Chapter Two-- Nightfall in Verona, Jenne' R. Andrews

Scroll down for preceding chapters-- best read in order....x


Chapter II, Wherein the Poet Drinks-In Europe and Finds Relief in the Grass...

Nel mezzo del cammino della nostra "vita"nell'Universo, mi ritrovai sulla Terra, questa"selva oscura" che aveva smarrito la via dell'Amore.  L’Inferno, Canto I, Dante

In the middle of the road of our “lives” in the Universe, I found myself on Earth, that dark forest that has obscured the way to Love. Trans. Jra.

As night fell, Caroline, Julia and I pulled into Nuremberg in our reconditioned VW bus. We drove along the great square where bells tolled from a Renaissance cathedral.

Germans in dark clothing walked quickly along the sidewalks, seeming disconnected from each other and unfriendly, their heads down, eye contact verboten. Pigeons wheeled over the plaza but no intimacy of small cafes invited our interest, even amid the great stillness of antiquity and the dark history of Nazi rallies emanating from tall, spare, neatly arranged stone buildings around the square.

Perhaps the city was still subdued by the shadows cast by the war years, so that the echo of turmoil, of oppression, not to say the infamy of Nuremberg itself, infiltrated daily life. There was neither the ambience nor the clamor of another language I yearned for.

It was thus easy to feel lonely and fearful there; I took comfort in the intimacy of the bus, and that my friends and I were on the road together. We were free to plunder the moment of its intimations and distractions, or not.

After the big push to get ourselves on the road, we seemed to find ourselves a little reticent and tired.  But this was Europe—there was no mistaking it!  We were all there together, still riding high on our own bravado, our day to day uninspiring routines at our backs, very, very far away. 

I poured three brimming cups of white wine from the bottle in our cooler, passing two of them up up to the front seat.

“Salud,” I said, raising my cup. 

Julia looked at me in the rear view mirror.  She laughed.  “Salud.”  She balanced the steering wheel in her left hand and took a gulp.

We wound our way down a side street, buying bread, cheese and wine at a stand, and then Julia turned the bus around, heading back the way we came.

“Now what,” I asked.

“Now, we pull in somewhere and rest, she said, turning onto a dirt road and driving along slowly, looking for a cut-in in the trees. Our headlights could only probe so far into the thick copse. Caroline looked out the window for an opportunity.

I was terrified. I was sure we were headed up someone's driveway.

“This is somebody else's country.  We can't just camp here.  We don't even know where we are.”

She turned to me, tossing her shoulder-length hair impatiently, her dark brows knitted.

“Jen.  We know what we are doing.  Relax.  You've got to relax, so we can all relax.  Drink some more wine.  Write in your journal.”

Subdued, I complied. Julia pulled off the road and switched off the engine.  I lit a candle and opened my journal, and got out a pen.   They unpacked t-shirts and rolled out their sleeping bags, making the front seat into a wide bed and locking the doors.  

We had all gone out and peed in the grass by the watery light of the moon, marking our presence for days to come.  My friends had mastered the art of rolling up their bell bottoms and squatting perfectly; I had not.

After they fell asleep, I quietly poured a little water into a dish and rinsed out the cuff of my jeans.  I took off my panties and rinsed those too, wringing them out and hanging them over the curtains at the rear of the bus.  I reached into my duffel bag and took out my flannel nightgown and put it on.  Slipping out of my tennis shoes, I pulled on my long woolen socks.  I was buttoned up to the gills, and I felt less vulnerable.

I set aside my clothing for the morning so that I could find it in a hurry if anything happened.  I took long gulps of wine; the warmth of the alcohol permeated and sedated me.  I settled back against the seat, pillow-less, lost, again amazed; I was in Germany, in a forest, in the middle of the night.

I woke abruptly at dawn, my bladder bursting.  Without opening the curtains, I slid the door open, and promptly slipped out of the listing bus in my socks, sitting down hard with my nightgown around my thighs, coming to a stop at the very edge of a paved bike path.  

At that moment, around the bend came a horde of bicycling Germans in tweed suit coats and caps, briefcases strapped to the back of their bikes.  


Off in the distance, the bells of Nuremberg tolled seven times.   The German men glanced at me, and at the bus in disgust, turning their faces away, disappearing around the copse of trees.

“Get up,” I said, hiking myself back up into the bus. “We're in the way.  This is a commuter path.” 

My beautiful tousled friends laughed at me.  I stood there in my flannel nightgown, my socks extending a good six inches from my toes, like rabbit's feet.

“You think this is funny?” I was fuming.

They laughed again.

I pulled up my socks and stumbled into the trees, squatting in the loam. I came back to the bus and climbed in and furtively dressed beneath my nightgown like an old maid. My friends seemed unconcerned about staying daisy-fresh; I furtively sprinkled a little talc into my underwear, and under my arms, reclaiming my dignity.

“When do we get to take a shower,” I asked, while we sat in the sun sipping coffee made on our camp stove.

“Probably in Salzburg. Be forewarned,”  Caroline said. “Showers in Europe are cold. They're out in the open just like the toilets.”

“No surprise there,” I muttered.

I had already discovered in a brief walk through Frankfurt the day before that the toilets were literal gratings in the street with perfunctory barriers to scrutiny. When we pulled in for gas, we found the inevitable partition with its latticed cover set into pavement. No toilet paper within miles; I quickly learned to stuff anything that passed for Kleenex into the pocket of my jeans.

Clearly I would need, sooner rather than later, to abandon my need for running hot water and master the art of a quick, discreet pause that required balance, flexibility and no self-consciousness whatsoever.

We repacked, and swerved back up onto the Autobahn. Caroline opened up the map.

“I think we should go ahead and get to Salzburg,” she said, looking at Julia for affirmation.

“Great idea.  Salzburg it is.”

“How far is Salzburg,” I asked.

“Just a few hours, “Caroline yawned, as if we were merely sitting in her living room back in the U.S. “ We'll stop and get a salad.”

I was ravenous. Wine, yogurt, hearts of palm: these things were all well and good, but what about real food?  I broke into the bread and cheese.

I feared a battle ahead;  Caroline and Julia would stay slim on the trip: I already wanted to eat my way through Europe, to try everything.  I also feared what would become of me if I couldn't eat a little meat now and then.  Meat was expensive, but I couldn't envision living on fruit and vegetables, as healthy and delicious as these were.  

In capitulation, Caroline had bought a few little pots of goose liver pate with rust-stains on them in Frankfurt I was sure had been tinned sometime in the previous century.

“Make these last,” she had said.  “We'll have one feast every few days.  We want to save our money for the discos, and clothes.”

I spread some of this dubious treat on a chunk of bread, choking it down. Across the morning we drove and drove.  We pulled over for a brief lunch of hearts of palm, apples and Gouda, pouring our chilled white wine into our tin camping cups, toasting each other.

After a few glasses of wine, my cheeks burning,   I told stories, in particular about the time my family went to Albuquerque to get a piano and left behind our rabbit, Ozma, in the garage in her hutch.  We had paid one of the neighbor boys to come and feed her.    

He had come twice a day to refill her dish with pellets and give her water, and when we came back she had tripled in size, her front and back legs extending out of the cage: mounded under her cage an enormous pile of droppings.

In fact, my forte' when in my cups, was story-telling; I had been much the entertainer in Minnesota, sitting at my friends’ kitchen table well into early morning.  Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I believed before the trip, now happily embellishing my escapades as a dilettante writer to my captive audience.  We chatted about our receding lives, our parties of poets and other ne’er do-wells I held on the tin roof of my apartment.

Then, heading for Salzburg, looking out at the sea of green meadows boundaried by ever taller mountains on either side of us, heading for Salzburg, birthplace of Mozart, I found myself pining for home.

I opened my journal to write a few self-admonitions:

“You are in Europe. Open your heart and mind to what this is.” I then described Nuremberg at nightfall, tand made notes about sliding out of the bus onto the commuter path. I listed what I could discern from the window.

This activity quelled my anxiety. We nosed into the mountains, up a winding highway, crossing the border into Austria, presenting our passports, paying at the toll booth.  

As we pressed on, I began to see the tips of mountains infinitely more stunning than the peaks of Colorado that made up the “Front Range” where my parents and brother lived.

We climbed higher, rounding a curve, and suddenly, there was a valley ahead and we were surrounded by the Alps. Now, breathing in ether, stunned by the shimmering, towering, sapphire beauty around us, we came down into Salzburg, parking the bus and making our way to the terrazzo terrace of a small cafe.

Julia and Caroline ordered “gemischte salats”, operating in German phrases extracted from one of our Berlitz foreign language guides. A little salad.

Caroline looked at me.

“I think we should eat in town tonight,” she said. “And go to a concert.”

I was overjoyed-- this was more like it.

After sight-seeing in the afternoon along narrow streets with the throng of other tourists, we went back to the bus, changed into dresses, and found our way to the Mozart cafe, where I ordered a golden mushroom omelet that melted in my mouth.  Mozart poured through the air.  There was Mozart on the jukebox in the cafe'. The unparalleled composer lived on here with a vengeance, despite having been dead for over a century and a half.

We emerged into the dusk, and walked to a concert hall, sitting in the back, where a pianist's hands flew over the keys, the great arched ceilings of the hall filling with a waterfall of sound.  

Rapt, I didn't care what piece it was, only that we were there in Mozart’s birthplace, enfolded in music.  I doubted that there could be too much of his music, or anywhere more beautiful than Salzburg and I thought it would be nice to stay put.

I began to relax.  That night I wrote again by candlelight, not as worried about keeping clean underwear cycling through my duffel bag to my little tub of water to hang in the rear window.

I had only known how to live by trying to keep all things under control.  The indifference of my friends to any kind of itinerary or destination was still troubling to me, but it had occurred to me that they were operating on the instincts of true adventurers and that perhaps I should trust them.  This trip was meant to liberate us, take our minds off all things painful and serious.

At my back, the ever-oozing wound of my unresolved relationship, the demands of my career, trying to cover rent and groceries with gigs as a poet in the schools, and always, the “shoulds” and overwhelming responsibilities of being the eldest child of parents who were struggling that sent me from Minnesota to Colorado again and again to clean the house and prop them up like Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. My arrangements never stayed put, and I had yet to understand that I could not save them from themselves.

In the morning, having found a campground on the outskirts of Salzburg, we had coffee at a cafe near the highway that would take us through the Alps, up and over the Brenner Pass, to Italy.

Now there was a bit of planning, Caroline getting out her map, and a pad and pen.

“We should drive straight through,” she said.  “It snows on the pass, and we want to make it over between storms.”

Mythologies of travelers lost in this manner had reached the U.S. and somewhere I had read about them.

I froze with terror. We, three young women in a VW bus outfitted for the flat, i.e., a safari, that chugged along like a freight train, were going to drive up above timberline into a cleft in the Alps where people skidded off the highway into oblivion, not to be found until the following spring.

“When were you last on the Brenner pass?”

They could see that the plan wasn't sitting well with me, my persona as the resident nervous wreck re-emerging.

“I went over by train,” Caroline admitted. “It was beautiful. About five years ago.”

“Who's driving?”

I thought about Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona-- the years of trips with my father, driving up San Francisco Peak outside Flagstaff, where, as we crept in first gear along a narrow road that dropped off on both sides, he would stick his head out the window and crane his neck to scrutinize the trees.  He was searching for clusters of dwarf mistletoe, one of his specialties. But he was an inveterate mountain driver.

"You're going to drive," Caroline said. "You're the experienced one in this kind of country; you'll get us there."

I was not at all sure I was equal to the task. I tossed back more wine.

Fortified, we set out again, up the alpine highway, climbing until our ears rang.  We wouldn't make the switch until we stopped briefly in the town of Zirl, far up into the cleft where the highway had been traveled for many years, and a fabled destiny must surely await us.

Chapter III will go up tomorrow-- enjoy-- feel free to comment.  There is a drop down archive box to locate preceding chapters in the text box below the posts.  xJenne'

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 - All rights reserved.  jenneandrews2010@gmail.com .

Chapter Three - Nightfall in Verona-- Jenne' R. Andrews

Chapter III, Wherein the Sojourners Linger in Austria

...At the same time, always, overhead, there

is the eternal, negative radiance of the snows.

Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing

elaborately. But above is the radiance of

changeless not-being. And life passes away

into this changeless radiance. Summer and

the prolific blue-and-white flowering of the

earth goes by, with the labour and the ecstasy

of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance

that hovers overhead, the radiant cold which

waits to receive back again all that which has

passed for the moment into being.

D.H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy.

It is said of the "old" Brenner Pass over the Alps into Italy that the route inspired the great German poet Goethe to write Iphigenie, viewing all from in his carriage on the way to Verona or in detouring to Lake Garda in Tuscany.

“How much I wished to have my friends for a moment near me in order that they might rejoice over the view which lies before me...” he wrote in Italian Journey in 1786.

The route ascended shortly after Zirl, Austria, and one climbed by way of a narrow mountain highway up into the clouds.  By day, at the summit, before later improvements that cut at lower elevation through the Alps, one could look back at Austria and Germany and in the other direction, to beautiful Tuscany spread out below. The descent, I read from the brochure we picked up, involved a series of heart-stopping switchbacks that would require a veteran mountain driver; hence the old route, at the time of our trip, was typically only used by locals.

As we left Salzburg where we had been steeped in Mozart and the crisp, cold white wine of Europe, I had been designated to take us over the pass and we had determined we would see more breathtaking scenery on the old road.  

Caroline had been reading our brochures.

“I think we should go ahead and stop at Zirl,” she said.  “They say the cathedral is not to be missed.”

I had been bracing myself to take over as we agreed; I was eager to follow Goethe's route. But I was relieved when, after about an hour, we cut off to the road into Zirl. We followed directions to the Cathedral of St. James and pulled in to the visitors' parking lot.

We put on sweatshirts; Julia loaded her camera with a new roll of film, and I tucked a notepad and pen into my pocket.  Caroline took our picnic basket out of the compartment at the front of the bus.  We had picked up more white wine heading out of Salzburg; we saw a picnic table under the trees, near the cathedral cemetery.  

We spread our tablecloth under the trees and ate bread, fruit and cheese, washing it down with wine. We were surrounded by mountains cast in ethereal blueness, their  steep, faceted faces ascending to snow-crowned summits.

Against this backdrop, the spires of the cathedral reached far into the sky.  

The cathedral's facade, an admixture of Baroque and Renaissance convention, was resplendent with gilded angels, rococo embellishments. We stood in awe, when, suddenly there was a great peal of sound.  The majestic, unmistakably precise and exuberant sound of Bach reverberated off the peaks; someone was playing a fugue, his hands traveling quickly over the keys of the cathedral organ, his feet dancing on its pedals.

“Let's go in.  I want to see him play,” I said.

“I want to photograph the inside,” Julia said, checking the camera on the cord around her neck.

We entered the cavernous cathedral. I looked up into the loft, where I could see someone sitting, half-obscured by a pillar.

Now the piece came to a crescendo, filling the nave and crashing to a close with a ritardando, a fading away of sound.

"Bravo, bravo," I cried, clapping.

Caroline looked askance at me, grabbing my arm.  "Shhhh."

Out of the gloom, near the altar, a group of nuns came by, each with an implacable face, hands prayerfully folded.  

Julia took photographs of the towering stained glass windows, each telling a story of Annunciation, Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.  Exquisite marble statuary stood in alcoves throughout the nave.  Candles flickered at triptychs of the Blessed Virgin.

I imagined a High Mass in this exquisite setting, and had the impulse to walk up and kneel at the altar.  I held myself back, unsure of visitor etiquette.

Finally we went out into the church graveyard, where we walked among the graves in air so pure it took our breath away.  There were exquisite marble carvings and bas reliefs at the head of each, so time-worn that the names and dates on them were indecipherable.  

I passed such a relief of a grieving woman set at the head of one of the graves, and turned back:  the subtlety of the pain etched in stone on her face shocked me.  Unlike the other sculpture, she was turned away, looking out at eternity with a delicate, down-turned mouth, unflinching eyes.  A wave of recognition passed through me; this was sorrow recast in art.

In addition to my necessary items in my faded army duffel bag, I had brought with me a host of endings, good-byes and impossibilities. I had written them down to get them out of me, and spread them out like cards on a table in therapy. In reality my fading affair was the tip of the iceberg.

As I looked at the statue old losses rose like phantoms out of my knapsack to stand with me in the tangled foliage  and wild rose bushes of the graveyard. What would it take to banish them-- I was abruptly afflicted with pain that leached out into the present.

My friends called to me that it was time to leave.

“I'll be there in a minute,” I said, as they walked back toward the bus.

I picked a small pink wild rose and laid it at the foot of the statue.

I spoke a short prayer in Latin from a requiem I had sung. No lingering at the feet of grief incarnate. I left the marble woman there, asking her to mourn on in my place.

On our way back to the bus, Caroline turned to us mischievously.

“I bet there's a disco in town,” she said.  At that time there were discos all over Europe.  

“I thought you wanted to keep on and get over the Brenner tonight,” I said.

“I did.  But let's live it up,  go out to dinner and then go dancing.” 

I was in immediate agreement.  We found a campground on the map and pulled in, each of us going off with a towel and a small bar of soap to one of the inevitably cold showers.  I unbound my hair and soaped up, sluicing down, rushing to get clean, dry and back to the bus.

At dusk we set out on foot to downtown Zirl; Caroline had seen a small inn on the way in and we walked in that direction.

“Look at that place.”

“Must have been built in the Middle Ages,” I muttered, not especially excited about our plans. I was worried about having the stamina to get us over the mountains.

“You are such a wet blanket. Always a wet blanket.”

I knew that wasn't true; I was tired. I had been tired before I got on the plane. I was tired on the way over the Atlantic, tired in Germany, tired in Austria, and tired now. But there was nothing to be done; as in other moments when my lingering depression tugged at me and I caught myself brooding, I cheered myself back up: we were in Europe! The drama of my former life was far away. I forced myself out of my gloom, stopping briefly at a bistro, tossing down a shot of espresso, while my friends window-shopped.

Then we stepped into a lamplit tavern where there were dark simple tables scattered on a grey stone floor.

We were seated in a corner; across the way sat a group of burly Austrians, drinking beer.

These revelers took one look at us and promptly moved their chairs over to our table, turning them around and straddling them. They were ruddy and bearded, with twinkling eyes.

Thankfully, Julia knew a smattering of German and one of them knew a bit of English.

“American girls!” one of them boomed, delighted, lifting his stein.

Another one leaned toward Julia.

“How about eine kleine nachtmusik,” he said.

She blushed.

“Nein, danke.”

They tried to foist beer on us, but we weren't beer drinkers; we didn't want to look like them.

“Vin. Wine. Vino,” I said.

“Ah. Vino.” One of them got up and began a foot dance, shuffling in a circle while the others laughed and clapped.

“Vino prego, ancor vino.”

We laughed. We drank with the Germans, picking at the bratwurst and sauerkraut brought to us on steaming platters.

“Where you go,” one said, during a lull.

“Dancing. We want to go dancing.”

They looked at each other.

“Disco?”

“Yes, Caroline brightened. “Is there a disco in Zirl?”

“Yavol,” one said.

“Bye-bye American girls. We hate discotech. We dance the old way.”

They got up again from the table. One walked over to the jukebox and dropped in money; a tinkly polka ensued. The men began to waltz together across the floor.

“Run for it,” Caroline whispered to me.

We bolted out the door in hysterics. We looked down the street, where we could see people walking in promenade at dusk.

I stopped.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?”  

From the depths of the dusk, seeming to come from a small doorway into a building without windows, came a familiar song:

“I want to hold your HAND.... I want to hold your H-A-A-A-A-N-D...”

“Wow,” Julia said. “The Beatles.”

“Yes,” Caroline said, grabbing my hand. “Hurry. This has got to be it.”

We walked swiftly through the redolent Tyrolean nightfall to the door of what appeared to be an old inn, now a nightclub. We each gave the man at the door a few marks, and went in.

To our delight, there were couples already out on the floor, gyrating, swiveling their hips.

I had thought we had heard a jukebox. But lo and behold, there was a band of wild-haired young men on a stage in the corner. Somehow they had mastered a medley of rock and roll classics in English. They were wrapping up the Beatles song when we stepped in.

Then there was a dramatic pause and everybody looked expectantly at the lead singer whose carrot-red curly and frizzed hair all but obscured his face.

He began tapping his feet; the drummer picked up a riff.

He whispered into the microphone, in a thick Austrian accent,

“Ah Can't Get No....” and put his hand to his ear to invite a response.

“Vee Can't Get Nein,” shouted the crowd.

Out of the tavern shadows came a young man in lederhosen and a white long-sleeved shirt. He grabbed Caroline by the hand and took her out on the dance floor.

Another such man came and grabbed Julia.

I shrank back in the shadows. I wanted to observe for awhile.

“Ah can't git no.... satisfaction.... Ah can't git no girlie action…”

The Rolling Stones classic reverberated from the rafters. The band wasn't half-bad-- or perhaps it was that we were so juiced up. We had been living on white wine and little else for a week, seeing all things through a dream-like scrim of intoxication.

A tall young man came up to me.

“Dance you mit me, ya?”

“Sure,” I said.

He led me out onto the floor. I had worn my striped mini-dress and slip-off shoes. I shook my booty; he shook his, tossing his mane of long hair, grinning at me.

He took a step toward me and gave me a biting kiss on the neck, sliding one hand into my dress, under my bra.

“Whoa.” I stepped back and pushed his hand away.

I shook my head. “Dancing. Dancing,” I said, my voice utterly drowned out by the music.

“Yavol. Dancing. Dancing.”

He backed up a step and waved his arms, gyrating his hips. I looked over at Caroline; she and her epiphanous Tyrolean were in a clinch.

The song wound down and I went back to the table, waving off my partner. Julia was already seated.

“Look at her,” she said.

“I see.”

“Well, she's been pining for something like this since her divorce.”

We watched them. Things got steamier. Suddenly, they disappeared.

I was stunned.

“Where did they go.”

Julia smiled.  

“They might be doing it standing up out in back,” she said. Or, maybe he's taken her off to his cabin up in the forest, like the big bad wolf.”

“He didn't look like a wolf. He looked like an extra from The Sound of Music.”

I pondered this turn of events.

“Oh God. What are we going do.”

“We don't have a choice. We have to wait.”

Julia and I left the tavern and walked back to the bus. The street lamps of Zirl were lit; people strolled arm in arm past bistros still open.

I was restless, fuming.

“Listen, Jen. We'll find things to do. We'll go back to the cathedral. You can write; I'll draw. She'll be back.”

“What if she doesn't come back? We'll have to call your parents, or contact Interpol or something.”

“She'll be back,” Julia said. “I know my sister.”


xx


Chapter Four will go up tomorrow. Please scroll down or click on the archive drop-down menu at the end of this post for preceding chapters.  Comments via the comment link are always welcome.  


Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 

Chapter Four - Nightfall in Verona - Jenne' R. Andrews

Chapter Four – Wherein the Poet Takes the Wheel

He who will establish himself on a certain height must yield according to circumstances, like the weather-cock on a church-spire, which, though it be made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it remained obstinately immovable, and did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.  Heinrich Heine,  English Fragments (1828), Ch. 11: The Emancipation

For two days we had been hanging out in Zirl, one of the most picturesque and history-laden towns in Austria, high in the Tyrol.

One of us had gone missing, Caroline-- and we could only wait, and hope that she was all right and hadn't been sold into slavery.

At thirty, Caroline was a beautiful woman, with long dark hair and brown eyes, a wide smile. She had lost weight, and planned to keep it off. She tucked her shirt in and belted her slim waist.

Julia and I were twenty-five and she looked like a Baroque angel. She too had long hair, a lighter brown, a small heart-shaped face; she was slim and pretty. She was besieged by men wherever we went.

I had long dark hair, blue eyes. I always thought I was fatter than I really was. I would look in the mirror and see a fat girl, turning sideways to suck in my stomach. As there were few mirrors available to us, at least traveling as we did from campground to campground, I would steal looks at myself in store windows, glancing over at myself as we walked and walked, taking in the touted attractions and veering off on our own, down tiny cobbled streets to small bistros in rose gardens.

I needed to constantly affirm to myself that I was pretty, or perhaps, given that I had permitted myself to be plucked right out of my life, that I was still there.

Regarding the sorrows that had arisen in the St. James churchyard, I continued in moments to worry about not only the wounded lion of my lover and how he was, but back in Colorado, the parents who bobbed all day in the water of dishabille  filling up our house.  

After years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, subjected to many shock treatments and battling to get on her feet, my mother had succumbed to drug and alcohol addiction.  She was incontinent at 60, spending her days in an armchair in our study, helped to the bathroom by my father periodically to change her clothes.

My father had been diagnosed with emphysema in 1968 and was running out of air. He refused to use his oxygen; he had begun to shrivel up and he fought for every breath. He was utterly devoted to my mother, although I thought he should have parked her in a mental hospital and left her there to save us from the awfulness of seeing both of them decline. 

My father was not the sort of man to leave his wife, no matter what happened. This was not the modus operandi of his generation.

I had written of the pain of their deterioration and my inability to rescue them for a very long time. I had moved to Minnesota with a boyfriend in 1970 to get away, staying after he moved on.

Now, I had come to Europe in large measure, I had begun to realize by the time we reached the Alps,  for relief from the past via an immersion in antiquity, which at times in turn re-illuminated the problematic thread in the fabric of my life as had happened to me in the churchyard at Zirl. It was useless to deny that I had brought my parents with me in my heart. I could not jettison myself from them into some new life; I could not abandon them. I had written numerous postcards to them, feeling guilty every time I wired for a little extra money.

Julia and I settled into our bus. It rained and the town shut down and we dozed. I wrote and worked on my manuscript; In Pursuit of the Family, my small first collection of poetry, had Robert Bly's scribbles all over it. I wanted my work to be very good. I drafted small short-lined poems about our trip, reining myself in, subscribing to the lyrical-but-abbreviated imperative of contemporary poetics. Julia drew beautiful whimsical characters and creatures, and painted them with watercolors.

By the time Caroline returned, emerging from the mist with a big smile on her face, her lover in tow, Julia had an entire new portfolio of sketches and I had several new poems.

Caroline led her amour du jour up to the bus.

“Julia, Jen, this is Beni.”

“Beni”. I thought to myself. “Wow.”

She turned to him and kissed him.

He grinned at us.

“He doesn't speak any English at all,” she said. “But look.”  She nodded at him.

He stepped back and braced his legs widely apart and opened his mouth. He emitted a long, ear-splitting yodel that bounced off the peaks.

“High on a hill lived a lonely goatherd....” went through my mind like a ticker in Times Square.

“Bravo.” We didn't know what else to say. We clapped.

Caroline turned to Beni and kissed him again.

“Thank you. Danke.”

He bowed to her, and pretended to wipe a tear from his eye.

“Danke schein..for...da..yavol, gut focking... “

He walked away.

“Ready?” Julia asked, hugging Caroline.

“Yes,” she said. “Sorry I was gone so long. Is Jen going to drive?”

It was dusk, but it was past time for us to be on our way. I looked out and up at the tops of the peaks, trying not to see that the road appeared to climb nearly vertically up into amassing cumulus clouds.

“I'll drive,” I said. “But first let's have a little wine.”

We sat in our idling bus and I downed three or four tin cups of vino bianco.

Then I got behind the wheel. Now Caroline and Julia sat in the back like sightseers-- I was alone, in the front seat, charged with the solemn duty of somehow getting us over the Alps.

“So how was he,” I asked Caroline.

She laughed. “Most excellent pitch and woo,” she said.

“Nothing like red meat and mountain air,” I thought, hiding my anxiety.

I drove up higher and higher, nosing into the dusk. At least the road was dry. There wasn't much traffic. What concerned me was whether the bus had the horsepower to do this sort of thing. I had driven up Pike's Peak with my father in a V-6 US Department of Agriculture Chevy, a sturdy thing with a three-on-the-post you could gear down with for traction. We had also, years later, driven over the Continental Divide in our old Nash Rambler,  a V-6 as well. 

The bus was a sardine can, ironically enough made by Germans, whose history indisputably involved the making of solid things such as the Berlin Wall. It would and did tip over in high winds. I laughed when I thought of driving it in Wyoming, where immense tractor-trailers would fall over like Tonka Toys in 90 mph gusts.

I wondered about our tires, if we could count on them on the descent. I hoped that the combined weight of our bodies and belongings would keep the wheels on the road even if, as I had begun to anticipate, we would encounter mountain weather.

“Give me some more wine, please,” I said. They passed me the tin chalice we had begun to share.

I looked in the rear view mirror. They were curled up with each other, under a blanket, their heads touching.

“Great. Now it's all up to me,” I thought.

It never occurred to me to say to my friends: It's not safe to go over the Alps at night, on any night. We are endangering each other. We should wait until morning.

I was not to become that self-concerned and self-protective until much later, and certainly not on this trip.

As it was, a certain amount of wine can make you feel immortal and immune to danger. So it was that I had one voice saying: “Stop. Turn around now,"  a subterranean alarm going off in the recesses of my brain where there was a tiny bit of sober matter. The other voice was like its own wild horse, euphoric, elated, self-destructive; it said, like the soprano in La Gioconda, pushing her lover away, “Va!” Go.

I drove up the mountain road out of Zirl, gripping the wheel. It wasn't long before the route narrowed, and not long before I had to turn on the headlights. A flash of light on rock warned me of traffic coming from the other direction, the only virtue to night driving under these conditions that I could fathom.

“What time is it?”

No one said a word. My friends were out cold. This in a way was my chance to vindicate myself-- I had been the one who needed reassurance, scared to death to be away from where I felt safe.

“How safe were we now?” We were not, but I imagined that we were so that I could keep going.

I drove on through the night-- there had been small lights from chalets on either side of the road; they disappeared. I could feel the altitude; my ears popped. As they popped at about 10,000 feet in Colorado, I figured we were nearing the summit.

A deer flashed across the road and was gone. My heart flew into my mouth. That was Strike One, I thought.

I steered around a widened curve, encountering a steeper ascent than before. I pressed on.

Suddenly, we were on the flat. I could see a widened shoulder on both sides. I could also tell from the abrupt lines of those shoulders that there was nothing but a plunge down the mountain on both sides.

I pulled over, got out, squatted in the gravel, stretching my legs.

“Ladies. Wake up.”

Not a peep.

I got back in and settled myself resolutely behind the wheel. I took another gulp of wine, replenishing it from the globe Caroline had handed me and that I had braced on the floor board on the passenger side. It was beside the point now that I was half-drunk.

Something flew across the windshield. Startled, I looked out, starting up the engine. Snow. Enormous snowflakes, coming at us like shooting stars.

I turned on my brights. That made it worse; refracted, they doubled in size, making the storm look worse than it was.

I thought about my father's tricks in such situations, when we had been caught by the weather unawares in our trips together.

I didn't want to do this, but it was the only way. I turned off the headlights, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the air filled with light thrown off by the storm. Then I put on the emergency brake, and eased into first gear.

I let the low gear help us, foot lightly on the brake, around one switchback, and then another. Whenever I could see a patch of shoulder, I would pull off to collect myself and close and open my eyes. Now I wasn't interested in any more wine.

I pulled back onto the pass, and repeated the procedure, barely seeing a few feet ahead of the bus in the driving snow. I felt our back wheels skid; I corrected the skid.

Suddenly, Caroline and Julia woke up. They popped up in the back seat like Punch and Judy.

“Oh my God. Oh my God.”

“Quiet,” I said. “You need to be quiet. And you might try praying.”

We were descending at a good rate. As long as I could see a few feet ahead, I could keep us adhered to the road, rather than soaring off into oblivion ass over teakettle.

The road widened again; it felt to me that we were almost down. Through the curtain of snow I could see farther.

Suddenly, we were on the flat, and out of the storm. The road had widened. There was no other traffic.

Caroline leaned forward. “Good job, Jen,” she said.

I pulled over, sagging with exhaustion.

They both looked at me with new respect.

“Did it snow the whole time?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “Would you drive now?”

Julia got out; I climbed out on the passenger side and went to the back of the bus. I could scarcely stand. I reached into my duffel bag for my nightgown.

Caroline laughed softly. “Get some rest.”

“I am going to. I need a few hours, but I don't want to miss crossing into Italy.”

“Jen.” Caroline's voice pierced my fading consciousness. 

“Did you take a detour? We have to cut over to the highway for Florence now, and we're not on the road I marked on the map.”

Oh, God. I leaned forward. “It was snowing. I couldn't see. Forever more in my imagination I will have brought us over the right road because it got us here.”

I couldn't believe I had gotten us into Italy. I began to comprehend that perhaps someone strong, competent, more than capable of rising to the occasion-- whose acquaintance I had not fully made-- lived within me.

 Please scroll down or use the drop-down archive box at the end of the blog for preceding chapters.  Comments may be left by clicking on the comment link or elsewhere.  I can be reached at jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011