Frank is Emptiness

April 3rd, 2018

Howard reminded me of my father’s uncle. Uncle John was a big man, and always had a ready smile and a infectious laugh. My dad’s uncle always seemed to be up to some mischief. When I was boy, I could never tell if Uncle John was laughing at us or at himself.

Howard was like that too. He ran the sweat lodge at Fort Belknap. Howard had an interesting set up. The lodge itself was inside of a wooden garage. The fire for heating the stones was outside, but everything else was in the building. Somebody told us that this was the only sweat that operated even when it was sixty degrees below zero outside.

Howard sat and talked to us while we waited for the rocks to heat up. They were heating eighty stones, twenty rocks for each round of the sweat. Howard liked to talk. He was good at it, and I liked to listen to him.

Howard was a simple man, earthy and wise. He spoke of many things, all of them connected with the sweat. He told us,

“Now when you pray, you don’t ask for material things; you know, like a car or winning the lottery.. That’s not right. That just attracts the bad spirits. Pray for your families. Pray for the earth. You will get the material things anyway. The Creator will give them to you. He knows what you all need.”

He took a drag on his cigarette, and went on,

“Sure, I’m smoking now, but it’s not just because I like that. It’s part of my prayer, for me and for you. When you smoke during the sweat, blow the smoke up, like that.” He blew a puff of smoke up toward the roof of the garage. “Let that tobacco be your prayer. Let the smoke rise to the Creator and the spirits, like that.”

Howard kept talking.

“We use our medicines during the sweat: the sage, the cedar, the sweet grass, and the tobacco. We call on the fire spirits to heat our stones. Those stones are the oldest living things on Mother Earth. They were here long before we were ever thought of. We use the water, the water that keeps all things alive, like that. The Creator, He cries for us, his children. The raindrops are his tears for us, because we are so pitiful like that.”

“That Christianity, that almost destroyed us. They tried to destroy our customs and our medicine. They talk about Satan, whatever that is. If I want to see the devil, I can just look at you or me! We all do bad things. We don’t need a devil for that!”

Howard laughed, and said, “I got nothing against those Christians. They got their Easter today. At least the little kids get an egg hunt!”

“I don’t care what color anybody is. Everybody is welcome in the sweat: black, yellow, white, red, green. We even had priests come to the sweat! They got something from it too! Anybody can sweat with us.”

“The important thing is the prayer. We have to pray for our families, for our babies, for the ones not even born yet. We have to pray for the earth like that. We have to pray for ourselves. Don’t forget to pray for ourselves! We need prayer too!”

“Pray to the laughter spirit. We need to joke and laugh. We need to cry too. Some people say that we shouldn’t cry during the sweat, like that. We can cry. The spirits help us to cry. Our ancestors are with us to help us. Cry if you want. Enjoy the sweat.”

“I don’t control’ the sweat. I don’t control’ nothing in there. The spirits, they are in control. Whatever happens is from the spirits. People say that I run a hot sweat. The spirits decide how hot it gets in there. They decide how hot we need to be. I don’t control that”.

“We have four rounds, one for each direction, one for each color: yellow, black, red, and white. We call on those spirits. We call on our ancestors. We call on the Creator.”

The sweat took three hours. We all sat in the dark. Howard ran a hot sweat. The steam coming off of the rocks burned my face and shoulders. It was hard to breath. It was hard to pray out loud. People sang traditional songs. The stones glowed in the dark. We burned sage and tobacco and sweet grass and cedar. We prayed.

The following morning we had a pipe ceremony. Tuffy led the ritual. He had us all sit around the buffalo skin. He burned the sweet grass. He prayed in his language, and then in English. Tuffy told us a story:

“When I was a boy, I went to the mission church here in Hays. One Sunday morning, I saw my grandma sitting in her chair. She told me that she wasn’t going to church no more. She said that the priests in the Church had been lying to her for all these years. She tried to raise her kids as Catholics. They didn’t turn out good. They drank. The ways of the priests were no good. I stopped being Catholic then. I was sixteen. I went back to our old ways.”

Other people in the circle talked about the Church. They had nothing good to say. They talked about the old boarding schools, where little kids were forcibly removed from their families and brainwashed. The children in these schools forgot their language, their customs, and their values. Some of them were beaten and abused in the church-run schools.

I am not ashamed to be a Catholic. I am ashamed of things that my Church has done.

Tuffy lit the pipe and we passed it around the circle three times. We prayed. We spoke from our hearts.

We said goodbye to the people at Fort Belknap.

 

April 2nd, 2018

This morning I looked out of the front doors of the Hays/ Lodgepole High School on the Fort Belknap reservation. I had just roused myself from my sleeping on the floor of the gymnasium. Theme was a light snow falling on our vehicles in the parking lot. The forecast called for two to four inches of snow to fall. I thought that maybe we wouldn’t get that much.

I went back to the gym to pack up my belongings. All school gymnasiums are the same: a basketball court with scoreboards, motivational posters, and flags proclaiming victories of ages past. Gyms all have the same smell: stale sweat and industrial cleaners. There were two unusual pictures on the wall. Each large banner showed an image of a former basketball hero, and each banner displayed the young man’s birth date and the day of his death. The two athletes were local boys who had died way too early. I wondered what had happened to them.

We needed to drive from Hays to Billings, a distance of about 160 miles. Normally, this journey would only take three hours. We expected it to take longer with the snowfall. We were right. It did take longer, a lot longer.

We had a total of four vehicles. Ferdinand and Kid rode in the VW microbus. Chief and Bobby rode in Bobby’s camper. Tony and Tyler drove the F250 with the travel trailer hooked on to the back. Jeremiah and I were in the Nissan. Jeremiah was driving.

We did well for the first few miles, then Jeremiah realized that the Nissan wasn’t accelerating worth a shit. This was troublesome to us, especially since the radiator had just been replaced, and perhaps we had engine problems. The car had 213,000 miles on it and a flickering check engine light. Eventually, we decided that the Nissan simply did not handle well on snow-covered roads. The tires really didn’t have the necessary amount of tread for winter driving, and we were doing exactly that.

We had to drive up to higher elevations in the mountains. The weather became evil. The snow was falling sideways, and accumulating into small drifts on the road. Our progress slowed to a crawl.

Jeremiah asked me, “Is this a blizzard?”

I told him, “Yes, it is.”

Visibility was reduced to almost zero. Trucks roared past us, and sprayed the car with snow. The windshield wiper iced up, and ceased to remove the snow. It sucked. The outside temperature was only fifteen degrees, and we were buffeted by high winds. This was clearly not a good road for a breakdown. Obviously, no road is a good road for getting stranded, but this was a potentially lethal stretch of highway.

We flipped through radio channels. We listened to a country station for a while. Then that faded out. Jeremiah searched for a few minutes, and all he could find was a Christian broadcast. Somebody was explaining that viruses were originally a good part of God’s creation, but then they became malevolent after the Fall. Jeremiah and I chose to drive without the radio.

We followed Tony and Tyler. Jeremiah carefully watched for their brake lights. We came close to rear-ending them a couple times. The road was icy in places, and the travel trailer occasionally fish-tailed. That got everybody’s attention.

We had walkie talkies in our vehicles. Tyler came up with the idea of guessing song titles from their lyrics. That game kept Tyler, Tony, Jeremiah, and me busy for at least an hour. We gave each other hints, and in the process learned more about contemporary music.

About twenty-five miles away from Billings, we saw the aftermath of an accident. Somebody rolled their car. They couldn’t keep it shiny side up. The thing was resting upside down when we passed it. Not good at all.

It took us almost six hours to get to Billings. Jeremiah and Tony were exhausted from driving. I was tired, and I was just a passenger. Here it was, the day after Easter, and we had spent the day driving through a blizzard. I love Montana.

 

 

 

 

 

March 31st, 2018

Tracy is a tall man. He dresses like a cowboy, because he is one. He sports a black Stetson. He has a belt buckle that is as big as a dinner plate, and he wears cockroach-killer boots. He has black hair and thick glasses. He has a weathered, brown face. He smiles easily and speaks softly. Tracy is sixty years old, my age.

Tracy doesn’t usually go by that name. His nickname is Ch’ing, and that is what most people call him. That is what I will call him. No, I don’t know how he got that nickname.

Ch’ing is a member of the Assiniboine tribe. He knows his history, both family and tribal. Ch’ing’s great-grandfather was fourteen years old when he fought at the Little Big Horn. This great-grandfather killed two men in battle. Afterward, the man had a price on his head and he fled to Canada with other members of the tribe. Eventually, Ch’ing’s family wound up at Fort Belknap. Ch’ing comes from a long line of warriors. His daughter, Brandi, fought as a soldier with the U.S. Army in Iraq. So, the warrior tradition continues in Ch’ing’s family.

I talked for a long time with Ch’ing. He is a horseman. I am not. Ch’ing knows everything about horses. I don’t. Ch’ing did a lot of talking. I mostly listened.

Ch’ing talked about horse medicine. He talked about how he used horses to heal kids who have been abused. He also uses his horses to help red feather warriors, combat vets who have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Ch’ing said, “They don’t even need to ride the horses. They just need to be with them. The horses know when a human is hurting. They take on that hurt. Then they roll around on the ground, and they shake off the hurt. A horse will do anything for a person. A horse will even die for a person. We lost a lot of horses when my daughter and my nephew were in Iraq.”

We talked about veterans and how hard it is for vets to come home. Ch’ing told me,

“We have rituals and ceremonies to bring the warriors home. The horses are good medicine for that. The horses help the warrior to recover his or her spirit. The warrior has get their spirit back. For many of them their spirit is still in Iraq or Vietnam or wherever.”

Ch’ing went on, “Christianity really screwed us up. They (the white people) told us that to kill was a big sin. They said that we would go to hell. But the warriors did these things in battle. These acts were war deeds, and they were honorable and noble.”

Ch’ing made me think of Hans. Hans never had any ceremony to bring his spirit home from the war. Very few people cared about what he did or what he suffered. Some of the people who actually did care only wanted to brand him as a killer. Nobody has ever honored our son as a warrior. The Native Americans do that for their own sons and daughters. They still believe that physical courage is a noble thing.

Ch’ing told me more about the horses.

“I blow into the nostrils of a horse, so that he gets my smell, so that he knows me,. The horse calms down when he knows me. Sometimes I spit in my hand and the horse licks my hand so that he can know me.”

He went on, “I have children that I call my grandchildren. They are in foster care, but I have adopted them. “Foster” is an “f” word to me. I let the children lead the horses. The one girl’s face lit up when she be with the horse. She was so shy before that, but then she started talking. The horses have helped her to heal.”

Ch’ing kept talking, “We have to protect our women and our children. We have to heal our returning warriors. The drugs, the booze, the domestic violence; they are all there because people’s spirits are wounded. Our people, our families need to heal. We have to help them.”

Amen, brother.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 31st, 2018

As we travel from reservation to reservation, people speak to us. Their stories are often very similar, especially with regards to drug abuse and domestic violence. Families are torn apart by these problems. Likewise, entire communities are decimated. These issues don’t affect any specific demographic. Although our focus is primarily on the Native Americans, other groups are also in crisis. These troubles are everywhere.

I talked to a man last night after we ate supper. He made a point of telling me that the statistics showed that the reservations were more severely affected by drugs and violence than the society at large. I wonder why that is. Why would Indians be more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse than other people?

I suspect that the answer to that question is complex, and it involves a number of variables. I have heard Native Americans place some of the blame on “historical trauma”, a kind of racial PTSD. Centuries of cultural and literal genocide have shaped Indian society. Economics must play a role. There may be genetic factors involved. I don’t know. I’m not sure that anybody knows.

A more pertinent question is what do the Native Americans (and the rest of American society) do to solve the problems. Education? Every rez I’ve seen has signs and posters about these issues. The children are taught about the dangers of drugs and about domestic violence. Enforcement? Can the police stop the flow of drugs? The war of drugs has not been a rousing success nationwide; why would it work any better on the reservations? The standard tools for dealing with drugs and violence do not seem to be enough.

Treatment and rehabilitation are particular concerns for the people we have met. The needs are great and the resources are limited. One reason for our walk to collect data on the crises in order to convince the federal government to keep the resources flowing to the reservations. Many abusers, at some point, want to change and get healthy. The fear is that Native American people won’t have necessary help available to them when they are ready to recover.

I have heard some of the Native Americans talk about getting the people back to their roots. These folks want to bring back the native languages and customs. There seems to be an identity crisis of sorts among some of the Indians. How could there not be? They want to maintain or revive the old ways, but they have to function in a larger culture that worships technology and material wealth. Going back to traditional values might be the answer, but how do the Native Americans get there? How does anybody get there?

People need a sense of purpose. Their lives need meaning. The confrontation between indigenous peoples and the power of the corporate state at Standing Rock has electrified some of these communities. Even though Standing Rock was not successful in the short term, that event has made many Native Americans aware of their power and potential. If a person knows that they can and must stand up for what is right, will they do drugs? If a person feels responsible for their people’s future, will they engage in violence against their own flesh and blood?

The man who spoke with me last night kept repeating that we have to keep trying. We cannot give up. We can’t give in. If one thing doesn’t work, then we try another tactic. He was adamant that we keep working to help our families, specially our children.

He’s right.

 

 

 

March 31st, 2018

We blew the radiator on the Nissan. That happened only a mile away from Hays. Jeremiah noticed smoke when he looked in the rearview mirror. Then he saw that the temperature gauge was pegged on hot. We pulled over.

A tribal cop pulled up behind us. We popped open the hood. Steam billowed out as I lifted it up. The cop looked inside, and said, “Oh yeah, you blew the radiator. Hopefully, you didn’t fry the engine.”

All the other vehicles were already parked up at the high school. Jeremiah got a ride there, and I stayed with the car and the cop. We had time on our hands, so we started a conversation.

Somehow or another, we began talking about the military. I told the officer about Hans’ experiences in Iraq. The cop had been deployed there too. I told the guy how Hans had been changed by his wartime experiences. Hans had come home comfortable with violence.

The cop nodded. He told me,

“I came back an asshole. I would go looking for violence, because I missed it. I would go to bars and steal away girls from their boyfriends, just so I could fight them.”

That sounded about right. Hans came back looking for the adrenalin rush. He used to go skydiving, and he rode a Kawasaki crotch rocket for a while. Hans was no stranger to dangerous activities. Soldiers come home from our wars, and they have no way to readjust to civilian life. In some ways they never readjust.

I rode in the squad car with the cop. I told him what Hans told me about fighting drugged out Iraqis, how he would empty an entire thirty round magazine into some guy and the Iraqi wouldn’t even slow down his attack. The cop told me an almost identical story. In a way I was relieved to know that Hans was telling me the truth, but the story was still appalling. The policeman told me some other horrendous tales. They were fascinating in a twisted sort of way. I didn’t doubt any of them.

I told the cop that Hans does everything to excess: he drinks too much, smokes too much, and works too much. The cop smiled and told me that he already had one hundred hours logged in his current, two week pay period. He said to me,

“I always answer a call. Some guys won’t answer a call. Some will say no. I always go in to work.”

That sounds like Hans. He worked eighty hours a week ago.

Hans starts his day with a Red Bull and a Pall Mall. The cop does the same thing. In fact, he was smoking and chugging a Monster while we were conversing.

I am meeting a lot of veterans as I visit different reservations. They all remind me of our redneck son.

 

 

 

 

 

March 31st, 2018

We currently only have eight people on the Longest Walk 5.3. I have been told that previous iterations of the walk had significantly more participants. Perhaps there were more walkers because the other walks took more southerly routes across the United States. We are traveling along the northern edge of the U.S., and it’s not always pleasant.

We walked yesterday after we arrived in Hays. Hays is a village near the southern end of the Fort Belknap rez. We had originally planned to walk five miles or more on the way to Hays. It is just as well that we didn’t do that. The weather did not cooperate with our efforts.

We were supposed to meet up with members of the local community at 6:00 PM at a crossroads approximately one mile from the high school. We were going to walk to the high school, carrying our staffs and flags. Horsemen were to accompany us. Once we arrived at the school, the people from Hays were going to give us a potluck dinner of epic proportions.

The temperature dropped significantly before we started the walk. The wind picked up and it began to snow. We got into cars and trucks to go to the crossroads. When we got there,  visibility was nearly zero and the snow was falling sideways.

We didn’t take any flags on this march. Bobby and Chief took the eagle staffs. Kid carried the chanupa (peace pipe). Tyler carried the carved wooden staff rom the Yakima tribe. Jeremiah drummed and sang. I just trudged along near the rear of our small contingent.

There was one local kid who walked with us. He was only wearing a wind breaker. No gloves. No hat. That boy was freezing. A young woman took off her own winter coat and draped it around his shoulders.

I was cold. I come from Wisconsin, so I am no stranger to frigid weather, but this storm was nasty. I could feel my beard begin to frost up. I started to grow snot-cicles around my mouth and nose. Everybody else to feeling it too. It was a short walk, but a also a brutal one.

Tony was taking photos as we walked toward the school. He looked at me, as the wind was whipping my beard around my face. Tony laughed and yelled, “Viking! Frank, say something in Viking!”. Sadly, I don’t know any Nordic languages, but  I could have made some heartfelt comments in German.

We arrived at the high school, frozen through and through. The hot food was very welcome.

I walked again this morning on my own. The mountains and hill’s were covered with snow. Cattle grazed on a hillside near the school. I could see my breath as I walked. It’s still cold, really cold.

I don’t expect us to get any new walkers for a while. I think that we will remain a small, tightknit group until spring comes to the north country.

 

 

 

March 31st, 2018

Native Americans love to share their food with guests. I never thought that there would be a chance of me gaining weight while participating in the Longest Walk, but it might happen. Every meal is a feast. I’m not sure why that is. It seems like the Indians count the number of guests, and then they cook for double that population. Perhaps, it is because they know what is like to be hungry, and they want to make sure nobody else has that experience.

I am not a fussy eater. I eat whatever is placed in front of me. It seems rude to me to refuse food of any kind. I understand that some people have particular dietary requirements. I don’t. I am basically omnivorous.

Last night the folks here at the Fort Belknap reservation had a potluck meal for us. There was buffalo meat in a variety of forms. I tried the tongue and the liver with onions. Somebody brought in a mountain of fry bread. Fry bread is excellent; it is kind of like eating an unsweetened doughnut. There were different soups. There were trays of boiled potatoes with oníons and carrots. There was roast turkey. We drank water or coffee with the food.

As far as I can see, the Indians don’t do salads. Actually, except for the potatoes, there were no vegetables on the table last night. I have not been to enough reservations to generalize, but greens do not seem to be priority in the Native American diet.

Tony was telling me a funny story about a young man from New York who was part of the walk while I was gone. This guy would always ask if the meal being served was vegan. It never was. If a person shares a meal with Native Americans, it is almost guaranteed that meat or dairy will be part of the menu. That’s just how it is.

It goes back to the culture. These people have traditionally been hunters and fishermen. They hunt deer and elk for food. They eat buffalo in this part of America. When we were in the Pacific Northwest, the people ate salmon. It’s who they are.

 

March 30th, 2018

The Amtrak station in Havre, Montana, is underwhelming. It is only open from 10:15 AM until 6:15 PM. The station consists of one small waiting room, with a tiny adjoining office. The waiting room contains several uncomfortable benches, some sickly plants, three vending machines (one of which is inoperable), and a variety of outdated magazines.  When I arrived at the station, there was one woman working in the office. She was accompanied by two small children. Apparently, she doesn’t need daycare. She lets her son and daughter run wild as she attends to her infrequent customers. Only two trains come into Havre each day: the Empire Builder as it rolls west to Seattle, and the Empire Builder that runs east toward Chicago.

I had been on the westbound Empire Builder for twenty-four hours. I was tired and paranoid. I had been texting Tony concerning my arrival time in this godforsaken Montana town, but he had not been responding. That bothered me. When I got off the train, there was no one there to greet me. My immediate reaction was to silently swear, “You fuckers.” I knew that the Longest Walkers were at the nearby Rocky Boy rez, and they knew that I was on my way to join them. So, where were these guys?

I made some calls. Bobby answered, and he told me that Tony was on his way. I relaxed a bit. I went outside of the station and I could feel the bite of the cold wind. I began to regret my decision to rejoin this ragtag group that was wandering from reservation to reservation.

Havre looked uninviting. The was plenty of snow and dirt, and a statue of some forgotten pioneer stood in front of the train station. It’s one of those western towns were every business establishment also doubles as a casino.

I saw a car pull up. It was Jeremiah’s Nissan, but Jeremiah wasn’t driving it. Some other guy was behind the wheel. I recognized Ferdinand (aka Fern) in the passenger seat. Fern saw me and they parked in front of the station. I threw my sleeping bag and other gear into the back of the car. The driver was Tyler, an acupuncture student/carpenter from San Francisco. He had joined the walk the day after I went home. The two of them were on their way to a local Indian craft store. Then they were going to pick up laundry.

I found out from Fern and Tyler that the group had just finished a massive walk/run with about three hundred school children. It was a rousing success, and it had gone on longer than expected. I was relieved that they hadn’t just forgotten about me. I was sorry that I missed that walk. It sounded very cool.

Rocky Boy is a Chippewa Cree reservation not far from the Canadian border. It is about a forty-five minute drive from Havre. The land is hilly with deep creek beds. In the distance are the Bear Paws mountains. The Bear Paws actually look like a bear reclining on the earth, with his head and paws facing to the west. The mountains are partially tree-covered. The rest of the rez is not.

There is a college campus on the reservation. It is called “Stone Child”. The name made me think of Jim Hendrix. I think I was conflating “Stone Free” with “Voodoo Child”. Hey, I hadn’t slept much. Rocky Boy and Stone Child are both translations of the same Indian name. We were staying in a common room in a part of the college building. Another night of sleeping bags on the floor. I was good with that.

The tribe had a party going on that evening in the school gymnasium next to the college. They were planning to honor their outstanding students and school athletes. I met the other walkers at the gym. We quickly caught up on recent events. I had been gone for nearly a month, so I had missed their journey from Puget Sound to central Montana. They had already covered a lot of miles, and they had visited eight more reservations in my absence.

The tribal members started drumming in a circle in the middle of the gym. They sang their traditional songs. People left the bleachers to join together for a round dance. I got up too. I am generally not a dancer, but this was pretty simple. We all joined hands and kind of shuffled around the drummers. There were old people dancing, and little kids, and everybody from the ages in between. Lots of smiles. The children were laughing. It was fun.

The tribe recognized the kids from the school. They also mentioned our visit to their land. Bobby made sure that surveys went out to collect data on drug abuse and domestic violence. Then we all ate fried chicken and noodle salad.

I walked outside just before sunset. The sun was shining on Bear Paws, and making the bear’s head glow gold and green. The western sky was bright orange. The sun dipped below the horizon, and I could just make out the evening star. The mountains still shown in the twilight. The trees were too dark to see, but the white patches of snow were visible. Then the stars came out.

 

 

 

 

March 26th, 2018

I have to pack a couple bags. I have to run a couple errands too. My train leaves Milwaukee at 3:52 PM, in theory. We are talking about Amtrak, so all times are negotiable. Between now and then, I have to get my stuff together so that I can hook up with the Longest Walk 5.3 again. The walkers are somewhere in the middle of Montana, and I plan on finding them.

I had hoped to leave home with everything organized and settled. I dislike loose ends. I like to have it all neat and tidy upon my departure.

Not.

The sad fact is that there are always loose ends. Always. There is always something forgotten, or something unforeseen. There is never a perfect time to start a new adventure. A person who waits for the perfect conditions never actually begins anything.

Karin and I visited our loved one yesterday afternoon. She had previously told me about her anxiety attacks. She always seems to find something to worry about, as do I. I think it is a genetic thing. It is a hereditary obsession. The mind never stops troubleshooting, so the person never starts living in the moment.

I am just going to go. Karin will drop me off, and I will sever the connection, at least somewhat. I am not capable of completely separating myself from the people back home. Perhaps that is a good thing. I don’t know. It just is.

I heard that it is cold in Montana.

 

 

March 20th, 2018

Hans has a hard job. He has always had difficult jobs. Every place he has ever worked has been physically and mentally demanding: the mail room at the Eagle newspaper, the Army, the oilfields, and now a concrete company. He has always had to push himself to the edge. It shows.

Hans drives a big pump truck for the concrete company. It has a 42 meter boom for the pipe. Hans transfers the concrete from the mixer trucks to the place where the finishers lay the slab. Sometimes he pours seventy yards of concrete for a house slab. Sometimes he pours a couple hundred yards for a larger project. He has to make sure that the work goes fast enough that the concrete doesn’t begin to set up in the pipes on his truck. The clean up at the end of his shift is always arduous. It is not unusual for him to have chip pieces of concrete from in his hopper.

Hans doesn’t have a start time. He is on call every day. He might have to go in at 6:00 AM, or he might need to show up at one in the morning. He might only work eight hours or he might have to work sixteen. He never knows. One day his dispatcher had him working for twenty-two hours straight. Even the corporate management thought that was a bit excessive.

Hans comes back from work dog tired and dirty. He typically slumps into a chair on his patio and lights up a Pall Mall. He cracks open a Lime-a-rita, and he sits there, staring into the distance. Gabby generally leaves him alone for at least half an hour. That’s a wise move.

Overall, Hans likes his work. He has always been good with his hands. He likes machinery; big or fast, or both. He prefers to work outdoors. So, construction is good fit for him. It just takes a lot out of him.

While Karin and I were visiting, Hans would light up and start talking. Usually, work is the initial topic of discussion. Later, he might talk about guns, or the Army, or cars, or those damn liberals. After a few drinks, Hans sometimes tells stories from Iraq. Some of those are funny. Some are very disturbing. He always tells his tales in the same matter-of-fact kind of monotone. He talks about driving a tank in the same tone as he talks about shooting a guy dead. It is like he is remembering things from a distance; as an observer, rather than as an active participant. He often would not look at us as he was speaking. He would look at something far away. Maybe he has to remember things that way.

At some point the dogs come out to the yard. Hans plays with his puppy. Hans smokes one cigarette after another. Fatigue sets in. I can see his shoulders sag. He becomes even quieter than usual. He gets a text regarding the next day’s assignment. He finishes up his last beer, and then goes to bed.

He needs to be up early.