In Between Two Worlds 01

After graduating from Maryhurst and before I left St. Louis in the summer of 1961 for Marynook Novitiate in Galesburg, Wisconsin, my younger brother Bill and I—well, truth be told it was mostly me—terrorized a Goodfellow Terrace policeman. It happened in the following manner.

One mid-July evening around 9:00 Bill and I were returning from a trip to the corner store at Stratford Avenue and Jennings Station Road when we saw the police car parked on the side of the road to trap unwary speeders. The Village of Goodfellow Terrace survived financially almost exclusively on revenue from speeding tickets. Everyone I knew hated those damned cops because they would give you a ticket for being two miles per hour over the 20 mph speed limit.

On the spur of the moment I decided to take the law into my hands and exact a small measure of revenge for all ambushed motorists. I told Bill to light a cigarette and hand it to me (I didn’t smoke). As we passed the police car I inserted the cigarette into the closed end of a book of matches and bent over as if to tie my shoes. I placed the match book and cigarette just under the trunk of the car and slid the two-inch salute I had been carrying in my pocket for just the right occasion into the other end of the match book so the wick was in direct contact with the match ends. And we casually sauntered away.

We hid in a clump of trees on a small rise overlooking Stratford Avenue and waited. To our consternation two or three minutes later the cop accelerated away from the curb, lights flashing, and pulled over an unwary speeder. We thought it was all over. But ten minutes later the cop finished writing the ticket, turned the police car around, and parked in the same spot that he had left minutes ago. We silently rejoiced, hoping beyond all hope that everything would work right.

Minutes later the fire-cracker went off with a tremendous roar, splattering rocks and pebbles and road debris against the undercarriage of the police car, which was enveloped by a cloud of dust and dirt. Inside the police car it probably sounded like an all out military assault. We could see the cop struggling desperately to open the car door. Finally, he threw open the door, trying simultaneously to leap from the car and pull his weapon to repel unseen assailants, and promptly sprawled face-first on the pavement.

What a sight that was. The guy lying prone in the middle of Stratford Avenue, his gun ready to fire and no one was around except the neighbors watching silently from their porches, hiding their laughter behind their hands. Bill and I laughed until our sides hurt so bad I thought we’d be sick. It was hysterical. Stupid, of course, but still hysterical.

*     *     *

After leaving Marynook Novitiate after two thoroughly miserable months, I discovered that living my high school days in the all-male atmosphere of Maryhurst Prep had ill-prepared me for normal boy-girl relationships. As recorded elsewhere, during the summers when I had been home from Maryhurst (which was a boarding school where I lived for ten months of each year) on occasion I dated JoAnn C., literally the girl across the street. But that was it. After leaving Marynook, JoAnn and I dated regularly but broke up several times for months on end. During those separations I went out with a number of other girls but was very insecure, nervous, and unsure of myself.

It was a new world for me, driving, dating, and working. One that took me quite a while to adjust to. And one in which I never felt comfortable in many telling ways. Well, not the driving part, that’s for sure.

The first year I was back home I took JoAnn to her senior prom at Incarnate Word Academy. That occasion marked the first time I went to a formal dance in a tux. Afterwards we stayed out until 4:00 AM, parked just up the block from her house, necking and engaging in all sorts of heavy breathing, groping, and so forth. Her parents were justly furious. I had to call her father the next day and apologize for keeping her out so late. Maybe I just should have reassured him by saying that we were safely parked only a half block away playing kissy-face and touchy-feely until I thought I was going to explode. Nah. Probably would not have been a good move. Then I had to tip-toe around when I picked her up from her house for a couple weeks until all was forgiven.

Less than two weeks after returning from Wisconsin I landed a low-level job at R.L. Polk that introduced me to the ways of the business world. I worked in the shipping and receiving department and also as a bonded messenger. One of my duties as a bonded messenger was to pick up checks for shipping and handling from our local clients since R.L. Polk was one of the country’s largest Yellow Page and fulfillment firms. Many times these checks would be for thousands of dollars so when I was first hired the company had me fill out all kinds of forms and become bonded. No big deal.

Because the company refused to allow me to drive the company car and they were too cheap to pay for taxis, I had to take buses. To keep from dying of boredom, I would always bring a book with me and read it while riding the bus.

One day, my boss’s boss, a pinched-face, mean-spirited, ill-tempered bitch from Hell if ever there was one, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, saw me returning from a client’s office with a book in my hand. She ordered my boss, Mrs. S., to reprimand me for reading on company time and to prohibit me from doing it again or be fired.

Mrs. S. was very angry with me, a situation that, in my innocence, I could not understand. I asked her why, if it was all right for me to stare out the bus window on company time, it was not appropriate to read. No reading on company time, I was told, or you’ll be fired. Period.

I thought that that was absolute bullshit. So from then on I brought books to work and either hid them down on the first floor loading dock or put them in plain sight on the workbench where I regularly had lunch. A couple days after the first incident the front office bitch from Hell came through the loading area around 10:00 and must have seen my book on the shipping counter. Not a minute later Mrs. S. reprimanded me and asked if I wanted to be fired. This time I was ready and told her with a smile that I read while taking the bus to and from work and on my lunch break. I innocently asked if the company had a policy of not letting their employees read during lunch. With Alma, our union shop steward, listening to her every word, what could she say?

The very next time I had to pick up a check I slipped a book under my shirt and belt and sauntered out as meek as a lamb. Nobody was going to stop me from reading. Fuck them and their ignorant attitudes. Up the rebels!

Things went okay for a couple months and then, of all things, I got fired. It was sometime in late March. To set up the story properly, you have to know a little about the building, which was located downtown at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue. It was an old building and in poor condition, especially in the shipping and receiving area where I worked. The wooden floor was a patch-work quilt of sections of new hardwood boards, old but seemingly adequate boards, and decaying, rotten, and sometimes splintered boards that made pulling the heavy skids of paper and envelopes difficult, even for strong young men like my co-worker Roger and me.

One morning Mrs. S. told me to load up a skid of boxes filled with printed materials that had been damaged in shipping. The company had received permission from its insurance carrier to destroy them and she had called the man we used to take care of our bulk trash. Roger wasn’t busy so he and I loaded the skid. It was difficult since the boxes were different sizes and shapes. Tying them together so they would be stable and not fall over when they were moved proved a difficult task. There were simply too many boxes of varying sizes. In addition many of the boxes had been damaged and were no longer rigid or square. I warned Mrs. S. that it would take two people to move the skid over the floor to the shipping elevator since the boxes were unstable, one to pull the skid lift and the other to stabilize the boxes so they wouldn’t fall.

Not long after that I was dispatched to the Post Office to deliver a check for postage. When I returned, the building’s head shipping and receiving clerk, an older fellow named Bill, laughingly told me that when I went upstairs they were going to fire my ass. What? I thought he was joking. But when I got upstairs Mrs. S. told me to leave at once. I was being fired for loading the skid wrong.

It turned out that right after she sent me to the Post Office, one of the main folding machines broke, and Roger rushed off to a hardware store for a replacement part. That’s when the guy came for the skid of damaged boxes. Naturally, instead of waiting for either Roger or me to return, Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell tried to move the skid across that uneven floor to the freight elevator. And equally naturally, the boxes fell from the skid as they moved it, injuring Mrs. S’s ankle. Of course she looked around for a scapegoat and found me. I protested that the boxes were damaged and of unequal sizes and they could not be loaded right in the first place and that I had warned her of that problem.

“You’re fired,” was all she said, not being the slightest bit interested in logic or rationality. I angrily asked her if Roger was being fired as well since we both loaded the skid. Fat fucking chance. His nose was too far up her butt for that. It was my ass that was toast.

That’s when Alma, our union shop steward, pulled me aside. I know she saw the tears in my eyes; I hated the unfairness of it all. She told me not to worry, the union would get me back on by threatening to file a grievance for me and the company would almost certainly have to reinstate me. Just go home and relax for a few days, she said. I felt absolutely terrible, upset, ashamed, hurt at the rank injustice. Such the innocent.

A week and a half later I was back on the job. It turned out Alma had been right. The union had raised the issue that it was against work rules for supervisory personnel, like Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell, to move freight. And if they wanted a strike, they had one. Of course, the company backed down, knowing the union had them by the balls since everyone on the work floor had witnessed the two women moving the skid and said that it all was a misunderstanding. Certainly, that’s one reason I have been a strong union supporter all my adult life. Another, of course, is I'm a flaming leftist.

That next week I was back at work and was paid for the days I missed, I might add. But everything had changed; the atmosphere was absolutely poisonous. Mrs. S. spent most of her time trying to catch me doing something wrong and finding fault with everything I did, whether it was correct or not. She gave me every nasty and dirty job she could find and generally made my life miserable. It was brutal.

Roger’s head was so far up her ass you couldn’t see his shoulders and he stayed as far away from me as humanly possible and still work in the same place. Two months later they laid me off, ostensibly due to a lack of work. I was so exhausted from the stress and tension I was relieved and didn’t give a shit. Less than a month later I was working full-time with my brother, Jack, at the Dairy.

Coastal Wetlands

Coastal Wetland                 A rich variety of freshwater, saltwater, and brackish environments and habitats characterized by wet and spongy soils located in the transition zone between dry land and the ocean that comprise the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems. Coastal wetlands may be known as bayou, wetland hardwood forests and swamps, seagrass beds, coastal marshes or ponds, mangrove swamp, tidal flat, tidal marsh, salt marsh, bogs, and many others. Whatever their local or regional names, those areas are rich in wildlife and are critical nesting, spawning, and nursery grounds for resident and migratory birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, shellfish and crustaceans. They easily constitute one of the most sensitive, valuable and productive habitats on Earth.

Author’s Rant: All across the U.S. coastal wetlands have been disappearing for the last 100 years. Rather than that process being slowed over the last 60 years as a result of rising environmental attitudes and practices, the rate of decline and destruction has been accelerating. The systemic and institutional failure of any U.S. governmental agency to protect those fragile environments is nothing less than appalling and heartbreaking. The agency most directly involved in those losses is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is charged under the law with their protection and regulation. So, why coastal wetlands are in decline? Here’s but one specific example.

The delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana contains about 40 percent of the coastal wetlands in the coterminous U.S. No other wetland comes close to its size or environmental significance. That complex web of natural levees, natural ridges, freshwater wetlands, tidal marshes, beaches, shifting bars, and barrier islands was created by the enormous sediment load deposited by the Mississippi River over thousands of years. The sediment load was largely from three main river systems that fed into the Mississippi: the Missouri, Ohio, and the Arkansas. So, historically the delta area experienced several opposing forces. The deposition of mud, silt, and sand built up and extended the land into the Gulf of Mexico, renewed the soil, prevented salt water intrusion and encroachment, and created an interrelated system of barrier islands, sand bars, and wetlands that resulted in an extraordinarily high level of natural productivity. At the same time, natural coastal erosion and marine processes tore down and carried away many of the deposited materials. Although those erosional processes didn’t come close to making the game even, they never stopped; year after year the waves and currents continued working and reworking the sediments. Second, the entire coastal area of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was sinking isostatically under the enormous weight of the deltaic deposits. Since that process was also very slow the delta grew as sediments continued to be deposited.

Barrier islands lying in front and to the side of the Mississippi River delta plain buffer the effects of ocean waves and currents on associated estuaries and wetlands. But today those barrier islands are eroding at a rate of up to 60 feet per year. As the barrier islands disintegrate, the vast system of sheltered wetlands are exposed to the full force of wave action, salinity intrusion, tropical storm and hurricane surge, tidal currents, and sediment transport that combine to accelerate wetland deterioration. The result is that today the barrier islands are disappearing, coastal erosion has increased, the shoreline is retreating, and the delta’s wetlands are being swallowed by the Gulf at the alarming rate of over 25,500 acres or 40 square miles each and every year. That wetland loss is about 80 percent of the total wetland loss recorded in the United States and is a process that not only is accelerating and but is also predicted to continue with marginal relief into the foreseeable future. If that rate of loss is not slowed, by the year 2040 an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will have been eaten by erosion and subsidence As a direct result, in certain areas the Louisiana shoreline will have moved inland as much as 33 miles.

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands extend as much as 80 miles inland and along the sea shore for about 180 miles. The State has lost over 1.2 million acres or 1,900 square miles of that fragile coastal habitat since the 1900s. Although not all Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are receding, in fact some areas are stable and others are growing, at the present rate of net loss all of that crucial habitat will have disappeared in about 200 years.

So, what’s really happening? The answer is neither complicated nor difficult to understand. The critical process is human alteration of a natural system. As people streamed across America, settling the land, they cried out for government help when natural disasters struck, like floods in the Midwest, South, and Great Plains. Congress responded by having the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build levees, dikes, dams, and reservoirs as flood control measures. The once mighty rivers like the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas were tamed by a system of dams and levees that continue upstream for nearly 1,200 miles. Their sediment loads decreased dramatically as mud and silt were dropped in the reservoirs created by the upstream dams. Today, the lower Mississippi River is nothing but an artificial channel contained by levees and embankments that prevent flooding and ensure that its sediment load is not distributed across the floodplain, where it would create and replenish wetlands, but instead is sped straight to the mouth of the River and into the deep waters of the Gulf. As a direct result of that human intervention, insufficient sediment is being deposited in the wetlands and without that replenishment, they are disappearing under the continuing and unabated assault of natural coastal erosion and subsidence.

In 1990, the federal Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection Restoration Act, (PL-101-646, Title 111, abbreviated as CWPPRA and widely known as the “Breaux Act”), provided authorization and funding for a multi-agency task force to curtail wetland losses. It took that task force, which included the State of Louisiana and four Federal agencies charged with restoring and protecting the remainder of Louisiana’s valuable coastal wetlands, eight years of extensive studies before a new coastal restoration plan was adopted in 1998. The underlying principles of the new plan, Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana, are to restore or mimic the natural processes that built and maintained coastal Louisiana. The Plan calls for basin-scale action to restore more natural hydrology and sediment introduction processes and proposes ecosystem restoration strategies that would result in efforts larger in scale than any that have been implemented in the past. The largely unappreciated irony is that the federal government, through environmentally disastrous actions of the Corps of Engineers, has taken away millions of tons of natural resource treasures with one hand and returns ounces with its other hand, and then claims to be solving the problem. Which leaves most objective observers more than a little cynical and bitter.

Make no mistake, at heart the disappearance of coastal wetlands is not a natural environmental problem. The crisis is cultural in nature and goes directly to the way American politics and government work. Few Americans have more than a passing interest in the natural environment. Unless millions of voters experience a drastic change of heart and begin demanding change, nothing will happen. But you have to remember we’re talking about Louisiana where politics is a game played for real. Second, wetlands and swamps don’t vote. Period. More importantly, they don’t contribute millions of dollars to political campaigns, as do agribusinesses, barge companies, chemical firms, oil refineries, and urban developers. Until that situation changes, coastal and other wetlands will continue to disappear at staggering rates while no one listens to the scientists or to the fishermen who daily see their livelihood disappearing.

Additional Author’s Rant: It is possible that that wetlands restoration situation was given an enormous boost in late August, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina savaged the Gulf Coast and dealt New Orleans a nearly fatal blow, which came at least in part because of a Presidential Administration that for three years running diverted many millions of dollars from the New Orleans Corps of Engineers budget for levee repair and strengthening and used that money in the war effort overseas. The initial word from Congress was that the coastal wetlands restoration effort would be strengthened (Katrina’s damage to the natural environment may be partially revealed in the damage done to the offshore Chandeleur Island chain, which lost up to one-half of its pre-storm land mass). But only time will tell if people will become distracted and the Katrina disaster disappears from the front page and falls into the great black hole of public indifference, and we are reminded yet again by the actions of our elected leaders that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

Real World Problem: In 2003, former petroleum geologist Robert Morton, who at that time was working for the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss in coastal Louisiana occurred during or just after the period of peak oil and natural gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After studying available data, Morton concluded that that coastal subsidence was related to the removal of millions of barrels of oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of saline formation water associated with the near-shore petroleum deposits. That massive removal of petroleum resources and related water led directly to regional depressurization, slippage along nearby subsurface faults, and induced subsidence of the land above. The great difficulty is that if Morton is right, no amount of coastal wetland restoration efforts will be effective in those areas as long as gas and oil are being removed in large quantities. If that is the case, land subsidence will continue to characterize southernmost Louisiana as will the disappearance of coastal wetlands. And who out there thinks we will voluntarily stop oil and gas production in coastal Louisiana?

Real World Examples: approximately 81 percent of coastal wetlands in the continental U.S. are in the Southeast and Louisiana has well over half of those. Other coastal wetlands of national significance are located in Florida around Choctawhatchee Bay, Apalachicola Bay, northeastern Florida between the St. Mary’s and St. John’s Rivers, Cape Canaveral, Tampa Bay, Biscayne Bay, and Florida Bay. The Paraná Delta in Argentina and the area around Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, are two of the larger coastal wetlands in South America. If you’re in southern France you might enjoy visiting the Camargue, a fascinating wetland between the Mediterranean Sea and the two arms of the Rhône River delta, Western Europe’s largest. 

Maryhurst Prep 07

Early one Saturday morning while dew-gems glistened on the grass and the wind was sweet with promise, I decided to drive to Maryhurst instead of writing another chapter for my dissertation. The year was 1972. We were in St. Louis during our summer semester break from my teaching responsibilities at Eastern Michigan University. I had never been back in the eleven years since high school graduation, probably in no small measure because I felt residual guilt about leaving. Actually, the guilt was not over abandoning a religious vocation but leaving a life I had loved that had allowed the wounds inflicted by my father to heal. Consequently, the idea of walking once again over the grounds where I had been so happy appealed to me. My wife, Sandy, and the children had left at 8:00 to help her cousin, Carol, prepare for an afternoon birthday party. Leaving me free to do as I pleased.

I drove south on Kirkwood Road to Big Bend. The area had developed so much since I left that I hardly recognized it. Then, without warning I saw it. A huge, vulgar Venture store and a strip center squatting toad-like in the middle of an enormous parking lot where Maryhurst Prep had been. I was completely stunned. My stomach knotted into a hard ball. The car seemed to stop of its own volition, almost as if it were as horrified as I. The lovely blue spruce were gone, as were the mighty oaks and maples. The gently curving entry drive and the athletic fields were acres of asphalt. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Maryhurst was no more. In its place stood a modern temple of Ba’al, vomiting people laden with gifts for self-adoration in the strange reverse homage that characterizes contemporary American society. Gone was everything but the most important — my memories of and love for the people and the place that profoundly affected my life.

Tears moistened my eyes and curved down my cheeks when I first wrote this material. I was unable to hold them back, though I could not tell if they were for the person I had been or for my wonderful memories of the past. Certainly they were for a place, a time I loved that could never be again.

But all memories are bitter-sweet flashes that make you laugh and cry in random disorder. So much has changed since I was a postulant. I am no longer that apprehensive boy in search of foundations. Bro. Vincent Gray is dead as is Bro. Al Stein, Fr. Michael Dorsey, Bro. Fred Weisbruch, and so many others, including my old friend and accomplice in so many mis-adventures, Herb B. (who died as a result of a brain injury he received while serving as a young man in the military). Bro. Xavier Shultz is alive [Author’s Note: he was when this section was originally written but died in 2001] but not particularly healthy in his life of retirement in Hawaii — he later moved to California for better medical care. My former classmates live separate existences that I hope are filled with satisfaction and contentment, though I know life is seldom that kind. I have lost track of each and every one, though once every two or three years I see Gerry M. at the supermarket or the Mall.

Despite all that, I visit Maryhurst several times a year. I slowly walk its wide corridors and smell the familiar mustiness mixed with chalk dust. I open my locker in the Rec Room; pull on the sweatshirt rank from the exertion of half a dozen yesterdays. Watch my mother patiently sew the miniature name labels on each piece of clothing. Lose once again in ping-pong to Ed M. with his powerhouse backhand. Wear pajamas for the very first time in my life on that initial night in the dorm. Hear my friends’ excited chatter as Billy W. and I, arms around each other’s shoulders, prepare to sally forth with barely containable excitement to defeat our erstwhile foes on the playing fields. Smell those gloriously sweet mornings in Spring when the buds explode their greenery across the landscape. Learn how to make rosaries. Play a viciously competitive, winner-take-all game of hearts with Charpy, Habs, and Eddy M. Rub my hand across the glass cabinet in the Chem Lab that Herb and I blew to smithereens. Taste once more Bro. Leo’s fabulous caramel rolls, his mouth-watering pizza, or that unbelievably delicious maple syrup drenched cornbread. Shock my face into shuddering awareness every morning in the dorm’s freezing water. Serve daily Mass with the familiar-forgotten Latin phrases rolling with ease from my tongue. Lose myself in the beauty and rolling majesty of Night Prayers. Polish the brass spigots in the toilets until they shine brilliantly. Run the base paths with abandon. Make another desperate but successful dive for a football that seemed to everyone just out of the reach of my outstretched fingertips. Attend Bro. Xav’s Geography class that made me aware of the world around me. Go reluctantly to work periods. Talk eagerly with my friends who, like me, haven’t aged a day. And with my fellow postulants, watch our much loved Bro. Xav do a fancy dive at the pool to our amazement and heartfelt pride.

Of course Maryhurst Prep will die one day. But only when my last breath whistles in the wind. For I am Maryhurst and we shall never part.