The American Fighter

"The Battle of the Bulge was over. Left behind were two tiny ravaged countries, destroyed homes and farms, dead cattle, dead souls, dead minds -- and more than 75,000 bodies.

Autumn Fog was creeping back to the Fuhrer like some huge wounded beast. It reminded many of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Men shuffled painfully through the snow, feet encased in burlap bags, with shawls wound around their heads like careless turbans. They plodded on frozen feet, bedeviled by biting winds, bombs and shells. The wounded and sick crept back to the homeland with rotting insides, ulcers oozing, pus running from destroyed ears. They staggered east on numb feet with despair in their hearts, stricken by dysentery, which left its bloody trail of filth in the snow.

Their will was broken. Few who survived the retreat believed there was now any chance of German victory. Almost every man brought back a story of doom, of Allied might, and of the terrifying weapon forged in the Ardennes: the American fighter. The GI who came out of the battle was the quintessential American -- the man Hitler did not believe existed."

- John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography

Indian River, Tahquamenon Falls, & Paradise

Mon. August 20, 2018

Spent and mentally exhausted today after a week home, fulfilling more social obligations in a week there than in a month in the UP. Nevertheless we are on the road again, traveling east across the UP towards Tahquamenon Falls for camping. Skies over the lake and across the countryside are drab and gray, this afternoon. I hope to God Tahquamenon is not swarming with tourists. Similarly-inclined graffiti artists beat me to the Seney rest stop, where the men's room stall displayed several anti-Trump slogans already. Today would be a great day for Donald the Dictator to keel over. 

B & I finally hit the road north on Saturday afternoon around 4:00 p.m. after I slept in late. Because we had picked up my new lease on the trip down, we had to drive separately back up north, with B following close behind me. Ate McDonald's in Pinconning; all rest stops along I-75 fairly busy with Saturday traffic. Still not a bad drive, when cut in half. We stopped at the Indian River compound, which we arrived at precisely at sundown: blazing red-orange sun was sinking into the piney horizon just as we were getting off exit 310. 

Dean & Mary Ann and their two big old dogs greeted us at the doorway, the air smelling nostalgically of pine needles. It was good to see them, like old friends, though still strange to me to realize I have an adult-to-adult relationship with them, now. They seemed genuinely pleased to host us. We sat, the four of us, in the screen room off the back porch, watching highlights from the Woodward Dream Cruise on local ABC, the light from Joel's memorial in the backyard increasingly-visible in the blackening night. Reminisced about old times back at the Burt Lake cottage -- my dad drunkenly ascending the wooden staircase there; Frankie breaking his toe on a rock in the shallows; Frankie & Patrick getting attacked by bees through the boardwalk, while I escaped, unscathed; Hoppies. 

At night, the windows open in the sticky summer heat, we listened hysterically from the second floor boarding room to the shouts and curses yelped by drunken barhoppers stumbling from The Brass Rail to The Pinehurst down Lake Street. 

Huber's were up early Sunday morning with the dogs, and they had coffee ready for us. Dean offered to take us out to breakfast, before our departure, to which I reluctantly agreed, not wanting to disappoint him by exclaiming that I hated breakfast. He drove us there in the golf cart, motoring through the side streets to a first restaurant, which had a thirty minute wait, a flood of tourists, then to a second restaurant, on the Sturgeon River, which also had a thirty minute wait. Waiting, we sat on the riverbank with Dean, listening to him tell stories, watching the tourists. When finally seated we all had coffee and ordered. B had the nutty french toast, and I got regular french toast. It tasted pretty good and I felt surprisingly awake. Following a cool golf cart ride back, we said our goodbyes to the Huber's and their lovable pups. 

I started getting tired on the Mackinac Bridge. Praise the Lord we weren't headed south on a summer Sunday. The line of cars waiting for the bridge was four-five times as long as I had ever seen it; it backed up all along U.S. 2 going east towards the bridge, almost as far as the St. Ignace city limits. I stopped for a smoking break at one of the roadside pullouts just outside of the busy section of St. Ignace, but still there was a heavy tourist presence all around. Huge traffic clusters, driving east. Driving west, I laughed hysterically at the pickup truck warriors attempting to pass people in the east-bound lane -- "gonna be a long day for you," I muttered to myself, enjoying the schadenfreude. We made rest stop breaks at the junction between Newberry and Seney and in Whetmore, where we fueled up on gas and coffee for the home stretch. Arrived in Marquette in late afternoon, home sweet home on the big lake. Smoked and lounged, flipping between the Little League World Series and ID Discovery most of the night, listened to a couple hours of the Hitler biography by John Toland; Hitler has now invaded Yugoslavia, with a definite date set for his ill-fated Operation Barbarosa. 

 Tues., August 21, 2018 -- Dawn

Woke around 7 a.m. to a chilly, damp fog outside the tent. Loaded a bowl, used the outhouse, then hit the trail solo. Because the campsites here provided little privacy, I've had to venture out a ways to find a secret smoking spot. There's a hidden trail that goes by Highway 123 before looping back towards the Falls, with a boardwalk consisting of two wood planks laid side by side that cuts through a clearing of beach grass and thorn bushes, a sort of bog area wet with mosquitoes.

Sitting in a spot near there, now, marked by two cigarette butts strewn among the pinestraw. Fog is thicker here, among the pines, veiling the sky in a gray misty haze above and between the jack pines. Mostly a pine forest, with younger oak trees and cedars a generation beneath the towering jack pines. Below that, there are dying, moss-eaten pines with sad, genuflecting branches. A few birds are chirping to life in the branches and pine boughs, with an occasional chipmunk or red squirrel chattering like a rattle.

Closer to my level, along the detritus, there's an endless layer of ferns that extends for miles outside of this campground area. Mostly, the ferns are a shade lighter green than the pines -- almost a lime green -- but in sun-strewn patches there are ferns revealing the first yellowing indications of autumn, ever faintly. Beside me, alongside my paperback copy of Burning Daylight and a cold cup of Holiday coffee, there are dead pine boughs that have turned the rusty color of the pinestraw. The ground is coated entirely in pine needles, forming a soft bedding I could sleep on, in addition to patches of reindeer moss, pine cones of multiple varieties, other twigs, and heaps of gray-brown sand. I hear some breed of miniature red squirrel gnawing pine cones to the forest floor, and the first rumblings of an eighteen-wheeler logging truck barreling through the silence. Sipping this bitter day-old coffee, I remember FBI Agent Dale Cooper, and my brother -- "Damn fine coffee".

Lower Falls

We found coffee at a little gift shop near the Lower Falls parking lot after hiking from the campground to the lower falls. Sitting on a boardwalk bench overlooking the falls and rapids, tourist-watching in the early morning rush and listening to the calming, steady whir of the falls, spraying mist. A sign here says this spot used to be part of the Munising Saltwater Sea millions of years ago, and I wonder what manner of foul sea dinosaurs existed in this wilderness, what raptors and magnificent flying dino-birds flew these Northern skies.

Whitefish Point Lighthouse

S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald memorial

Loud thunder heavy rain

Thin line between joy and pain

It's a long strange trip it's all insane

You ain't never gonna be the same

Living life through the night

Thin line of a lightning strike

Sometimes the only light

When the moon is tucked away

Pistons pumping

Minds are racing

It's hard to sleep man

When I'm shaking

Bad news surrounds me

It always found me

Creeping up when things are good

Yeah the dark days find a way

Loud thunder heavy rain

Thin line between joy and pain

It's a long strange trip it's all insane

You ain't never gonna be the same

Living life through the night

Thin line of a lightning strike

Sometimes the only light

When the moon is tucked away

- Cody Jinks

"Every Man to His Post"

When I said in the House of Commons the other day that I thought it improbable that the enemy's air attack in September could be more than three times as great as it was in August, I was not, of course, referring to barbarous attacks upon the civil population, but to the great air battle which is being fought out between our fighters and the German Air Force.

You will understand that whenever the weather is favourable, waves of German bombers, protected by fighters, often three or four hundred at a time, surge over this island, especially the promontory of Kent, in the hope of attacking military and other objectives by daylight. However, they are met by our fighter squadrons and nearly always broken up; and their losses average three to one in machines and six to one in pilots.

This effort of the Germans to secure daylight mastery of the air over England is, of course, the crux of the whole war. So far it has failed conspicuously. It has cost them very dear, and we have felt stronger, and actually are relatively a good deal stronger, than when the hard fighting began in July. There is no doubt that Herr Hitler is using up his fighter force at a very high rate, and that if he goes on for many more weeks he will wear down and ruin this vital part of his Air Force. That will give us a very great advantage.

On the other hand, for him to try to invade this country without having secured mastery in the air would be a very hazardous undertaking. Nevertheless, all his preparations for invasion on a great scale are steadily going forward. Several hundreds of self-propelled barges are moving down the coasts of Europe, from the German and Dutch harbours to the ports of Northern France; from Dunkirk to Brest; and beyond Brest to the French harbours in the Bay of Biscay.

Besides this, convoys of merchant ships in tens of dozens are being moved through the Straits of Dover into the Channel, dodging along from port to port under the protection of the new batteries which the Germans have built on the French shore. There are now considerable gatherings of shipping in the German, Dutch, Belgian, and French harbours -- all the way from Hamburg to Brest. Finally, there are some preparations made of ships to carry an invading force from the Norwegian harbours.

Behind these clusters of ships or barges, there stand very large numbers of German troops, awaiting the order to go on board and set out on their very dangerous and uncertain voyage across the seas. We cannot tell when they will try to come; we cannot be sure that in fact they will try at all; but no one should blind himself to the fact that a heavy, full-scale invasion of this island is being prepared with all the usual German thoroughness and method, and that it may be launched now -- upon England, upon Scotland, or upon Ireland, or upon all three.

If this invasion is going to be tried at all, it does not seem that it can be long delayed. The weather may break at any time. Besides this, it is difficult for the enemy to keep these gatherings of ships waiting about indefinitely, while they are bombed every night by our bombers, and very often shelled by our warships which are waiting for them outside.

Therefore, we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon's Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilisation than these brave old days of the past.

Every man and woman will therefore prepare himself to do his duty, whatever it may be, with special pride and care. Our fleets and flotillas are very powerful and numerous; our Air Force is at the highest strength it has ever reached, and it is conscious of its proved superiority, not indeed in numbers, but in men and machines. Our shores are well fortified and strongly manned, and behind them, ready to attack the invaders, we have a far larger and better-equipped mobile Army than we have ever had before.

Besides this, we have more than a million and a half men of the Home Guard, who are just as much soldiers of the Regular Army as the Grenadier Guards, and who are determined to fight for every inch of the ground in every village and in every street.

It is with devout but sure confidence that I say: Let God defend the Right.

These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings of London are, of course, a part of Hitler's invasion plans. He hopes, by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty imperial city, and make them a burden and an anxiety to the Government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing.

Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibre of the Londoners, whose forbears played a leading part in the establishment of Parliamentary institutions and who have been bred to value freedom far above their lives. This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.

What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration he has caused in London have been removed. He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe, and until the Old World -- and the New -- can join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honour, upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown.

This is a time for everyone to stand together, and hold firm, as they are doing. I express my admiration for the exemplary manner in which all the Air Raid Precautions services of London are being discharged, especially the Fire Brigade, whose work has been so heavy and also dangerous. All the world that is still free marvels at the composure and fortitude with which the citizens of London are facing and surmounting the great ordeal to which they are subjected, the end of which or the severity of which cannot yet be foreseen.

It is a message of good cheer to our fighting Forces on the seas, in the air, and in our waiting Armies in all their posts and stations, that we sent them from this capital city. They know that they have behind them a people who will not flinch or weary of the struggle -- hard and protracted though it will be; but that we shall rather draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival, and of a victory won not only for ourselves but for all; a victory won not only for our own time, but for the long and better days that are to come.

Winston Churchill

Broadcast to London

September 11, 1940

Clerks

Fuck Trump