“Aha, Miss Colorado at last,” a familiar voice boomed. “No! It’s Miss America. Welcome to Bavaria. Welcome to the adventure of a lifetime.” He was at the foot of the stairs in the bright afternoon sun. Here on the tarmac, splendid in army greens and spit-shined shoes, with a smile that swallowed his face. Beside him, not Bonner, but a smartly dressed man wearing some kind of airport badge.
Jack presented his elbow as if we were about to stride into the graduation ball at West Point. “Come, Fräulein. Your chariot awaits. And thanks to my new friend here, we’ll be on the road in record time.”
The official nodded, a barely perceptible head-erect gesture that people in authority give to their men. “It is my privilege to meet you, Fräulein,” he said, his accent obviously German. With that, we veered away from the other passengers into a separate door, and he whisked me through immigration and customs. No lines. No waiting.
At the curb, the man shook Jack’s hand and turned to me. “Miss Garret-son, enjoy our Deutschland. Auf Wiedersehen.” He stepped back, executed a snappy turn, and disappeared into the terminal.
“Wow, how’d you manage that?” I asked.
“Let’s say it pays to speak German—and wear a uniform—in Germany.”
Side by side, we stood awkwardly, Lieutenant Jack Sigg and I, dear friends, yet strangers meeting as if for the first time.
“Bonner’s at the border. Said he’s dying to see you.” Jack guided me to his gleaming white Corvette, top down, the Sting Ray he’d written about.
What a sleek, low-slung machine, something out of the movies! He jockeyed my bag into the tiny trunk and escorted me to my seat. Wow, I should have worn my white gloves and ball gown—it was that elegant. This was no mere car, but an intimate two-person capsule. I didn’t sit in this baby. I fit myself into it, strapped in, and awaited takeoff. Moments later, we zoomed away, me a modern-day Isadora Duncan—but wise enough not to trail a long scarf. Germany at last.
I was a wide-eyed tourist, trying to memorize every detail of the landscape as it whizzed by. I had a 360-degree view, but every three seconds, I glanced over at this handsome officer. Jack was doing ninety, zipping through the curves as if an archrival were hot on his bumper. My hair whipped about like straw in a cyclone.
He was every bit the man I remembered. A tad more muscular, perhaps. And ruddier. Outdoorsy, a guy who spent time in the sun, but not with the red face and pasty forehead of a rancher. Ramrod straight, square-jawed, so clean-shaven his skin glowed. The hint of a cowlick swirled above his right temple, almost shaved away with his burr cut, but visible nonetheless. Bushy eyebrows. And a pointy nose—not ugly or distracting, merely pointy.
What else will we discover about each other, Lieutenant Sigg?
He caught me staring and shouted, “Great wheels, huh?” His devilish grin assured me this indeed would be a summer to remember.
Around us, suburbs encroached on verdant fields dotted with white farmhouses. A city sprang up. “Almost home,” he called. He gestured ahead to a massive red-roofed white building perched on a hilltop above the city, dominating the skyline. “The castle I wrote you about, Trausnitz. Dates to 1204. Grand, isn’t she?” It looked more like a grand dame hotel than a castle—no drawbridge or turrets, clearly stuccoed and painted. “And site number two on our tour: St. Martin’s Cathedral.” He pointed. “The bell tower is the tallest brick steeple in Europe.”
Jack slowed. We rolled through an arch in a daunting brick fortification, as thick as the Great Wall. Inside, the city was a movie set ready for lights, camera, action. Pink, blue, and yellow four- and five-story buildings rose beside shiny black cobblestone streets, freshly scrubbed. The cathedral loomed before us, its tower jutting up like a gargantuan sentry.
“Welcome to old Landshut, Fräulein,” he said. “But look quickly. I need to finish a few things at the office. We’ll take the full tour later. Deutschland style. On foot.”
“What? No drawbridge? What’s a medieval fortress without a drawbridge?”
He grinned. Another thing I hadn’t noticed: his cockeyed grin. “Tell you what—if it’s a drawbridge you want, I’ll build you one.”
We glided through the old town and five minutes later pulled up to a drab barracks. No entry checkpoint or signs, but clearly an army base. Jack shepherded me from of the Sting Ray and heaved out my suitcase. “Your home away from home, Landshut’s finest BOQ. My quarters and your brother’s are across the parking lot, a quick sprint if you need anything.”
“How racy. I’ll be staying with a gang of bachelor officers?”
“Not a chance. These days, this BOQ houses female teachers and married couples.”
He carried my bag like he was an orderly, not my prospective fiancé, and introduced me to a pair of young women who could easily have been dorm mates at CU. Both taught at the US Army’s school for dependent children. They had agreed to put me up for the summer.
Jack raced off. I turned to my benefactors and barely mustered a decent greeting, my world swirling in fog. When I went on to explain how exhausted I was from the long flights, jet lag, and my overnight in Paris, it came out mush. One of them steered me into a bedroom.
I didn’t wake up until early afternoon the next day, fully clothed in a strange bed, my brain as rumpled as my blouse. Nagging worry had offered no harbor for rest. I had to tell Jack about Terry. From the beginning of our airmail romance, we had promised to be one hundred percent honest with each other. Fie on excuses. I had broken the promise. Time to confess.
I practiced, but everything came out shallow and stupid. “Jack, something has come up I need to tell you about . . .” No! “Jack, remember my best buddy, Terry?” Ack! “Jack, I’ve wanted to tell you this, but . . .” No, no, no.
What if he called the whole deal off?
Terry
Friday, 12 June 1964, Center. Day four at home. First, I had to finish Mom’s to-do list: replace the loose board on the back steps, muck out the chicken coop, and make sure Greg and Randy finished mowing the grass and pulling the weeds from the ditch bank.
Afterward, fun and games. But you can play only so much three-person basketball on a gravel driveway, trying to fling a gritty ball through a hoop hanging by baling wire from the side of a potato cellar. Or fungo, whacking a baseball into an alfalfa field or over a sheep shed and then spending the next half hour searching for it.
Noon mail: none for me. After lunch, I wrote to Annie again—my third letter in a week—four pages, typed single-spaced. Enough! I dug out my sleeping bag and took off for Valley View, a natural hot springs at an abandoned 1920s resort in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, forty-five miles away. I invited the boys, telling them I was going there to read Shakespeare. They hooted and raced off.
Valley View Hot Springs. Off the beaten path. Deserted, but not decrepit, and with an artesian hot-water swimming pool. No visitors. You could skinny-dip here. And you could see the entire San Luis Valley, a hundred miles north to south, from Poncha Pass to the New Mexico border, and fifty miles east to west, from the Sangre de Cristo Range to the San Juan foothills.
Nights were spectacular: a billion stars, no neon. From poolside, I could see a smattering of miniscule towns that dotted the inky valley below, each a tiny cluster of streetlights. Random headlights streaked from cluster to cluster, and here and there, a pinprick of light in a farmyard appeared. No engines, sirens, radios, or human voices. Only the occasional yelp of a coyote.
I made a fire, roasted hot dogs, guzzled a couple cans of Olympia, and spread out my sleeping bag ten feet from the pool—prelude to a hop, skip, and jump into its steamy depths in the morning. Minutes later, as at home, memories of Annie hijacked the night . . . not our May photo shoot, but the camping trip up James Creek the previous fall.
It hadn’t been a ploy to lure her into a night of lechery but rather a spurof-the-moment caper. She was my buddy. I had no romantic designs on her in those days. Saturday’s forecast had been for a high of eighty-three, astoundingly hot
for Boulder in October and not a day to waste in the library. Sarah, my girlfriend at the time, had snorted when I suggested a campout. She was a city girl. New York City! No interest. None.
I called Annie. She thrived in the outdoors. Besides, I missed her. Our Sunday nights at McDonald’s had faded away since I’d taken up with Sarah. Annie bought in, and off we went.
James Creek wasn’t Silverton. No snowcapped fourteeners or mountain-goat trails that turned your thighs to Jell-O, but instead, a shaded path along a cheerful stream, a quiet refuge in the foothills. We hiked. We splashed in the creek. We chomped thick burgers and wiped our hands on our jeans. After dinner, we emptied a bottle of wine and talked far into the night. I went on and on about Sarah and me. Probably too much detail, but Annie was as much fascinated as shocked by my sudden and unlikely partner in the loss of my virginity. All she could say was “Sarah? That older girl in J-School? Miss Lipstick? No!”
Annie was still my best friend. But something had changed over the summer. It wasn’t as if she had metamorphosed from caterpillar to monarch butterfly. She’d always been a cutie, even though I teased her mercilessly about her freckles. After the fire died out, I wanted to slip into her bedroll, but I didn’t tell her that. I did dare touch her foot with mine, albeit through the padding of my sleeping bag. I felt guilty, sleeping with Sarah, lusting after Annie, but desire overpowered guilt. Annie didn’t notice my subtle move, I was sure. She didn’t tease me about it, not once.
We finally slept. At dawn, the crisp morning air whisked away the night’s illicit thoughts. We stirred up a robust breakfast, cleaned up the campsite, and spent the day hiking the hills.
That campout may indeed have marked a shift in our friendship, but only as an exercise in revisionist history. It wasn’t until March 1964 that I finally realized Annie was my Juliet. I wowed her at the doughnut shop, and afterward, everything changed.
At Valley View Hot Springs that June night, Annie’s image blotted out the starry sky. Before she left for Europe, we had filled a storehouse of memories. With her gone, the road to the Peace Corps at summer’s end threatened to be a lonely trek through a bleak desert. With no shoes. No water. And a full pack of stone-heavy yearnings.
I had planned to spend the weekend at Valley View, hike a trail or two, and attempt an assault on 14,300-foot-high Crestone Peak. But Annie’s likeness called me from every boulder and bush. I abandoned Valley View for the comfort of the farm, hot meals, and a soft bed.
And the hope that each new day would bring me a letter from Germany.
Ann
Friday, June 12, 1964, Landshut, Germany. I shivered in the frigid predawn as Jack packed the Sting Ray for a weekend getaway to southern Bavaria.
“Cold?” Jack asked.
I nodded. My cute new bolero was all show and no substance. He put the top up.
Time now to get acquainted, beyond our airmail images. And somehow I had to tell him about Terry. But after the VIP greeting in Munich and most of Thursday lost to sleep, we were wordless, cloistered side by side in his hot rod. I sneaked a peek and caught him gazing at me. “A picture may be worth a thousand words,” I blurted out, “but the real thing beats a thousand pictures . . . if I only knew what to say.”
He nodded sheepishly.
“You tongue-tied too, the one who can talk endlessly on tape?”
“I need my notes,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”
“I need my typewriter.”
Our confessions broke the ice. Jack launched into an animated treatise on Bavarian farming as we whizzed through the crazy quilt of farm plots, varying in color from forest and olive green to sepia, tan, and ecru. “They’re mostly small family farms,” he said. “They sell their fresh meat and produce locally. Germans don’t waste a square inch of land.”
“So different from the American West,” I said. “Our ranch in Colorado sprawled over two thousand acres, but the land was so beset with tumbleweeds, rabbit brush, and Russian thistle that our spread supported only two hundred head of cattle.”
“That’s the West for you. Huge tracts of land dedicated to relatively small output.” He glanced over at me. “But tell me more about you. What was it like for an army brat turned cowgirl? The transition must have been tough.”
“Not really. We army brats learn to adapt. As for the ranch, I loved the expanse of the valley, the sunrises, sunsets, and especially the night sky. Under a full moon, the landscape was magical. On moonless nights, the stars seemed to burn tiny holes in the sky, and it was so dark I could see forever—into the Milky Way and beyond.”
“Ja, I remember that from my short visit. The huge sky made me feel both Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian at the same time.”
I sniggered. “Whoa, that’s pretty Swiftian of you.”
“Just trying to talk your language, ma’am. You did major in lit, after all. But back to the night sky. It was exhilarating. Too bad we didn’t ‘discover’ each other then.” He gave a sly smile.
“I figured you were being nice to me only because I was your roommate’s little sister.”
“Ha! Do you recall that Bonner and I went out with a couple of girls while I was at the ranch?”
I nodded. How could I forget?
“I don’t know where he dug up my date, but get this—I was secretly happy it was a bust. I thought it would enhance my standing with you!”
“If I’d only known! It could’ve saved me a lot of anxiety in the university dating scene.” He laughed, and I was feeling more relaxed with this man than I ever expected. The miles, or kilometers, melted away.
Two hours later, the road teased the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The azure sky played cat and mouse with the lush mountains, dipping into gorges, running up forested hillsides, and dancing on jagged peaks. Eventually, Jack turned off the main road and pulled into a parking lot. “Ready to feast your eyes on German opulence? This is Linderhof Palace, built by King Ludwig of Bavaria. One of three.”
Now a tour guide, Jack spun tales of how King Ludwig had built the castles as stages for Wagner’s operas, particularly Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, and that Linderhof had one of the world’s first electric power stations.
In one chamber, we saw ourselves repeated endlessly by mirrors on all sides, vanishing into infinity. Jack escorted me in a circle and whispered, “Look. We, we, we, we, we . . . forever. How’s that for a thought?”
Was that a proposal—after only three days? Was I ready for this? I smiled but said nothing.
Soon we were off to Neuschwanstein, zigzagging up a backcountry road through a thick forest. He entertained me with tidbits about King Ludwig: the engineering marvels in this castle, the kitchen so modern for its time, and the forced-air heating, unlike other medieval castles. And the sad fact that it was completed many years after his death.
Jack stopped at a high overlook. Ahead of us a snowy white castle perched impossibly on a spindly cliff, its spires disappearing into the clouds. “Behold! The famous Neuschwanstein!”
Truly the stuff of fairy tales. We leaned silently on the rail, shoulders touching. Softly, he said, “My castles in the air—for us—are even grander. But come. Ready for another explore?”
Castles in the air? Really? I was afraid to ask. I straightened up and hooked my hand through the crook of his elbow. “All right, Lieutenant. Lead on!”
Inside, nonstop opulence: drawing room, bedroom, throne room (never finished)—on and on, all with exquisite artworks, elaborate brocades, intricate wood carvings, and mosaics, until we were satiated. Jack sensed my weariness. “How about we find ourselves something to eat and a nice no-frills guesthouse for the night?”
“Yes, enough with King Midas of Bavaria,” I said, and he whisked us off to Füssen, a village nestled nearby. We ambled down the narrow streets and tried to imagine what life must have been like for the haves—and the have-nots—in Ludwig’s time.
Ah, Füssen. A bouquet of colors: pastel storefronts, red roofs, and bright window boxes, a welcome
relief from lavish castles. Here was the small-town Germany I had expected—an artisan selling hand-carved wooden music boxes, an antiquarian bookseller with elegant leather-bound books in German, French, and English, a ladies’ clothier, where Jack bought me a scarf “to keep your curls intact.”
“Perfect choice for your warp speed hot rod.” I wound the scarf around my head, gritted my teeth, and squinted my eyes like a race car driver.
He belly-laughed. “Okay, okay. Message received! I’ll try to slow down.”
The aroma of fresh bread lured us into a tiny café. He ordered in German, and in minutes the waitress returned. “For our special guest, we have der haut Chocolat und der Strawberry Tart.”
I’d written to Jack about a vivid memory from my 1957 trip there with my parents: a wild-strawberry tart, the berries picked in the morning and baked into a mouth-watering confection. “My favorite! How’d you know?”
“I pay attention to the important stuff.”
After dinner, we lingered in the hall outside my postage-stamp-size room at a small inn, as awkward as seventh-graders on a first date. I expected him to kiss me good night, but he stood there, hemming and hawing about what a great day we’d had. My feet ached. My legs were wobbly. “I’m beat. I really have to turn in.”
“Don’t go. Please. Not yet,” he said. “If you leave, I won’t survive until morning.”
“What, you’ll change into a pumpkin overnight? How would I get back to Landshut?”
He lifted an unruly curl from my face and laid his hand on my cheek. “This is the only thing that will save us.” He tucked a finger under my chin, and our lips met for the first time. He didn’t close his eyes. Me either. His lips were soft and warm, and he smelled of fresh bread. But he pulled back—not far, an eyelash or two—before the kiss fully matured. “Or this.” His lips brushed mine before he moved in for a long, delicious taste. “Or something like this.” He took my head in his hands, but he held back, his mouth tantalizingly beyond reach.
A Rendezvous to Remember: A Memoir of Joy and Heartache at the Dawn of the Sixties Page 5