aircraft evacuated Americans and Vietnamese. After the airport runway was pocked with bomb blasts, U.S. forces used helicopters to rescue a final few from the roof of the American embassy.

Last week, on April 30, we observed a bitter milestone, the 50th anniversary of the end. Fifty years. Ancient history.

The fall of Saigon followed the capture of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, by Khmer Rouge rebels on April 17. Then on May 12, Khmer Rouge troops seized the U.S. commercial ship Mayaguez off the Cambodian coast. Nearly 20 Americans, mostly Marines, were killed trying to rescue the ship’s crew.

Some dates are enshrined in remembrance: December 7, 1941, June 6, 1944, November 22, 1963, September 11, 2001. April 30, 1975 is barely an afterthought. A few small-type headlines mentioned it last week. It was remembered by Vietnamese Americans, the children and grandchildren of Vietnamese lucky enough to escape.

Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s the Marine Corps built a mockup of a Vietnamese village on the campus of the Corps’ Basic School in Quantico, Va., where newly commissioned lieutenants are trained. My company used it to run through some exercises. “Counterinsurgency” became a buzzword. But really, we had no idea what we were doing.

Infantry officers from my Basic School class, which graduated in May 1972, went directly to Vietnam with elements of the Third Marine Division. Months later, I met many of them on Okinawa as the Marines completed redeploying from Southeast Asia.

Americans alive in the 1960s recall the name “Vietnam” as the unrelenting nightmare it always was. By the late ‘60s Americans turned against the war. The country was racked with anti-war activism, including violence. In February 1968 CBS anchor Walter Cronkite announced on the air that the war was unwinnable. A month later U.S. Army soldiers massacred between 350 and 500 civilians at My Lai. Army leaders tried to cover it up. It was America’s darkest hour.

In June 1971 the country was shocked when The New York Times published excerpts of The Pentagon Papers, the classified Defense Department history of the war released by analyst Daniel Ellsberg. For a while the war was sad grist for the box office: The Deer Hunter, We Were Soldiers, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, others. Filmmaker Ken Burns made a 10-part documentary that reached back into the dim origins of war in Southeast Asia. Books were written.

Over decades, military leaders, diplomats, historians studied and analyzed, studied and analyzed the war. They recognized that U.S. forces thrashed incoherently through the country, racking up body counts that included thousands of civilians. The Americans, with all their firepower, had no clue how to counter an enemy that understood the people and their culture.

The lesson didn’t register. History repeated itself in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Vietnam changed some veterans and family members forever. Others worked hard to forget. People born just few years after Vietnam known next to nothing about it. Schoolchildren today most likely know less than nothing.

Vietnam lacerated the soul of the country. Yet in 1985 the late Sen. John McCain, who spent five-and-a-half years as a POW in North Vietnam’s Hoa Lo prison, called the Hanoi Hilton, returned to Vietnam. A decade later, as a member of the Senate POW/MIA select committee, he worked with Vietnam veteran Sen. John Kerry to help establish U.S. diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

Today Vietnam is a tourist destination. Thousands of Americans, veterans and non-veterans, take advantage of dozens of travel agencies and tour companies to visit. Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and the city’s Cu Chi tunnels, the Khe Sanh Marine base, Hue City, and Da Nang, among others, are highlights.

Tours visit the Mekong River delta and the former demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam. Visitors can check out the Dien Bien Phu museum, which commemorates the Viet Minh victory over a French task force in May 1954 that expelled France from Indochina.  In Hanoi visitors can walk through the Hoa Lo prison, now a museum. Four complete Hoa Lo cells have been reassembled at the American Heritage Museum in Boston.

Tourists can visit Quang Ngai province, site of the My Lai massacre memorial, a “place of deep sorrow and reflection,” according to the brochure. On tour websites you can read glowing reviews, like those of tours of Las Vegas or Disneyworld. We’ve come that far.

A few of the tours offer guidance on “mental and emotional wellbeing.” Mindfulness of potential “triggers that could evoke traumatic memories is crucial,” says one company. The tour should be a “journey of healing, reflection, and connection … a way to confront the past, find closure, and create new, positive memories.”

It’s been 50 years. The oldtimers created their memories long ago. The hard part is for the young, to witness the truths of the history, learn from them, make them last.

April 28, 2025

Friends came to town, we drove to the local state park and ran up and down the trails and around a pretty lake. The forest was muddy in places, but sweet and silent. North Lake flashed deep blue through the trees. Gentle waves break against the shore.

The glistening reflection of sunlight on the surface has a restorative effect. Folks will pause for brief moments near the water. Beyond the lake shore, low rounded hills crowd in, thick with forest. Fallen tree trunks reach out into the water, giving some perspective to the distance to the far shore. It is a place to lighten burdens.

Bitterness and angst are sweeping the nation as it lurches toward depression. Yet last weekend our group, five middle-agers and one senior citizen completed, decisively, with the figurative exclamation point, another chapter in a 15-year story, of friendship formed in one place then preserved at long distance by text message, email, and occasional meetups.

The purpose, on the face of it, is running forest trails. But it’s a deeper, more textured story, told here before, in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas. Now, as the local host, I charted the course and handed out maps. Paris Mountain State Park, within the Greenville, S.C., city limits at 1,500 acres, is one-tenth the size of our old running space, Prince William Forest Park near Woodbridge, Va.

The Paris Mountain trails mostly are well-manicured by hikers, dog walkers, mountain bikers, and scout troops on their badge-earning outings. Old folks plod through the woods, getting their dose of seniors exercise. But Paris Mountain has its moments. Here and there, along the Sulphur Springs and Brissy Ridge pathways, thick roots reach to grab feet and legs. Rocks shaped like axe blades protrude to slice ankles.

For some stretches the trails wind steeply upward through the woods, making legs go numb, lungs strain, hearts pump to exhaustion. Creeks are a gaggle of rocks strewn in rushing water. Dead logs obstruct crossings.

The first mile, Mountain Creek, is sedate. Chris, Paul, Archie, and Kirk sprinted out of sight, Kevin and I slogged it. He wore a rucksack with 25 pounds of weights, his Florida hiking routine. We moved on to Sulphur Springs, following a creek, the sound of moving water soft, soothing. Rocks became boulders. The trail twisted upward, three feet wide along a twenty-foot crevice crossed with root tangles. We inhaled and bent our backs.

We crossed the creek and climbed upward to the Fire Tower intersection, then parted at the Kanuga trail. Kevin followed the mapped course, descending to the lake. I turned onto Kanuga-light, my escape route.

As I moved onto Brissy Ridge Kirk and Archie showed up, forging their own alternate route. They hurried down toward the hard part. At the end of Brissy Ridge, Paul pulled up and moved ahead on the final descent back to Mountain Creek. Chris already had passed, slowed by thick roots and jagged rocks. He raced down the backside of Sulphur Springs to Mountain Creek, finished, and jumped in Placid Lake. Within an hour we all got there. The late morning sun warmed us.

Ten or twelve years ago it was all backslapping, stories, jokes. We ran, drank coffee, gathered for happy hours, and solved the world’s problems.

It went on like that. The number varied. At one point, around 2010, we were about a dozen, meeting at 5:00 AM at the local Gold’s Gym on Thursdays to run neighborhood streets. Tom, the instigator, combined “Gold’s” and “Thursday” to create “THuGs.” We had fun with that.

 Scott was still on active Marine Corps duty. Nearly all of us were veterans who turned into federal contractors. Chris was in accounting. Paul was more or less retired, we never were sure.

We ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 2011, then a “Tuff Mudder” obstacle event and a couple of half-marathons. During the work week we ran on roads. Saturdays were for forest trails at Prince William, Manassas National Battlefield Park, and county parks.

We kept it up through summer heat and winter cold, as if we’d be embarrassed to miss it. One morning five or six years ago we pulled on thermals and mittens in single-digit chill and slogged over frozen tundra at Prince William, trotting a short loop before scrambling back to warm cars and coffee. We remember that as a benchmark: we did not let the cold cancel us.

We staged a casual trail half-marathon in Virginia, some of the team ran a race in rural Tennessee. But it was inevitable: the THuG thing couldn’t stay the same; we all had family situations and jobs having to do with corporate decisionmaking and government funding. Al, Tom, Josh, and Dave drifted away. Paul, Scott, and Amir pulled up stakes and left.

Over three years most of the rest of us scattered. Chris, Archie, and Alex hung on in Virginia. Paul, in Asheville, kept sending messages, jokes, ideas for reunions.

We pulled off the gatherings, twice near Sylva, N.C., for a painful 2,700-foot climb up Black Rock Mountain, when Chris won a fast-finisher souvenir buckle. This was Paul’s idea, a tortured slog up a sinuous fire road into the fog of the outer Blue Ridge. We showed up at Kevin’s place in Sarasota, then last April again near Paul’s for a trail in the Blue Ridge and an evening in Asheville. Scott got us down to Austin last fall.

For a brief weekend in this town we were present again. We finished the run, a bit slower then last time. That’s the way it is. It’s been fifteen years, after all. Our kids then now are adults. The happy hours are ancient history. The hair is mostly gray. THuGs are watching their carbs, turning in earlier. In Greenville, the topic of religion and belief came up.

Sunday morning arrived, the end of the adventure, the trip from the THuG dream back to the world. We talked a bit about next time, the next place: to be present, to march forward, to live in the moment, and the future. That’s the plan, and the hope.

April 21, 2025

Lent rushed to its sublime yet nightmarish close. The Sunday church music is intense, at our church, at least, summoning hope and joy. Outside the world is gnashing its teeth. The country is drowning in political derangement.

Masses were crowded at St. Mary Magdalene in Simpsonville, S.C. The mix of anguish and gladness of the Triduum arrived, with the country paralyzed by ratcheting psychosis at the top. Midwesterners and Southerners still are picking through tornado rubble, even while federal recovery funds are zeroed out. Still, wildfires are mostly controlled, floodwaters receding. The countryside is green and vernal.

Statues and crucifixes at Catholic churches were shrouded in purple. Protestant churches advertised their services. The congregations and the celebrants looked forward to the solace of blessings. At the nearest church, Prince of Peace, I heard prayers for Ukraine and for death-row inmates. 

We are seeking the life of the spirit, sustenance for the soul. We search along many paths to faith: family, community, regional habits and allegiances, history, cultural traditions, affections, preferences. We have around here stern cradle Catholics and stern evangelicals, Baptists, Church of Christ folks, and so on.

I thought of four Catholic communities: the parish closest to our home, Prince of Peace; Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, N.C., 90 miles away; St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., and Christendom College in Front Royal, Va.

For Holy Week at Prince of Peace the pews facing the altar were fitted on the aisle end with a pole to which a palm frond was attached, creating a theatrical canopy of palms for priests, deacons, and altarboys to process through, in the way we imagine Christ entering Jerusalem.

The Mass there, to my prejudiced mind, inclines to a procedure. The parish follows the traditional practice of the priest at Mass facing away from the congregation. Some folks are fiercely loyal. We belonged for a year, and didn’t find our spiritual life. We looked elsewhere.  

The monastery chapel altars at Belmont Abbey, from which our youngest daughter graduated, and at the church at St. Anselm are stark chunks of stone. Both schools are run by monks of the Benedictine order. You would expect austerity from the monks, and you get austerity.

The new chapel at 554-student Christendom College, completed in 2023, like Prince of Peace resembles a medieval church, that was the intent. From the rear pews the priest is an indistinct dot. We went to Mass there with friends a year ago. Afterward, one of them said, “That was joyless.”

Christendom assures students and parents that its curriculum is “faithful to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” The school doesn’t accept Title IX funds or participate in federal student loan programs out of concern that federal money would interfere with its Catholic mission. I know the place because I earned my M.A. there.

At Mary Magdalene on Palm Sunday we listened once again to the reading of the Passion, the immortal passages from Luke that tell of Christ’s trial and crucifixion. Again the congregation is transfixed by the brutality of the execution, for centuries a common event in the Western world. We shudder, reminded of the truth of it at that bleak moment at the dawn of civilization.

The scandal of the crucifixion resonates throughout history. It flows through the centuries of inhumanity perpetrated by Christians and pagans. We walk, we are forced to walk, through the barbarity that assaults our attempts at civilization.

The somber message that may lead us to faith reminds us that two millennia of preaching and proselytizing failed to transform human nature, which in a grotesquely twisted way tolerated the Soviet famine of the 1930s, then the Holocaust. These are the darkest benchmarks of the twentieth century, along with genocides of recent decades, Red China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, countless others less prominent.

We don’t dwell on those things, which would cost us our sanity. One of the gifts of faith is the capacity to abide, to persevere. We recognize madness but still struggle to realize our gift. Yet the central reality of the Mass, and of Christian services everywhere, in every humble church and congregation, is transformation through a miracle.

It can only be a miracle, the event we call Resurrection. It is all we have, our only source of strength as we struggle to extricate ourselves from our nature. The miracle may lift us from our unsteady, tentative faith to grasp the possibility of a higher life, better than our own but still wholly human. We may call it the mystery of Christ’s life; we may call it other things.

Crowds rushed to the churches on Easter, for some it was a once-a-year outing. Some wore suits, others blue jeans. The kids were there, some awestruck, others bewildered.

The priest intoned the prayers and raised the cup, as Christ did, assuring the crowd that the freedom of salvation was present for all. The people move forward in long lines. They participated in the mystery, then moved on with their lives.