Apparently Rodgers had these printed some time in the past. They are sent with the compliments of his son Dick.
* * *
On September 4, 1918, just as the war was nearing its end, fifty-five hundred befuddled American soldiers found themselves crunching their mittened hands under their armpits for warmth and stamping their feet against the frozen ground of Archangel, a little town in northern Russia. The air was frigid and a cold sun lay low on the horizon. The goddamned army had issued them boots with slick, treadless soles, footwear better suited to a fight-or-flight-can’t-get-any-traction nightmare than battle maneuvers in the snow and ice. Most of the soldiers, including my grandfather, were from Michigan, men in their twenties who’d received penny postcards instructing them to report to Fort Custer in Battle Creek. In the fruitless poetry of operations, they were called the American North Russian Expeditionary Forces. Around carefully shielded campfires, they renamed themselves the Polar Bears.
My grandfather, an army engineer, lived in a boxcar where he and his fellow infantrymen puzzled over how to face an enemy that wasn’t exactly an enemy in a battle that wasn’t part of a war. Even if that question had an answer, it wouldn’t have done any good. Illogic was the only certainty to their time in the far north. On Armistice Day, November 11, as the rest of the human race recognized the end of the Great War, the Polar Bears—the 339th US Infantry—were in a battle with thousands of raging Bolsheviks, a fight that was as gruesome as it was ambiguous. The war was over, yet the close combat went on for four days, with twenty-eight Polar Bears killed and seventy wounded, and more than five hundred Russian casualties.
So isolated were the soldiers that they could only guess at why they were fighting or what might be happening back home, so far away. They were caught in the middle of another nation’s revolution, dispatched to fight the idea of something, which always makes for a difficult motivation, especially where homicide is concerned. They didn’t know that a letter-writing campaign was under way, calling for the nation’s leaders to bring them home. They didn’t know that President Woodrow Wilson was harboring private regret for his decision to send them there, admitting later, “I have at no time felt confident in my own judgment about it.” They were sick and freezing, ill equipped, wondering if they’d been chosen only because they were natives of the snowy upper Midwest, and whether anyone had any idea that it was never this cold back home. They pulled boots off dead Bolsheviks and put them on their own feet, throwing away the useless ones issued by their own military.
The Creation of Russia is mostly about two things: cold and the question why. It opens with a poem called “Memorial Day Prayer,” filled with a particular kind of hurt, first for “thy children who have died,” but more for the injustice of being sent to kill and die without a mission, its final line pleading, “Oh, make our duty plain.”
By midwinter, the issue of whether they should be transported home was irrelevant. The Russian ports were frozen and there was no way out. So the fighting went on, the Americans firing unreliable, Russian-made Mosin-Nagant rifles and Lewis machine guns into relentless waves of Russian soldiers, whose attacks continued through the winter and into the spring.
One soldier wrote of their plight in a letter home: “We had to fight to save our necks and that’s what we did. We didn’t know why we were fighting the Bolsheviks. We fought to stay alive.”
I found my grandfather’s brown overcoat in his attic, a heavy garment so long it draped behind me like a sad monarch’s cape. It never occurred to me then what he might have felt as he lived inside this coat, inside a boxcar inside a land that not even a Great Lakes winter could have prepared him for, and the Great Lakes winter is not to be trifled with. I took, or was given, I don’t remember which, a leather belt with a strap that went up and over the shoulder. For some reason, boys are always drawn to things that strap over the shoulder—guitars, rifles, backpacks—and by these things they are allowed to test the weight of whom they might someday become—musicians, soldiers, wanderers.
My grandfather never talked about it, or not to me anyway. He was an engineer first, a man of utility and order and who gave no truck to sadness or complaint. He was also a man of cold, frozen places, of the Great Lakes, which in winter offer something more pure even than the deepest meditation: infinite, white, terrible ice. These lakes aren’t flat when they freeze. Their edges are frozen images of turmoil, waves and swells and garbage-flecked foam, clenched, caught unawares by the hard freeze. To gaze upon this is to set the mind first to flatness then to practicality then invention. Men from the Great Lakes region do not seek therapy, and not because doing so would bring them discomfort or shame, but because it is unnecessary. The winters here isolate everything but our troubles and allow the time and emptiness to solve them or find a place to hide them forever.
So my grandfather lived his life. When he needed a table saw to build his workshop, he worked out the puzzle in his head: build the saw first. He wrote a little booklet of his own—Home Workshop Handbook—and copied it and offered it “to anyone foolish enough to send name and address and one dollar to cover cost of prints.” The pages are filled with uncanny practicality, handwritten in the precise block script common to engineers and draftsmen, detailing the properties of glues and adhesives; recommended drilling speeds for various materials; maximum spans for joists and rafters; lumber grades, nail sizes, wire gauges, and so on and so on.
The work is painstaking and tedious and raises the question why, which he answers in a brief, matter-of-fact introduction: “If this data had been readily available years ago, it might have prevented several poorly glued joints, burned drills, broken screws, and sloppy shellac jobs.”
After my grandmother died and he had to start cooking for himself, he took a shine to prefab, frozen supermarket dinners. But they were too big for one serving, so he took them to the basement, fired up that homemade saw, and sliced the frozen slabs in half.
* * *
By the time my dad returned home, grinning and caked in white, we’d flung layer after layer of snow onto the continuous mound that wrapped the edge of the driveway, growing and growing. He came right into step with us and we continued to try to scrape away what the night had left behind. The wind had calmed some and the snowfall abated, but not enough to settle the nerves. Nothing was moving, anywhere. Not a single car had passed our house all day, and the sounds of digging and scraping were distant, disconnected. The idea that all of this could have happened so unexpectedly, so quickly, so violently, and so completely disturbed us all, even my dad, I think, though he seemed invigorated by the challenge to set it right. Men like him are at their best when something needs unexpectedly to be fixed.
We worked until the driveway was clear, ready for whatever might come next, then Ralph and I, and our sister and our younger brother, began to dig again. We hollowed out a cave in a Volkswagen-size snow mound, scooping and shaping deeper and deeper, until we four could sit upright inside. Then we carved out another, then began a tunnel between them and then another, until we had a network like the tubes in a gerbil cage. The light inside was strange, an optical paradox: muted and radiant, opaque and incandescent, and the sound had a similar quality, compressed and private and complete. Even the temperature was ambiguous. The packed snow warmed like insulation, until the cold crept into the bones and refused to leave.
Later, when night had fallen, I went back out and crawled inside and lay there in the dark, in the snow cave. It smelled like mute earth. I felt as if I could stay there forever, in the peaceful silence that only cold can produce. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be carried off.
* * *
We took turns on the sleds, sometimes riding double, sometimes the four of us piled one on top of the other in defiance of physical laws, teetering, elbows digging into backs, gathering just enough momentum for the cartoon spill. We rode on a golf course near our home, down a glorious hillside hooded with oaks a
nd maples, deep into a valley with steep sides and one slope gentle enough to climb back up for another plunge. We rode this way into the afternoon, into the late shade of a complicated winter sky. The northern Ohio sky is perpetually overcast in wintertime, but the acclimated natives could pass a blind-test between the early dusk and the sunless midafternoon, just as a Las Vegas lounge lizard inside a casino can sense the difference between 3:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. This was different, though. The sky had darkened in a way we’d never before seen, as if its humors were out of balance, blackening it with blood or bile.
Three days in, and the blizzard had only worsened. We were lucky; we had power and heat. Even so, we were isolated. Schools were closed, with no clue to when they might reopen. Most people couldn’t go anywhere. Many were stranded wherever they had been when the storm hit. Those who did go out often had to turn back. It was hard to understand anymore whether this was an adventure.
Nature will always provide the best metaphors, and here amid the chaos, with the barometer lower than it had ever before been, was a strange coherence. Two weeks before this historic storm, Goodyear announced it was closing its main Akron factory. Nearly fourteen hundred people would be put out of work. A month later, Firestone would announce it was closing its big Akron plant, eliminating twelve hundred jobs. That year, 1978, four thousand people would lose their jobs in a city defined more than anything else by its work.
But as children, we didn’t understand all that any more than we understood the barometer. What we understood was the velocity of steel and plastic on ass-groomed ice, caterwauling down the hills, cutting hard into turns and skidding, sideways stops, imagining ourselves at Innsbruck: Dorothy Hamill; Franz Klammer; Rosi Mittermaier. We’d brought along a pair of skis and tried those too, but the sleds were the thing, the flat-bottomed ones shooting us down the hills.
Our fingers and toes were deadened and impliable, such that the walk home was filled with complaining and the calculation of how bad these digits would burn when we filled the tub with hot water for the thaw. We played a game of frostbite one-upmanship, insisting nerve damage or blackened skin or amputation was imminent. As we pulled our sleds across the white fairways and greens, the sky began to take on an eerie darkness and suddenly more snow came, not floating, but crashing down, handfuls thrown by the lesser angels and saints, the simmering ones, disgruntled seraphim of the back-office operation whose task it was to remind us that ours is, every so often, a petulant God. And that’s when I heard, for the first time in my experience of Ohio snowstorms, thunder.
We stumbled toward home in ragged formation, trudging faster through the snow. If you have never experienced an electrical blizzard, it is flat-out unnerving. The difference between thunder in a rainstorm and thunder in a snowstorm is the difference between Jimi Hendrix and Black Sabbath. It is bowling balls hurled toward hell.
We all started to run, pretending not to panic, until we made it home.
* * *
Days. Days. Somewhere out there the trucker melted more snow, drawing oxygen through that tube. A meteorologist was stuck at the airport, unable to get home—the weatherman himself stranded by the weather. He was taping extra pages onto his chart, the valley of the barometer so low it went to the bottom of the paper scroll and beyond. Somewhere, people were dying and had died.
Faith and belief are not the same thing, and anyone who has lain inside a snow cave at night in the dark of the American Midwest knows this. Faith is the promise of what might be. It is the blood brother of hope. Belief is pragmatism in isolation; it is what exists even if the world doesn’t know you’re there and never will. That’s something more like the place I knew.
* * *
Our igloos lasted till Easter, the packed crust holding its form and the burrows inside abandoned. Eventually, their roofs collapsed or melted through. Rain got to them. Mud and black twigs pushed up from underneath. We kicked at them, resentful of the lost thrill. And then that day came, the day no one around here ever really believes will arrive, a day drunk, stumbling home from late winter, glasses cracked, salt-stained boots kicking the cans of hard times down the storm sewer. Sun and warmth, riding like a white-hatted parasite on the spiny back of a cold breeze, euthanizing the briny, primordial ice clenched to the curb until it bleeds its last.
For one day in Ohio, we get something whispering low in our ear, something hard to appreciate unless you’ve been through the Delta lows and Alberta clippers. The sun comes with an offer, one we are never sure we deserve. We have waited, we have waited, we have waited, and finally it comes and we have no choice but to accept this, our fate: the discomfort of grace.
THE LAKE EFFECT
Have you ever seen Lake Erie in the winter? It’s the strangest thing. It freezes, as water will do in places this cold, but it doesn’t freeze flat and calm, like Norwegian fjords or Frostian ponds. It freezes in gnarls of turmoil, as if someone said, “Hey, Great Lake, if you keep twisting your face like that it’ll freeze that wa—”
And then it does.
The water gets all heavy and slushy but continues to churn, defiant, dauntless, pissed off, slower and slower, and then, just like that, it loses the fight, froth and waves and swells caught midmotion. I once stood on a wind-whipped Cleveland beach and saw a plastic diaper sticking up from the crust of ice at the edge and wished that the water had been able to churn one final time to save us both—the lake and me—from the unpleasantness. It was ugly as hell and it made me smile.
* * *
The winter of my sixteenth year, my dad got tickets to a football play-off game in Cleveland, the Browns against the Oakland Raiders. He and my two brothers and I rode up in one of his company’s beat-up surveying vans, all of us bundled against the cold. My dad always bought vehicles with a profound antithesis of style: three-on-the-tree, pie-pan hubcapped, olive-drab tin boxes with a blank plate where the AM radio belonged. Hard vinyl bench seats. No carpet. No ceiling padding. Even with the heat on full blast, the inside of the van felt like a meat locker. The interior was caked with dried mud and smelled strongly of last summer’s mosquito repellent, cut with the sweet lumbery pine of the wooden property stakes that clattered around in the rear. My older brother, Ralph, had tied his orange plastic, kid-size Browns helmet to the top of the van with clothesline. Slapped together on the cheap, we looked like everyone else driving into Cleveland that day.
There was never any color in the thirty miles of sky between Akron and Cleveland. It was a masterpiece of monochrome. Until you hit the city limits. There, the celestial flatness was spiked by a huge steel-factory smokestack with giant, fantastical flames roaring out its top. It looked exactly like hell and smelled worse. That’s how we knew we were in Cleveland.
The temperature that day was four degrees; the windchill was thirty-six below. At the time, it was the second-coldest NFL play-off game ever played, which is uncannily correct. When you live in a place like this, you come to understand that we are never first. In anything. Not even misery. The second-most-frigid game in history? Yes. Exactly.
We parked as close as we could get to the stadium, which stood like some outpost of the Great Depression at the edge of Lake Erie’s polluted, gunmetal waters. My dad had a spare pair of galoshes in the back of the truck, surveyor’s boots. Before we locked up and started our walk to the stadium, he told me to put them on, but I refused. They didn’t look cool. I was wearing my black, high-top Chuck Taylors, and there was no way I’d be seen in front of eighty thousand people sporting those hideous boots.
I’d never been to a Browns game before. I had no idea that the entire crowd would be dressed like some hybrid of a Dickens backstreet throng and a postapocalyptic hunting party. Here, camouflage was the mark of a Sunday dandy. These fans, three abreast on the sidewalk, shuffling toward Cleveland Municipal Stadium, were a cattle call of dull parkas topped with bulbous, oversize jerseys; fatsos in earflaps; drunks with double-layered blankets wrapped cr
ooked around their torsos. Meaty men layered in flannel with two-week beards and stretched-out stocking caps. Women in mismatched gloves and padded hunting pants. They looked like a rogue regiment of Michelin Men. We joined them in the long, slow walk up East Ninth Street toward the colorless, hulking stadium, its countless tons of dumped concrete tracked with wooden seats.
I, still clinging to the potential street credibility of my footwear, was a decided outsider. I was casually interested in the Browns, in football, in sports. But as family dynamics go, I was a rank amateur. While I was reading Sherlock Holmes stories, my brother Ralph was memorizing the Browns media guide. His favorite pastime was being quizzed on arcane roster details:
Brian Sipe?
Quarterback! Number seventeen! San Diego State!
Major?
Architecture!
Dave Logan?
Receiver! Number eighty-five! University of Colorado!
Hometown?
Fargo! North Dakota!
And so on.
Not until we approached the stadium gates did I begin to feel something of the upsweep. And then there it was, as sudden and profound as the olfactory poignancy of a hog pen: the spirit of thousands, roughing out their ardor. The city smelled of barrel fires and roasted hot dogs and cold wool: the aluminum tang of a Cleveland January. But the sound is what defined the day, spontaneous group cheers delivered in bellowing choruses:
The Hard Way on Purpose Page 5