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"How I Spent my Summer Vacation"

10/1/2011

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[Dear readers:  My first entry of the school year was delayed due to the busy rush at the beginning of the semester and a nagging illness I had difficulty shaking.  That said, I plan to publish weekly for the rest of the school year. 
Thanks for hanging in!]


       “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

    Way back in September 1974, when I first started teaching high school, I really did assign my 9th graders an essay on this topic.  It was a hot day, nearly 100 degrees, an easy temperature for the Sacramento Valley to hit at that time of the year.  The building had no air conditioner; the assignment turned out to be a flop.

     That semester, however, I did garner the absolute best excuse I have ever received from a student who did not do his homework and therefore was unprepared for a Monday morning quiz.  He wrote: “I am not prepared for this morning’s quiz because my father and me drove to Idaho to watch Evil Knievel jump the Snake Canyon.”  Knievel was unsuccessful in his jump; the student wasn’t particularly the best I ever taught.  His excuse, however, still ranks as my #1.

    The second best excuse came here at SMSU.  I had a world-class weightlifter in class.  His reason for missing:  tournament judges for an upcoming championship match came by his apartment that morning and demanded an immediate, unannounced, random urine test to make sure he was not using steroids to enhance his performance.  And so, he was late—but he passed that test.
           
     The semester after this particular incident, I was explaining to my advanced LIT class, one filled with mostly future high school teachers, the range of excuses we hear as teachers.  Of course, I began, Evil Knievel still ranks #1.  But when I next explained the weightlifting #2 excuse, his girlfriend (unbeknownst to me, a member of the class) blurted out, “But, it’s TRUE, he did need to give a urine sample that day.”  
         
     My third best excuse is actually the most chilling.  A student missed class because of a train accident in her home town, an accident that released a tanker car of chlorine gas.  The mustard-colored cloud forced the evacuation of the whole town. It made the national news. 
 
    Coincidentally, this was the semester I was teaching World War One poetry and could tie the accident to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about British Tommies being caught in a poison gas attack:  
    “Gas!  GAS! Quick, boys!" – an ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
    
     This past summer, in addition to trips to Arizona and Grand Marais, I read several excellent books. One, Beatrix Potter:  A Life in Nature, is an engrossing biography of an individual woman who changed the world even though confronted with her culture’s entrenched sexism.  At first aiming to become an amateur botanist and scientific illustrator, Potter was rejected by the decidedly male scientific community of her day.  Over time, her illustrations (which she fortunately kept) proved to be more accurate than many others of the day.  And her theories about mushrooms and how they spread was scientifically correct if not accepted until many years later.  When a work covering all the fungi of Britain was published in the 1990s, the author rediscovered her illustrations and used about two dozen in his work because Potter’s were finer than any other illustrations and photographs of this subject. Potter was long dead by then.
   
     And besides Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck and a host of other children’s favorites, Potter began buying centuries-old farms in the historic
and remote Lakes’ District and restoring them as working farms.  She supervised their renovation; hand-picked their managers; introduced Herdwick sheep (a breeding stock better suited to the harsh climate in Northern England); and eventually donated her considerable land holdings to the National Trust. Today, these farms are owned by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  The Lakes’ District had been the haunt of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and scores of landscape painters a century before Potter settled there; her actions saved a huge slice of English literary and artistic culture in perpetuity.
     
     My literary specialty is the British novel, so it’s no surprise I read a few novels this summer. I finally finished the 20-volume Patrick O’Brien series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  O’Brien’s two heroes are unlikely friends:  Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin. 
 
    “Mad Jack” is a devoted Royal Navy officer with the spleen to fire all his guns and the ambition to capture valuable prizes on the high seas.  In that era, officers grew extremely rich from such tactics that we would describe as piracy today.  The captain’s medical officer, Maturin, is a renowned surgeon, a naturalist, a Catholic whose family came from two natural enemies of England (Spain and Ireland), but an enlightened Renaissance Gentleman devoted to stamping out tyranny wherever he found it.  

     Napoleon is his arch enemy even if the Doctor has latent sympathies for his beloved Irish; he views France’s dictatorial Emperor as worse than anyone sitting on the English throne.  And, Stephen is a spy for the British, a way to insert him on shore for adventures in his native Spain and eventually the fledging United States and the rebellious areas of South America.  He is a way for O’Brien to introduce some cloak-and-dagger plot twists and elements that span a few volumes as subplots.   
      
     Since I started reading the series in the summer of 2001, I have watched this pair woo and wed elegant ladies and then watched one of them lose his beloved wife.  I’ve witnessed in brilliant prose as “Mad Jack” Aubrey attacked French, Spanish, Moroccan, Dutch, and American men-of-war.  I’ve seen the pair cast adrift on the sea, tossed up helpless on deserted islands, been too hot, too cold, too hungry, been overstuffed with the delicacies of the era, been drunk, sober, and been consumed by a cocaine addiction.  They also play a respectable selection of violin and cello pieces together when not waging war or discovering the latest mammal or aviary specimen.    

     I had thought that O’Brien was going to return the pair to England at the end of Volume Twenty, Blue at the Mizzen.  Jack has defeated a superior fleet in the South Pacific as he helped Chile free itself from Spain; Stephen has aided in the political intrigue while pointing out (accurately) the flora and fauna of the South America coastal areas.  Jack’s wife and children are waiting at home in Kent; Stephen has proposed to the one stunning woman who can match his scientific wits.  Napoleon is out of the scene, but trouble is brewing and so. . .

     O’Brien was about a third of the way into his 21st novel when he died.  I have the publisher’s attempt to put the partial manuscript into novel form, but I found it uninviting knowing it will just end without a clear plot conclusion. Yet I envy O’Brien’s grit to keep going, handwriting fifty thousand words, fully committed even in ill health to reach the last paragraph and period of #21.  Surely, the writer’s equivalent of dying with his boots on.  
 
     Also this summer, I ordered the DVD set of The Pacific and watched that.  For those of you who don’t follow HBO Productions, The Pacific is the companion to Band of Brothers, the HBO series that told the story of the “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division in Europe during World War II.  The Pacific follows various Marines as they land on Japanese-held tropical (and fortified) islands to fight a determined enemy and the horrific jungle itself.  Both ten-hour mini-series are worth the effort to watch, as graphic in language, action, and accuracy as they are.  Although made-for-TV movies, they hold nothing back.

     After I finished The Pacific, I downloaded to my Kindle two of the memoirs the film used as sources, Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow:  From Parris Island to the Pacific and E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge’s With the Old Breed:  At Peleliu and Okinawa.  After the war, Leckie became an award-winning AP journalist; Sledge earned his PhD in biology and was a beloved professor for many years.  Both are now dead.  The war stories are harrowing and graphic, not to sensationalize the violence, but to make a point:  war is hell and should not be glorified.  
 
     But both authors accurately point out that those young Marines in the Pacific suffered    unimaginable horrors to defeat a determined enemy capable of unimaginable horrors.  Neither war survivor wanted to write about their buried memories of friends dying painfully, of buddies being mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare or by a cruel enemy, of malaria and other jungle-borne diseases ravaging their own young, healthy bodies.  But they felt compelled to in order to put their post-War demons to rest.  So write they did of these gruesome miseries, of their own fears, and frankly, of their own eventual hatred for their fellow humans whom they killed with ruthless and merciless efficiency.  (Lucky was a machine gunner, Sledgehammer part of a mortar team.)   

     Enrolling in college after his discharge, Sledgehammer was asked by a perky coed what he learned in the Marines that could be used to foster his education.  “I worked with explosives,” he softly replied, embarrassed by the question.  “Well, that might apply to engineering,” the overly-helpful coed chirped.  Bending down to her ear, he whispered, “The Marines taught me to kill Japs. I learned really well and got damned good at it.”  
 
    Upon seeing a stage production of the upbeat South Pacific soon after it first opened on Broadway, Leckie began writing Helmet for my Pillow so people in the peaceful USA wouldn’t think the South Pacific war was a musical.  He succeeded.

     This gives you a glimpse of how I spent my summer on top of Chairing the Department, traveling to a few weddings and graduations, and working on my own sci-fi novels, The Marsco Saga.  By Christmas ’11, you will be able to download the first, The Marsco Dissident, onto your e-readers.  An electronic stocking-stuffer.

     Meanwhile, keep reading in good health!    


2 Comments
Wendy Claussen
10/1/2011 11:24:23 am

We were waiting patiently for this. Hope and pray your illness is long gone and you are back to normal (well...for as normal as you can be! :-). Fun 'my summer vacation' post. I have a collection of funny student absence excuses written by parents if you'd ever like to read them. :-) WHEN you are done with your Pacific DVD's, my hubby would love to watch them (he has seen all the Band of Brother's). :-)

Reply
Dana Yost
10/4/2011 10:14:50 pm

Very nice blog, eclectic, as the name implies. My niece, a college junior, is a serious student of WWII and devours every book about it -- especially about the Pacific. She read Sledge's work and "Helmet for My Pillow" and thought "The Pacific" was pretty true to the works, although some things were condensed for dramatic purpose. The anecdote with the co-ed is really telling -- and maybe just as important today. Those who have not been there have no idea, really, about the horrible nature of the reality of killing and dying.

So the weightlifter's excuse was verified. Did the kid in 1974 really go see Evel Knievel make the Snake River jump? !!

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