I Didn’t Need a Weatherman

Reg Darling

 

Part One

In the spring of 1968, I briefly emerged from the semi-reclusive life of my freshman year to volunteer in Eugene McCarthy’s presidential primary campaign. Distributing campaign literature downtown the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination, I offered a flier to a middle-aged man who said, “I don’t give a shit about that, but I’d sure like to shake the hand of the man who shot that goddamned nigger.” I had already gotten several similar, though less vehement, responses that day. I returned to my room, my books, and my solitude. It would take far more than fliers handed out by polite kids with fresh haircuts to penetrate the indifference and blind, bigoted anger of Appalachia.

 

[I was a student at Clarion State College—now Clarion University—in northwestern Pennsylvania.]

 

When the spring semester ended, I needed a summer job. After a week filled with a seemingly endless stream of application forms, I had two offers. One of them was with a company that manufactured parts for bomb detonators on a military contract. The alternative was a potato chip factory.

 

[With the war in Vietnam in full raging stagger, the choice seemed like a no-brainer.]

 

At the application interview, I was asked if I could count to one hundred. They had a shortage of workers who could do that, and the foremen had better things to do than counting crates of potatoes and barrels of waste.

 

[A friend got a summer job at a slaughterhouse where he spent his workdays shooting pigs in the head with a .22. He said he got used to it. It occurred to me that perhaps some things shouldn’t be gotten used to, but I didn’t tell him that.]

 

My primary responsibility was the operation of an automatic potato peeler. I stood on a three-foot square metal grate platform. A steel hopper protruded through the wall just above eye level to my left. The peeler, about the size of a fifty-five-gallon drum, stood directly in front of me; its abrasive inner surface spun rapidly while a jet of water continually flushed the mix of potato peelings and starch out the bottom into metal grate-covered drainage trenches in the concrete floor. To my right, on the bottom of the peeler, was a hatch that opened onto a conveyer leading to the rest of the production line: slicer, fryer, and packaging machines.

 

My job was to press a button on the side of the hopper with my left hand; this filled the hopper with potatoes from a much larger hopper in the warehouse area on the other side of the wall. Then, I lifted a latch and swung open a metal door, spilling a load of potatoes into the peeler, closed and latched the door, and pressed the button again. After a few seconds, I bent down, opened the hatch in the bottom of the peeler, released the potatoes onto the conveyor belt, and closed the hatch. Then I opened the hopper to dump more potatoes into the peeler, pressed the button to refill the hopper, let the peeled potatoes out onto the conveyor belt, and so on for nine hours per day with two ten-minute coffee breaks and a half hour for lunch.

 

On my first day, one of the regular workers came by and asked how I was doing.

“Okay,” I said.

“Yeah, it ain’t so bad once you get the hang of it,” he replied.

 

[A fair number of my fellow workers seemed stunted and dim, and those who didn’t carried an indefinable aura of damage. Whether their dimness was a birthright or an accumulation of scars was neither relevant nor any of my business. Hard labor and bad luck were the common ground they all stood upon. It wasn’t possible to be smug in my ability to count to one hundred. These men had tough lives and lived those lives with more courage than life had ever summoned from me, so at lunchtime, instead of retreating to some quiet corner with a book, I joined the whole crew in the lunchroom and mostly listened.]

 

There were three production lines, and each fryer held forty thousand gallons of cooking oil. The temperature in the frying room, where the peelers were located, was always around a hundred degrees. The heat and monotony were a simple matter of day-by-day endurance, but the potatoes themselves were another story.

They were stored in bulk in a cool, and dark, but not refrigerated, warehouse. The wooden crates dumped by forklift into the large hopper that fed the smaller one I filled by pressing a button were often as not filled with a brown gelatinous mass of reeking decay, seething with maggots. A fine mist of atomized potato rot and pulverized maggots stained my clothing brown by the end of each day. The smell was indescribable.

Occasionally, I worked fast in order to load the conveyor to capacity and give myself enough time to run back to the warehouse and plead with a forklift operator to find a clean crate or two to provide me a brief respite. But since the flow of potatoes from my end affected the whole production line, doing that always risked inciting the wrath of the fryer operator.

 

[I came home one day in early June, reeking of rot and maggots, to find my mother weeping in front of the television because Bobby Kennedy had been shot.]

 

At least once per week, standing in the peeler’s foul spray, feeling a surge of near panic, I gave myself permission to walk off the job and never go back. But that self-granted permission enabled me to stay. I was not trapped.

 

I quit a week before the beginning of the fall semester, to wash the reek and filth out of my lungs, hair, and brain with reading, archery, and long walks. I had enough money to cover textbooks, tuition, late-night diner food, dates, and a thirty-five-millimeter camera. My parents paid for my room and cafeteria meal ticket.

 

I had sat through three months of lunches listening to half-broken men talk about lives so stunted and diminished by hardship and absurdity it made me ache. I had watched the whole glorious, exhilarating uprising of hope that began with Eugene McCarthy go down the toilet. To see society as a nice, cozy place to settle into, placidly do whatever jobs fate delivered, raise a family, and grow old was no longer possible. It all seemed too much like standing on my three-foot square steel platform amidst the spray of rot and corruption swirling up from the depths of the machinery. I wanted off the platform and out of the factory, and if I could throw a brick in the works on the way out, so much the better.

 

I had only one chance to hunt that fall—the final day of the season.

 

[Hunting mattered. For a redneck male, it was the umbilical connection to home.]

 

The territory was loved and familiar so I knew where to go and found my opportunity by midmorning. I blew the shot and lost the arrow. Feeling discouraged, I hiked back to Aunt Gert and Uncle Ed’s for lunch and saw my father emerge from the woods dragging a doe and smiling broadly. He, too, had missed a deer earlier, but disappointment only sharpened his focus rather than diminishing it. I picked up my bow and quiver and returned to the woods with rekindled determination.

After a half hour of motionless vigilance near a well-traveled deer trail, a lone doe angled across the open, grassy forest, walking slowly. At her closest point, which was still a little too far, I swung with her next step and released the bowstring. The shot felt instantly wrong, and the arrow struck her hindquarter. The broadhead shattered the hip joint. The deer went down, rolled over, rose unsteadily to her feet, and fell again. I drew another arrow from the quiver—I had two left now—and shot again as the doe struggled to her feet once more. The shot was well aimed, but the deer fell again before the arrow flew through the space she had formerly occupied and embedded itself in a tree. I had one arrow left and no room for mistakes.

I walked quickly toward the deer. As I drew near, she stopped struggling and looked at me with dark, frightened eyes shining with the same light of pure sentience that had shone from the eyes of beloved animals who had saved me from drowning in the dark childhood loneliness of my parents crazy, desperate dysfunction. My heart knew this, but circumstance required me to refuse such tender recognition. At three feet, just out of hoof range, I drew the bow and drove an arrow through her heart. She gasped and died. I sat a while with shaking hands and heavy breath to apologize to the deer and to the forest before beginning the work of field dressing and dragging.

While I sat by a campfire that night, a raccoon walked into the outer perimeter of the firelight. Something was terribly wrong with his face. I picked up my bow, stood up, and nocked an arrow. He just stood there. The arrow struck under his chin, exited his belly, and skipped into the dark woods. The raccoon took two calm steps and fell over. He had been shot in the face with a rifle. The bullet had struck at an oblique angle, glanced off his skull, and took out an eye. The wound was horribly infected. I borrowed a shovel from Ed to bury him. My father helped with the digging. He was a terrible presence in my dreams for weeks afterward.

 

[The realization that the very focal point of success itself could be an agonizing hardship rippled out through my life like waves from a pebble tossed into a still pond.]

 

Part Two

The war in Vietnam and all the strange liberations, contractions, double binds, and paranoia that went with its time reshaped important aspects of my psyche in several successive phases. The initial ones really can’t be non-tritely described because that time is laden with notions and images that mutated into semi-caricature as they were absorbed into popular culture-lite—a universally known narrative that isn’t so much directly false as polished to a suspicious gloss. I think it suffices to say that in the process of becoming a conscious adult in the confluence of counter culture, civil rights, and the peace movement, I wallowed in the zeitgeist, including the suburbs of its dark side. Though much of my outward persona was far more superficial than it seemed at the time, the tribal identity that can be supported by the ornaments we choose and refuse to wear is not trivial. For many of us, it transformed a pathway out of an obsolete identity from a confusing slog through a morass of hormones and ambiguity into a light leap across a muddy ditch.

 

[It didn’t take long to discover that one could still step in dog shit on the other side.]

 

I loved the warm embrace of hippie subculture and of gentle, pretty women without makeup or bras, who smelled of patchouli and marijuana smoke. I believed in peace, but I also knew that violence wasn’t merely political, that it was deeply embedded in all our souls.

 

[I had already gotten to know violence from several viewpoints, including my own personal darkness.]

 

Speaking out against the war was the only way to resist the complicity that pervaded my life.

 

Acid’s alternative paradigm that the body is a complex array of sense organs whose purpose is to understand the world around us, to make sense of the world, danced in perfect harmony with rock and roll’s simple, raw message that the body is a manifestation of the divine. Beyond the intentions of the musicians, beyond even the listener’s ecstasy, there was truth, transcendence, and divinity in the music. There was the awesome, inevitable, by-God-orgasmic reality of raw being throbbing and pulsing with the immensity of now.

 

[Fuck the rest. Screw the debates, analytical arguments, and academic rigor—explain this guitar riff, explain this orgasm, explain why this young woman’s eyes lay waste to Kant and Hegel.]

 

Despite its core of conscience and nobility, the antiwar movement harbored its fair share of egotism and folly. Dumbfuckitude is a basic part of the human condition. If we had a means of accurately measuring it, dumbfuckitude in any segment of humanity would probably graph out on a Bell Curve like everything else in the world.

 

[It’s important not to allow the constant background level of human dysfunction to obscure the vital principles of truth and compassion that must be our navigational headings if we are to have any hope of transcending our savagery.]

 

We grabbed the truth right by the ass, but we hadn’t expected it to be so easy to catch. We reacted like the hormonal disasters we mostly were and fucked it up. Though this was partly due to an excess of weed and wine, we would have done much better with parents whose spirits had not been trampled and ravaged by war.

 

[Sometimes I attempted to have real discussions with my father, but he was lost without the swift guidance of adrenaline rage. I sought a simple revealing of his experience, but he always retreated behind a wall of euphemism and opinion. I was grateful for his material generosity, but continually reinventing him was painfully tiresome.]

 

While we laughed, danced, fucked, and smoked, the Grim Reaper stood quietly in the background dressed in red, white, and blue.

 

[Reality became something fluid, flowing, and mutable.]

 

After close encounters with several kinds of official and unofficial human ugliness, I began to think that flower power needed thorns and teeth. People like me—the battered children of war-damaged fathers—could be that. I could be a sharp tooth, a claw. Having grown up hunting, fishing, hiking, and camping, I had skills my mostly city-bred comrades lacked.

But my brief foray into the wild illegal side of resistance en route to revolution taught me that heavy risk and moral ambiguity make shitty roommates. I had a survival instinct not merely for my beating heart and breathing lungs, but for my truest sense of self.

 

[Years later, stoned and drunk by a late night campfire, I began to tell an old trusted friend about things I had done in a context of protest that I had never spoken about to anyone. Even drunk or tripping with my most trusted friends, I said nothing. At the first glimpse of detail, he realized where I was going and said, “Shut up! Don’t tell anyone—not ever. Talking about that stuff is a line you can’t ever afford to cross.”]

 

Cynicism festered like an infection in the wound inflicted at Kent State. Hope retreated from the larger world and took up residence in the realm of living hidden. I continued to provide deserters and draft resisters traveling the underground or en route to Canada a place to crash and a meal, but I didn’t want to be a leader or spokesperson. I no longer wanted to be visible. I sensed bad weirdness afoot.

 

[Fear killed the anarchy in many hearts. Beer and money replaced anger with apathy. But not for everyone—for those who had forest, desert, mountains, or ocean in their hearts, the anarchy went too deep. We hid, waiting for the wild to rise again.]

 

I recognized the envelope and knew what it meant before I opened it. I was summoned to report for a pre-induction draft physical. I didn’t know why my student deferment had been denied and feared that an appeal would only attract unwanted attention. It could easily have been an innocuous bureaucratic glitch, but my fears weren’t irrational.

 

[As loves unraveled in the weird dance of my irremediably vulnerable heart and a young redneck male’s hormonal ruthlessness cast suddenly adrift in the strange, wonderful liberations of the times, I had often been uncertain that I did, indeed, want to live. I drifted along not actually seeking death (or not very hard, anyway), but doubting how much I would do to get out of the way if I saw it coming.

But to have my life seized, held, and ruthlessly used seemed vastly worse than merely losing my life to a careless automobile or the happenstance of disease. A compound fractured arm in high school had awakened me to life’s inescapable precariousness. There was a lot of random ugly shit floating around in the world and most, but not all, of it could be avoided with a quick wit and good reaction time.]

 

Though explosive, red-faced shouting matches between my father and me were common, behind our conflicts there was never any doubt that he would lay down his life for me in a heartbeat.

“Where do you want to go? Canada, Sweden—you name it and we’ll get you there. I didn’t get shot five times in World War II so they could do this to my sons.”

“I’m looking at my alternatives. I might not have to leave.”

“Just let me know what you need. They’ll have to shoot me to take you.”

He meant it.

 

I consulted like-minded people about safe places to crash for three different routes to Canada, but Aaron had a different idea. “Check the queer box,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a checklist of various physical and mental conditions on the form you’ll have to fill out at the physical. One of them is ‘homosexual tendencies’—put a checkmark there.”

“Won’t they question me?”

“Of course they will. Keep your answers simple. Answer with just yes or no as much as possible. Don’t tell a story. If you have to name a witness or lover, use my name.”

Though Aaron was utterly confident his plan would work, I considered other alternatives. Applying for conscientious objector’s status was too risky. Any plan that involved calling attention to myself could undermine other options, leaving me trapped if it failed. I could buy a black market kidney stone. They came with a list of symptoms and instructions on what to tell one’s doctor. It was only a temporary reprieve. It was rumored that eating several tablespoons of Tide before the physical would dramatically elevate your blood pressure. If you didn’t have a stroke, you would have a few months to figure out what to do next—another temporary reprieve.

 

[I didn’t want a temporary reprieve. I wanted this shit off my back and out of my life.]

 

I could go to Canada. The problem, of course, was that I might well never be able to return. Exile had to be a last resort.

 

[My heart was rooted in the forests of home.]

 

Several of my fellow anti-war activists thought I should refuse the draft as an act of civil disobedience and willingly go to prison to protest the savage injustice of the war. I believed my first and foremost duty with regard to the war was to refuse to participate, but I could see no great nobility or political effectiveness in being punished for my refusal. In fact, I thought the best political statement I could make would be to refuse and not be punished. I was also pissed off and personally unwilling to voluntarily surrender any part of my life to the evil swine who had led my country into senseless war. With regard to my life, their impotence would be my protest.

 

[If I walked away from my refusal unscathed, every orgasm, toke, and hike would be a joyous celebration of disobedience.]

 

For me, the war and the draft were separate issues. Military conscription is nothing more than a specialized form of slavery—I would have dodged the draft in peacetime. I believed that if someone tried to abduct me for the purpose of placing me in involuntary servitude, I would be morally justified in resisting by any means at my disposal, including lethal force, if necessary. I was not a pacifist and I would not submit. Going to prison for refusing to be a slave would be an act of submission, not resistance. I had my life, and I intended to live it. Dodging the draft was not a protest—it was self-defense.

 

[Freedom is not a cop-out; it’s a birthright.]

 

I made contacts and studied routes. If Aaron’s plan didn’t work, Canada was Plan B. I would cross over via Vermont, Minnesota, or Washington.

I spent the day before the physical at Aaron’s cabin getting briefed. He mapped out the basic ground rules: Keep to yourself. Don’t get drawn into conversations. Keep it simple. Answer with “Yes” or “No” whenever possible. Don’t tell a story, because that only creates a risk of getting caught in a contradiction. Smile and be polite. At random moments during conversation about other things, Aaron would fire a potential draft physical question at me and critique my answer. I was provisionally confident.

If I had any misgivings about evading the draft, the pre-induction physical erased them quickly. It was terrifyingly obvious that the prospective inductees were on a production line. We were abstract units, pieces of meat. I would never allow this military machine to control my life. If Aaron’s gambit failed, I would do whatever I had to do to resist. If I had to go underground or head for the border, I would be armed until the very last feasible point to ditch the weapons before crossing.

 

[Would I have resorted to violence had I encountered official, or even unofficial, interference? Well, in 1970 I was a very righteously pissed-off young man, so yes, there’s a fair chance things could have gotten ugly. Now, many years later, I realize that the person whose work it would be to stop me is probably just someone with a job and friends and family—trying to navigate through this world mostly by dumbass guesswork, just like me, someone I could probably enjoy having a beer with. The situation would be neck deep in moral ambiguity. So, I would like to say that violence is something I’ve cast aside.

The problem is that my son was a college student when Dubya cooked up his scam war in Iraq. When it started, I consulted like-minded people about travel routes and safe places to stay for three different ways out of the country. The draft was never reinstated, but if it had been, my son would have had an armed escort to the border. Though that isn’t macho bluster, I find it a bit embarrassing to talk about because it sounds uncomfortably similar to the ranting of people I think of as utter whack-jobs. But I was not delusional to think that the government might declare it expedient to seize my kid for cannon fodder, and in that circumstance, submission would be unthinkable.]

 

The realization that the government could snatch my life away, and when I got too old to be optimally useful, it could snatch my children or grandchildren and send them off to kill and die in the third-world shithole of its choice, imprinted me in a fairly indelible way.

 

An idealistic friend said, “This isn’t about you.”

“The hell it isn’t,” I replied.

Beyond all the intricate lunacies of national and international politics, it was clear that the government was attempting to seize my life. It was time to take this personally.

 

So I was very focused. After all the assorted standard physical checks, we were herded into a large holding area where we waited to be called for individual attention relating to items checked on our forms, selected by the Marines, or sent home. I sat quietly apart from the others, simmering with rage and determination.

The interview with the “shrink” (I have no idea what his real qualifications were) was fairly easy. He seemed more nervous than I. His whole demeanor bespoke a thinly disguised mixture of disgust and fear.

“I can’t tell by looking at you or talking to you if this is true. How do I know this is true?”

“If it wasn’t true, I wouldn’t have signed it. It says right here you can go to jail for lying.”

“When was your last homosexual experience?”

“Last night.”

“Are you depressed about this?”

“Sometimes.”

“Have you ever dated women?”

“Yes.”

“How do you explain that?”

“I have lots of tendencies.”

“Have you ever used illegal drugs?”

“Yes.”

“Would you be willing to sign a statement?”

“Yes, but isn’t that what I just did?”

He sent me back to the waiting area, and an hour later they let everyone go.

A few weeks afterward, I was notified that my draft status had been changed to 1-Y. I was free.

 

[I was also desperate.]

 

The realization that there were sinister forces at large in the world that could take people like me into custody and either lock us in cages or enslave us in duty to the military (which could involve the wholesale slaughter of innocent people for ill-defined political reasons) was an exponentially altered view of the world and my possible future in it.

Though I had been a battered child, I had also been strangely sheltered by my parents’ dysfunction. I thought one could take for granted one’s right to simply follow the convoluted flow of life, love, desire, and spirit.

 

[Truth is an invention, which is why the inventing of it is so hugely important.]

 

Now, knowing that beneath and behind the grit of wage labor and the lovely shivers of art and sex lurked a cold mechanized threat aroused a complex mixture of reactions, with anger and dread being high on the list. I had to be ornery, vigilant, skeptical, and prepared if I wanted to retain possession of my own life.

My country had declared war on me. We achieved a ceasefire of sorts, but our peace has remained unstable and uncertain.

 

[Lately, it has taken a turn for the worse.]

 

I had to evolve a new, strange, complex morality in order to walk out the other side of this slow-motion kidnap attempt alive and free. I was already capable of an innocent ruthlessness that I hadn’t yet recognized as appalling, but my personal collision with the draft system was truly a loss of innocence.

 

[I realized I was higher on the food chain in the forest than in town.]

 

There was a tough vigilance that I would have to hold to for the rest of my life. I would always be ready to disappear, and for a while, that possibility was relatively easy to maintain. My Pleistocene vigilance faded apace with obvious necessity, despite the lingering background knowledge that the spirit of Tricky Dick on meth still roams America howling.

The loss of innocence was far deeper than the terrible blunders of love and sex. The draft notice changed me and, mostly not for the better, even though those changes may also have saved me more than once.

I would always be an outlaw, even at my law-abiding best, and there was no remedy for it. There were fundamental ways of regarding one’s relationship with one’s country and government that were no longer possible for me. I became an outsider in ways that could never be fully remedied.

I was also extraordinarily angry and though my rage was largely justified, I already had a sufficient supply of dark anarchy in my heart. Adding more neither improved nor protected my life—all it did was juice up the PTSD and reclassify a big chunk of my heart’s darkness as a primarily political problem.

I was willing to have a ceasefire with my government because I had other work to do that was more important than anything even remotely likely to result from entangling my life in some sort of revolutionary martyrdom. But I would never sign a treaty.

 

[Those motherfuckers had crossed the line in a big way.]

 

It’s not like you can try to abduct and enslave someone for the purpose of using them as a disposable weapon and when you fail to bring it off you can just say, “Oops, sorry about that,” and everything is peachy again.

I assembled “The Box” and kept it close.

The contents of the box:

A file folder containing a new identity, including a valid social security number, a loaded handgun, twenty-five rounds of ammunition, waterproof matches, a compass, a hunting knife, a small flashlight, with extra batteries, twenty feet of nylon cord, and $500.00 in cash.

I never showed the box to anyone. Its necessity gave permission to the harboring of secrets. The possibility of needing the box rendered all commitments provisional to some indefinable degree that I preferred not to think about and still cannot assess.

I don’t want to overdramatize—it’s not like I was afraid all the time. I was really pretty confident in the way wild young males tend to be, and my fondness for marijuana had cultivated a matter-of-fact tolerance for paranoia. All hippies lived with a certain level of day-to-day fear (we often carried felonies in our pockets), and I just had a little more that couldn’t be flushed or swallowed. After a while, it became almost normal. I kept my fear in the box, and I kept the box because the fear leaked out whenever I thought about ditching it.

The box followed me for more than a decade. The handgun got unloaded when I became a parent. I told my wife about the basics, but skipped the details. Though I had intended to shred or burn it, my spare identity got stashed away with old journals and forgotten long before the Internet age rendered it hopelessly obsolete. And then, in the waning days of 2016, with Amerika gone weird and stupidly narrow, it resurfaced with eerie timeliness when I was looking for something else, as such things tend to do.

I tossed the yellowed file folder into the fireplace and watched it burn.

 

[That my dissidence could have been wilder and stronger is a guilt I still carry.]

 

 

© Reg Darling

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Reg Darling lives in Arlington, Vermont. He worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare for thirty years before retiring in 2004. He paints a small watercolor everyday and hasn’t missed a day in more than six years. When he isn’t writing or painting, he wanders in the woods. His essays have appeared in The Chaos Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Remembered Arts Journal, River Teeth Journal, Sky Island Journal, Tiferet Journal, Timberline Review, Whitefish Review, and others. His daily watercolors, photographs, and, occasionally a bit of writing, can be seen at reg-darling.tumblr.com