The Soap People

  Lake Bonaparte, on the north western edge of the Adirondacks, has a human history known in its basic form to every school kid in the area; but the lake has some deep secrets ... to which I may be the only living witness.
        The lake’s namesake, Joseph Bonaparte, was installed by his brother Napolean as king of Spain; but after a short and unpopular reign, was driven out by his reluctant subjects.  He got away with the crown jewels though, and with  enough gold to eventually buy a big enough swath of Adirondack wilderness to start  his own country.
   At the heart of  Bonaparte country was a lake that, sight unseen, he named “Diana” after the goddess of the hunt.  He built a residence twenty  miles away in the hamlet of Natural Bridge, which was then little more than a convenient river crossing where the Indian River plunges into the ground and runs through caverns.  The Bonaparte house was less  than a hundred yards from where I lived  until we moved down state.  it was lined with sheet iron for security, and people have speculated that it had an underground escape route to the caverns, but the foundation and the basement were still there when I was living in Natural Bridge and I can attest that there was no tunnel out of the basement and anyway, the Natural Bridge Caverns, are no place anyone would want to escape to.  
   That house was  his residence only while  he constructed a railroad spur   to the shore of the lake and built  there a grand lodge  he called The “Hermitage”, to which he bought many guests and furnishings, including a few gondolas.
   Joseph found an American mistress and had a child by her, but he never found the fertile and tillable land he would need to sustain his estate, and after a few years he abandoned the territory to the Black Flies, Mosquitoes, Horse Flies,  Deer Flies,   and the invisible  midges so small  they could just about fly right through a  silk stocking. 
    Left behind, his daughter Caroline eventually married one Zebulon Benton,    who adopted  a Napoleonic hat and kept  his hand in his shirt when photographed.    Benton somehow got a Swiss investor  to back him in a scheme to build an iron smelter – a great stone pyramid  – a mile or two down the Bonaparte  outlet. Iron ore was to be brought there for smelting  and the pig iron hauled away forty miles   by ox cart  over  roads he had to build.  He built the town for his workers too,  , and he called it “ Alpine”, despite the absence of any visible mountains. The building of the little town itself provided more work than the short period of its iron smelting ever did.    My mother remembered when some of the buildings were standing.   Now the foundation walls are spilled, the cellars only dents in the second growth forest floor, the smelter mounted  by Birch and Aspen, looking like an Aztec ruin.
 Joseph Bonaparte’s Hermitage burnt many years ago and  so did the Hermitage hotel which succeeded it;  but maybe a gondola rests intact somewhere on the bottom of the lake, or drifts in swirling currents deep off Bullock Point.
   Of ourse, after Joseph was gone,  everyone called his lake   “Lake Bonaparte,” rather than “Diana”.
  I don’t know what  Indians called the lake, but the Algonquins and  the Iroquois who drove them out were here only for their hunting seasons.
   As a ten year old, scuffling idly  with my shoe as I sat on the doorstep of our Bonaparte camp, I  turned up a flint spear point. More recently  a backhoe working  near the outlet of the lake turned up a set of bones from an ancient burial, which shows that though people may never have lived here permanently, they have been dying here for a long time. 

  Since we used to leave Lake Bonaparte when summer ended and return again when the next summer began, as a child  I never saw the lake frozen over, never walked on it, heard it groan,  or watched the ice break up and sink to the bottom in the spring. For me, it was always summer at Bonaparte.  
    Deep in the lake where the ice sinks to, there are no seasons, and
all time is a
swirling  present.

   To me the   child,  “Bonaparte” suggested  “bones apart.” , even after I was told about the fugitive  king who had tried to settle here. I often though of  my Grandfather’s friend Ernie Thomas,  one of the few people actually bon at Alpine, who, years before I was born, fell through the ice and his bones are still down there.
          In the nineteen twenties,  for five hundred dollars, my grandfather Bert Failing  brought   an island near the north shore of Bonaparte  from a logger who owned much of this part of the lake then.    We call it “Loon Island”, but naturally most everybody else calls it “Failing’s Island”.
 Loon Island was only a peninsula when the aboriginal hunter  lost his spear point there, but it was made an island by the dam Zeb Benton built at the outlet to power his sawmill. 
.     Loon Island Camp was framed mostly by Ernie Thomas and his son Harlan, with a monumental   fireplace of stones carried from the lake shore and few from Alpine foundations and from the abandoned mica mine behind Round Island. 
   The building was intended as a hunting and fishing camp Within a few years the mantel-piece had as stuffed Pheasant, a Wood Duck, and a Snowy Owl that a  farmer had shot as it perched his barn  and then brought to my great grandfathers medical office to finish dying. Covering the stove pipe hole left over the mantel for winter hunting hook-ups of a box-stove, was a six foot set of Longhorn Steer horns that my grandfather  brought back from a train trip to Texas. The battered furniture and implements from two generations of older camps  made the the place old, even when it was new.
   A pump house, a boathouse, and an ice house went up in the next few years. By 1943, when I was born, there already  were too many of us for that camp, so my grandparents built another cottage back off the bluff nearer the middle of the island; later a log sleeping cabin, a boathouse, a gazebo, and a bathhouse.
 Grandfather Failing, who practiced every profession going in Lewis County, outside of mortuary science, medicine, and mink ranching , retired at the age of fifty-two so that he could  fish. Fishing to him was not   sitting and drifting and dreaming, but a dead serious, and often  hopeless, pursuit.    
 Though most of the other lakes and ponds in the area are red and acidic from the tannic swamps, Lake Bonaparte  is essentially a big, clear spring hole, fed and enriched mostly by  springs issuing from limestone. In Joseph’s and in great grandfather Drury’s time it was Lake Trout and Whitefish water, but since then its population has changed … and  it is mostly we who have changed it.
 The lake originally had been populated by a stranded species of Char, which evolved into the lake trout now found in some northern lakes. Northern Pike, Smallmouth   Bass, Whitefish, Bullheads and Ling (only one of which I ever saw, floating dead in the middle of the lake) may have been native to the lake when the aboriginals fished here. The Lake Trout was the fish of my great grandfather, the Walleyed Pike the fish of  my grandfather. I saw my last Bonaparte  Walleye  when I was snorkeling off our island, and now it is the largemouth Bass which provides most of game fishing, though the Northern Pike are doing well living off the Rock Bass and Sunfish that   my grandfather  introduced  for the kids to catch. The state stocks the lake with trout, but the trout are dependent on the stocking program, to survive all the predatory species.
   
   Since World War One the old Pine Camp military reservation wilderness bordering the west shore of the lake had morphed into Fort Drum, the heart of which is the impact zone for heavy artillery practice. The impact was at times loud enough that it rattled  our windows and made the old train bell on top of the camp resonate. Then people used to complain that the artillery   kept the fish from biting.
 By the time he was eighty years old, my grandfather  was walleyed  with cataracts.  But he had learned to   walk the island by   feeling the path with his feet, and using a  flashlight  intensified by reflective paint on the the tree trunks. The lake itself, he knew by heart.
 He fished   mostly at night, hoping the fish might be active when the artillery was asleep, hoping against possibility, as if it were the ancestral Red Char that he sought.  

    One morning my brother Herb told me that  the night before, my grandfather  had hooked and brought to the boat  a Walleye as big as a log: a monster that got off because the landing net was too small.     
   For days, my grandfather was as grim and silent as if the bottom had drained out of the lake.     

    Less than a week after he had lost the grandfather Walleye, I was searching the flotsam of our beach  for baby snapping turtles disguised as rotting leaves.  I liked to take one home each fall for the aquarium, although they always escaped the aquarium and often disappeared forever in the house, except for one we found mummified under a radiator thirty years after its escape. 
   I found no turtles that day, but in the scrim of leaves, lake weed, and twig ends, was my grandfather’s briar pipe ... startling me  as if it were a part of him lying there.
  It  must have fallen out of his pocket during his struggle with the Walleye.  I picked it up and ran up onto  the island with it.
   Grandfather was sitting on his porch, still brooding over the lake. He accepted the pipe without saying anything.
   He stared at it for a moment then closed it in his hand and examined me with the pearls that were his  eyes. 
    Still, he said nothing, and I backed away; but I think it was then that he decided to share his secret. I was the one he had taught stillness, patience, and quietude.  I was the one who would inherit his fishing tackle, if not also his desperate mission.

  “Come on Davey,” he said one day after dinner.  “Get your hat and bug shirt on; it’s time you and
me do some special fishing,”
It wasn’t just fishing,
    it wasn’t really fishing at all.

    We went straight to the open lake   where we never fished because there was no shoal  or weed bed. My grandfather took his bearings on some landmarks then lowered the grapple type anchor twenty or thirty feet down while telling me to get in the middle of the boat and row in slow circles. 
  I didn’t make many circles before he  grunted and began hauling, eventually bringing aboard a rope tied to the handle of a. glass jug.    He shipped the anchor, left the jug to float on the surface, and then hauled some more, as I stared into the depths and   a   cage began to appear: a  wire cage like the ones he made for fish-traps, but this was  larger, and those  vague objects in it were not fish.   
     Amber colored bodies, human shaped, some without a few or any limbs, and some limbs without bodies,   hard and pale amber like old glycerine soap.

They were small as children or dwarf peoples, and nothing remained of hair or clothing,  victims maybe of a battle on the ice, or they might have been  systematic deep lake burials by a vanished culture that knew of the cold, whirling currents with the power to transubstantiate flesh into essential soap - currents grandfather discovered when he snagged his first gyring  while  trolling where few or none had bothered to fish before.  He had accumulated half a dozen complete bodies over the years, plus the occasional arm or leg, and a recognizable dog.
   I was fascinated, and  no more frightened or repelled than by any fossil.
   So now that I had witnessed his dubious treasure, Grandfather   opened the cage door and freed the Soap People, telling me, “Now Davey, say nothing to anyone about this.”

  We didn’t even speak to one another about the Soap People   after that.
    I frequently dreamed of them gyring in the deep of my sleep, but our silence on the subject was so complete that sometimes, especially in later years when I no longer even dreamed of them,  I wondered if it was only in my dreams that the Soap People  had existed.
   That fall my grandfather closed camp by himself after the rest of us had left.  Still tough as leather at his age, he hauled the boats out of the water and carried the outboard motors to the pump house, then he went to Florida where he and my grandmother wintered each year.
 But he may have known already of the cancer developing in his spine, and which kept him from returning the next season, or ever again.
     When I was in my early thirties and beginning to wonder about my memories, I canoed to approximately that same spot near the middle of the lake, a location he had triangulated using shore markers I didn’t know and and that probably no longer existed … and  there I rowed in slow circles for at least half an hour, grappling with the same anchor Grandfather had used, but got nothing.
 The Soap People may have dissolved in the  more acid water of these days.  Maybe  the remnants  washed up on our beach, looking like the chunks of soap   we used to bring down there to wash the dog or own hair.  Maybe we brushed the sand off a few  and set them  on the  raft  until we used them up. Some things,  we will never know.

The One and Several Oren Pierce

    The self-inventing writer slash hair cutter slash jeweler slash "osteoempathetic"    healer Oren Pierce  lives less than a mile  down  through the woods from here, in a rented, concrete silo that someone once almost finished converting to comfortable living quarters.
     He calls it "Cayuga Tower" because it's very near the lake, but it's  in a  barnyard  long ago abandoned, even by the barn, and so over-grown  with Buckthorn, Juniper, and Pear that he can't see the  lake for the trees; he can't even see the sky from his Cayuga tower.
 Wiring runs in and out of the windows, and twists up the  silo along with Woodbine and Poison Ivy vines thick as your wrist.  I don't know of any plumbing.  A depression in the yard  with cattails growing at the bottom is either a failed dug-pond or a sump hole.  Or both.
  It's cold comfort there in the tower, so when we go away,  Oren happily comes up here  to look after our  place and stay  in the back-yard  trailer with a sky-viewing cupola and the comfy  bed downstairs that converts to a bath tub.  He says he writes well there. Maybe in the bathtub.
   
  Lately Oren has been publishing stories about   a pale-faced, sort-of bear whose father (according to her Black Bear Mother's early  stories) is a Polar Bear;  although Mother Bear later  confesses that  Nowella's father was a White Man.  Owen Pierce's  stories keep reminding us of this naked  fact.  But oftn in the stories, what we have here seems to be nothing more than a trunk full of stuffed animals … and the scale of these creatures shifts unsettlingly, at least for simple understanding.  Clearly not stories for children, unless they are haunted children.
    .    

The Call of the Water Pig

During the February  we spent on   Hydra  pretending to be writers,  all we heard   at night were    donkey calls  and a beeping like the  warning  from a radio tower;  but there WAS no radio tower …  the island wasn't even electrified back then. 
 We told ourselves the beeping was the call of the Water Pig: a creature named by either Eric or John, which was   the nexus or Plexis, or mascot, or totem animal of the shared intestinal affliction we   called"Water Pig Fever".

    Morning light on Hydra came with  soft voices,  more donkeys,  roosters crowing and Maria's  "Ta Paraneo Ena Etimo," echoing up the stair well.  Her husband, Jimmy the Egyptian, had purchased Maria from  her family after a year long tour of the islands,  looking over fishermen's widows, which  were plentiful and inexpensive.   Jimmy  had tried and failed to teach Maria " Breakfast is Ready " in English, so instead he taught us the Greek       Jimmy - short, broad, and sixtyish, was a Matre'D  at   two harbor-front restaurants during the tourist season.  His English was very  good, and he spoke all major tourist languages.  He confided to us that he had worked for the C.I.A. during WW2.
            There were only the three chairs and Jimmy's steamer trunk there in the front room where we took breakfast.  Maria …  maybe thirty five years old … grave, silent, and beautiful,  brought out a single burner  stove that was little more than a Bunsen Burner on the flooor. She boiled Greek coffee  in a little pot, served thick as gruels , then she took the stove and retired to the back room. 
 We ate  the coffee with spoons, using  Jimmy's  trunk for a table.
    Afterwards he clapped his hands, and Maria emerged to clear the dishes away so Jimmy could open the trunk from which, over the course of several days, he produced clippings and a few novels in which he was mentioned.     While on Hydra would see few other local women  other than Maria, but Jimmy told us he could arrange for the four of us to have a party with some young women from another island, for money of course, but we did't take him up on it, and anyway I would not be untrue to Maria.
      
           It was  too cold for pretending to write in our unheated room, so  after breakfast we went to the harbor front;  John  toting his typewriter.
    We sat  at tables  in the sun,  but if an elbow was overtaken by the shade,  the arm knew it and one moved the chair a notch. We drank the instant Nescafe which was favored at the cafes (I longing for Maria's wine dark gurel) and we ate  the Biff Stake, which I am pretty sure was  the thrice cooked mutton kept on display in the store windows.
   In this way time passed and was marked.  Not much writing got done at the waterfront, but the typewriter made friends.
             A "lawyer" from Atlanta    decompressing on his way back home from  Viet Nam …"Veit WHAT? "which he   had left because lately everyone there was carrying a gun.     
  Fred, an ex G.I. gone bohemian after Service in peace time Germany, now renting a village house cheap, sleeping in a arched nook  in the wall ( intended I suspect as an alter for the icons ) and writing  experimental poems, which he sprinkled with various spices and food products , then baked in a slow oven.  Fred and George the Cop and Bob George the lawyer posed with us for the street photographer, who didn't have much work then.   Fred pointed out the Great Novelist X, with half a dozen people bubbling around him .
      Somewhere along there a certain  Russian Dancer   happened  along, but she made no impression on me …   attached to Maria as I was. 
 
    
    We spent an evening in a taverna where we actually danced with fishermen,  like in Zorba the Greek …. although the movie hadn't been made yet … holding onto their hankerchiefs.
   One old man,  after not dancing at all but drinking a lot,  crawled across the floor in front of the bar (where the keeper couldn't see him ) and all the way  down to the wine casks in the back of the room,  where he opened a spout and lay mouth agape under it until the tavern keeper  shut it off and dragged him out, to crawl home
    Maybe it was there then or another night, but somewhere John met the Russian Dancer who I never heard about when we were on the island, but whose existence   casts some doubt on his story to us about how he had been invited by one of the dancing fishermen   to go out squid spearing by lantern light. 

     
The steel blue  sea was  still too cold for swimming, but the rocks along the shore beyond the harbor were warm  on the surface.  
   While John was off "spearing squid" somewhere, one day , or several days,   Eric and I  walked out along and out of the harbor,  around the  point to take off our shirts and stretch out on the rocks .

       I rose up on my elbows the day I remember when I heard the outboard motor of a small  boat puttering along a fifty  yards or less off shore.
     A man in a suit was at the stern, hand on the controls,  while a white haired man in  f  whites stood at the bow scanning over the waves, like  the Captain of all he surveyed. 
      Surveying  us …then using dramatic gestures understandable at a great distance, the Captain  directed his stern man to steer the boat to shore.

      Without introductions or mention of any particular destination,  The Captain directed  us  to ride along.  
   We were boys, we were good sports,  and we climbed aboard.

      First stop was at a   near-shore island about the size of a house,  with a small white-washed chapel on top of it.  I read that there a lot of these on small islands off Greek shores: memorials to fishermen lost at sea.  Disembarked, the Captain pried a limpet off the shore rocks and ate it out of the shell with his front teeth, and told us to do the same.  Fruit of the Sea, he said.
     He told us he had come here, to light a candle and pray for his dead mother.
        We followed him up the the chapel, but   the door to the chapel was locked.  
         The Captian directed us to pick up a nearby log and batter the door in.  We did what we were told.  He was  crazy, but he was the captain.  My  apologies to all the dead fishermen and their widows.      

      The Captain lit a candle.   We lurked  uneasily outside while he prayed loud and long for his mother and also sang a few songs for his mother.
     After a while, the Captain led us back down the rocks to where the stern man waited, holding the boat off the rocks.
      Next stop was another village, smaller and more stretched out  than Hydra.  We stopped and tied up at a long dock extending from a house with a lot of grape arbor shade out front. There was as party going on.
       A wedding party.  The stern man stayed with the boat.  The Captain led us to the gathering, sat us down, and brought a serving girl to uswith her tray of many different olives.
  Then he grabbed the bride - still in her wedding dress -  and danced her around some.  
      A fellow in jodpurs appeard, carrying a shotgun which he left leaning against a wall.  He was returning from a short bird hunt and I think we learned that he was the groom, which may be some kind of tradition.
    Whoever the hunter was,  our fun loving guide picked up the shotgun and fired it through the arbor overhead.  This may be fairly common behavior in the more eastern mediteranian countries, but the other wedding guests soon disarmed him, and  our boatman suddenly appeared.   All insisted that the Captain   needed to leave.
       He refused to get back in the  boat, but proposed we walk back to Hydra harbor while the boatman returned along shore with the boat.    Eric chose toride back in the boat, but I agreed to walk with the Captain,  more so as not to offend him than out of a thirst for any more   adventure.
       It was a  long, winding walk  just about dinner time all over the island.  The Captain stopped us at several kitchen doors,  introduced me to the family sitting inside, then lifted food off the  grill and handed it to me.

    Finally, at the harbor front,   the Captian ducked  into a trinket shop,  and just as quickly  reappeared with a silver colored skull ring which handed to me . 
      Then he asked me to marry him.

   I turned him down, but he insisted that I keep the trinket.
       I had that thing for years, but then misplaced or lost it, and since I lost it,  I can no longer remember what it  really was ,  as if out of mind was out of being … so I had to make up the skull detail.
     I saw the  Captain once more.
       As we were about to board the boat leaving Hydra.      
        He came riding along the harbor on the back of a donkey that he seriously outweighed, surrounded and persued by  a dozen or so kids.  Had he known we were leaving.
         Stopping where we waited to go up the ramp, he reached into his lumpily bulging shirt, and pulled out an orange, which he handed to me.  I don't recall if Eric or John got one too. 
       While in Athens waiting for a train, we met someone who recognized the old man from our descriptions.
        The Captain WAS a captain: a retired sea captain  who lived half the time there in Hydra , and half the time at his apartment in Athens where he would go to the taverns evenings with a wheel barrow,  so that someone he met there could wheel him home when he was drunk, often staying on for a few days or weeks.  He had several people living in the apartment at a time.  Sometimes they would wheelbarrow him TO the taverna.
     The half the time that he spent on Hydra, the Captain lived with his mother, who  was NOT dead, though she must have been old as as the olive trees.  The steersman in the suit was his lawyer. 

   In Spring ofthe year  before we were there, the Americans or the French were filming  the blessing of the boats scene from the movie Phaedra,  in which the bishop throws a cross into the harbor and the  Hydra village boys dive into the harbor to recover it, as the tradition there.  The Captian  was there, and he too dove, or jumped in.  He had to be rescued.   I am not sure he would even float.  Not a glorious way for a Captain to  die at sea

    I have never been back, and I am sure Hydra is no longer the place it was, but  I have  recently learned that the mysterious beeping on Hydra, assuredly not a radio tower,  was and is actually the call of the Scops Owl.  

magicus

www.owlpages.com

     The important thing about the Scops, is that i  hasn't always been an Owl .
   The Scops USED to be one of two   sons of a fisherman who was lost at sea …  leaving the older brother in charge of the family sheep and the younger   in charge of the horses.  I am not inventing this.
  One day there was an especially dangerous and frightening thunderstorm, such may have drowned their father at sea, so the younger boy herded the horses  back home.
       But the older brother, counting the horses  as they came in and coming up one short,   sent the  younger brother  racing back through the storm to get the missing horse.
   While searching for the horse, the younger brother was struck by lightning and killed.

   Only when the horse came back without the younger brother,  did the older  realized that he had forgotten  to count that one - the horse his brother had been riding … and that, as a result, the young one had died.  Let that be a lesson to me, and to anyone who can figure out its relevance to the story here.  Anyway, I am not inventing it.
   
         Long ago, and long since my month on Hydra, an underwater cable was  laid from shore to Hydra.  This I know, because Googling tells me so.  Googling also reveals that the name of the island Hydra  (from the root word meaning "water",   originally referred to the springs that made the island habitable … until the earth quaked a few centuries ago, the rocks fractured, and the normal chanels and cisterns dried up.   Much of the water comes by taknker now days , and they write that a deasalinization plant is going to happen.
        But stop the story  here,  go back , dig a little deeper in the Net,  and  you will see that THE Hydra  you are more likely to know about even if you have never heard of the island, is the many headed monster which guards the Underworld.    THE WATER PIG,  you might say, and I DO say.
       You can enter the Underworld either when you slay the critter, or when it slays you.  Easy enough to get IN by  the cheap trick of dying, but you don't get in alive or get out at all, unless you  cut off every one of its piggy heads.  This Hercules and every boy and artist must do, AFTER shoveling out the stables, and a few other things.
    For an artist or a curious young person, the Underworld WOULD be a fascinating place to visit … if you knew you could get back out.     And Hydra  the island, at the gates of hell or not,  would be a paradise to live and stay on if  you only  have  a donkey, a garden, and a well.   
      I know my Hydra/Hydra conflation is  naked ambiguation  …  but ALL things are related,  if you just do the hard work of relating them, as I have here, or better..
  Did the young Irving (whom Eric reminds me we used to call "Old Irving")   visit the Underworld when he was unconscious those three days.?  Did young Old Irving slay the piggy headed monster?    Well, I wouldn't go to far with that kind of myth making.  
        All I know is that  he came out of his coma raring to go  Russian dancing and "squid spearing,"  that he never  said anything to me about a visit to the underworld,  and also, that he never did submit the story he had promised to the student magazine … where as Eric did; so did I,  and this was it  again, with improvements and corrections ... but I didn't consciously make any of it up except as noted.     
    


 

Water Pig Fever

   Aboard the  old Orient Express  on the way from Vienna to   Istambul in nineteen sixty three,  Eric Ross,  John Irving, and I had eaten nothing but Semmel rolls and cheese  for three days.  So, as we were nearing Istambul,   we went to the dining car  for  one regular meal before the trip was over.    
   By the time we finished eating that fateful meal, the train was in the station,  we hadn't been given a bill, and the waiter was nowhere to be seen.
          We went back to the compartment for our baggage, and we got off the train. 
   But as we were dealing with a kid who hooked for a student hotel,  the waiter   ran up and made us pay.
     I don't remember that we added a tip, and I doubt it, but we were going to pay for  that meal  the rest of our lives; my next payment being made that night, simultaniously into a toilet and the bathtub  of that student hotel.

   No doubt but that meal  was the source of  what we might well have called the "Orient Express", and  we three later referred to as " Water Pig Fever".      Dr. Rudolf Faulkner, the Russian doctor of internal medicine I visited in Vienna, said    it was a rare form of disentery  -    but   in my case (he advised me) was as much a metaphysical as a physicial affliction.     By my nature, said the doctor, I had the disease of a philosphic mind:  a mind unable to turn away from the emptiness at the heart of being.
   Those, or something like them, may have been the words of the Russian writer Ospenski, whose "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching"  Doctor Faulkner prescribed for me to read.  I may get around to that someday.
  Anyway, it was convieniently enough, pretty much what I had come to Vienna to study and would encounter there in the form of Sartre's La Nausea, and Victor Frankl's popular and positive version of Existentialism, none of which you need to read.
   
   I avoid philosophical abstraction now days,  my insides are healthy, and I have tediously trained myself to at least imagine pattern  and meaning  between me and the famous black hole at the heart of being,   but I'll never totally rid myself of Water Pig Fever.
    I may not even WANT  to be totally  free of it, if only for the reason  that, without the continuing story of misadventure and suffering,  I might not remember much of my  past life at all.
  And here is great and valuable pleasure in remembering … even  in remembering the painful and wrenching past,  which you can always remember  differently  and in better humor than we actually experienced it. there is great pleasure and education in remembering togehter, as we differ in such novel ways  in our memories and experiences of the same event.
            According to Irving, I was the only one who spent the night using the bathtub and the toilet simultaneouslhy … and that does make sense… seeing as there was only one of each, and three of us..
      
      We each came down with our own version of the Water Pig Fever.
      Irving's own  crisis came   after we had taken the boat to Greece, and a ferry from the port of Piraeus to the Island Hydra  where, for a month, we would pretend to be writers.
    Irving was better at the writing act and had brought along his portable typewriter, which he lugged to the harbour front cafe each day,  but within a week he had his own long, drawn-out bout in the bathrorom,  after which he  lay in a coma for a couple of days, drooling into a pan beside the bed while we waited for the mayor of Hydra:   a doctor who traveled the islands seeing patients  on a three day rotation. 
   When he finally did arrive, the mayor told   us that John had Typhoid Fever, or maybe it was Typhus, ask him… anyway,  the Doctor said that if John had gone another day or two without the medicine, he would have died.  
   As for Eric, it might suffice to report that he had his rectum rebuilt a few years later, and is functioning well in Colorado.
    All three lived to tell the tale and I have been telling it over and over  for the last forty years.    I remember that month in Hydra so very well now, having  reinvisioned and told it so many times, and I am likely to tell it again here….   but I don't believe the other two guys about the events of that month, and I am not so sure about myself.
    Not a problem:  It is just marvelous what seperate worlds we inhabit, even when we are together and supposedly having the same experience.
           

A Note to our Readers

    There is a whole lot of stuff besides the stuffing that is necessary to make a book and I am darn sure going to have it all with the next book.
  Here is how I am coming along in the early stages. 
     As you can see, there is a lot of filling out to do before I get to the body of the monster.

 Nowella and Uncle Threadbear

         by Oren Pierce, B.A. , B.S., M.S.G
  
   About Oren Pierce.
               
  Oren Pierce is the pseudonym of  Youtube weatherman, Davey Weathercock, who is himself pseudonymous, and has not done any weather reporting since his partner  Olive the weather hen (who worked under her own name) died. 
  Mr. Weathercock now makes his life with a trunk full of stuffed animals, cats, chickens,    and other characters.      
     The head animal   -  his Significant Critter -  is a pale-furred, long-nosed bear not much larger than a chicken. 
Mr. Weathercoock  calls his bear  Nowella, and thinks it is important for him to tell her life story,  including all about her confused, wide-world wanderings,  starting even  before the beginning. 
   We may not hang around for all of that ourselves,   but let's just hope Mr. Weathercock is  at least entertaining  enough  that you will not stand up right away to go eat Tuna Noodle Cassarole at the refrigerator.

              Prologue

           Introduction

            How to use this book

                Because the Dog's Plot Book of Bears is spiral bound,  you will need no book marks, and can instead  leave this handy ,  lanky book  flopped open in your easy  chair , so   later you can return to reading,  exactly where you left off before your trip to the refrigerator … and no one will have taken your seat.
        Unless, in passing by, someone has been hooked in by an illustration and  has taken up the story where you left off.. 
            To prevent such   bookjacking,  you may take this book  to the kitchen with you and leave it   open on the counter, just as you would flop or prop a typical spiral bound cook book, while you  make, or in this case eat the   tuna noodle casserole.   
        In light of that flexibility, we have included among the Bonus features, a  recipe for hand made tuna noodle casserole,  as well as one called  " Chicken Soup for Chickens,"  and  instructions for several non-filling, meatless  main dishes that can be offered to  stuffed animals. 
                 Note:
                   Please close the refrigerator door while you are reading/eating.  Warning :  these pages are not waterproof or sink-washable and these comments are in no way intended to   endorse or encourage eating while reading.

   Footnotes
                 Most irrelevant detail and distracting information has been relegated to foot notes, where you may read it after the chapter is over, or after the book, or not at all.  It is recommended that you race right through the story in one run, in order to get the  whole world view.  It is NOT recommended that  you take this book to, or keep it in the bathroom.

         
          Epiogue

     Afterword