Remembering the Owl in the Mask of a Dreamer: John Haines at 100

Today would have been John Haines' 100th birthday.  John, who passed away in Alaska in March 2011, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a naval officer. As a boy, Haines attended school here in Washington, D.C., while his father was stationed at the Washington Navy Yard.

After serving on a navy destroyer in the South Pacific during World War II, Haines studied at American University and the National Art School, both in Washington, and the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Art in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In 1947, Haines left Washington and eventually homesteaded acreage along the Richardson Highway approximately 68 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.  It was here that he spent much of the next four decades running his trap lines and living off the land while trying to realize his artistic talents.  It was here that he moved from the visual to the literary arts, and his experiences in the Alaskan wilderness were the inspiration for his early poetry collections - Winter News (1966) and The Stone Harp (1971), the essay collection Living Off the Country (1981), and the memoir The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989).

Haines came back to Washington in 1991-92 as Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at the George Washington University and visited Washington frequently during the last two decades of his life. He also taught at several other colleges and universities; his last academic appointment was as an instructor in the Honors Program at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

His later books included New Poems 1980-88 (1990), The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993), Where the Twilight Never Ends (1994), Fables and Distances (1996), A Guide to the Four-Chambered Heart (1997), For the Century’s End: Poems 1990-1999 (2001), and Descent (2010).

Haines was honored for his writing, receiving the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Western States Book Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Congress, and the Alaska Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, among others. He was also named a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1997.

I met John as a Jenny McKean Moore fellow at George Washington University in 1991 and we remained good friends during the final two decades of his life.  He was a guest in my home during his visits to Washington, and I look back with particular fondness on the days he and I spent together in Big  Sky, Montana in the autumn of 2004 following the release of A Gradual Twilight: An Appreciation of John Haines which I edited, and which was published by CavanKerry Press.

So Happy Birthday, John!  I miss you, but I know you are always nearby.

The Man of the Hour Redux – My Dad Would Have Turned 100 Today!

Sadly, Dad passed away in October 2009 at the age of 85 after a few years of declining health.  Yet It seems to me only proper to reflect on his life on the occasion of what would have been his 100th birthday today.

Ralph C. Rogers was born in the small town of Decatur, Michigan on June 24, 1924, and lived there for the first 18 years of his life. He played varsity basketball at Decatur High School and eventually attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.  Drafted into military service during World War II, he entered the US Army in April 1943, just a couple months shy of his 19th birthday. He left his native Michigan, having never traveled farther than northern Ohio.

He was first sent to the University of Maine, in Orono, as part of the Army Specialized Training Program.  The ASTP was designed to single out specially qualified soldiers for their exceptional IQs and send them to various college campuses around the United States to learn special wartime skills.  The two-company detachment of over 500 soldiers assigned to the University of Maine in the summer of 1943 was designated as a “pre-radar” group to study electrical and civil engineering and other related disciplines that would be required for the eventual invasion of Japan.  But the realities of war intervened.  

In February 1944, during the third term of the ASTP program at Orono, many of the soldiers enrolled in the basic part of the program, including my dad, were recalled to active combat duty.  Casualties were mounting rapidly in North Africa, and plans were afoot for the eventual invasion of continental Europe.  The Army decided its need for infantry replacements was more pressing than the need for technical specialties.

Dad traveled by train to Tennessee to join the Second Army’s spring field maneuvers before undertaking basic training at Fort Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina.  He was eventually assigned to the 104th Infantry Regiment, 26th Infantry “Yankee” Division. Originally consisting of personnel from the Massachusetts National Guard, the division was no longer the special pride of New England as its ranks swelled with men from all over the United States.  These new troops were needed to bring the division up to strength before it shipped out of Boston for France in the wake of the D-Day invasion in early June 1944.  There it would join the newly constituted US Third Army under General George Patton. 

Dad would serve in the front ranks as combat infantry riflemen and knew from the outset that the future of an infantryman was grim. Dad remained in the 104th Infantry Regiment throughout the northern European campaign in 1944-1945, including the Battle of the Bulge during which he received the Bronze Star for valor during combat operations.  His regiment was also awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government for its participation in the liberation of that country.  By early May 1945, the 26th Infantry Division had crossed Germany and met up with advanced units of the Soviet Red Army in the vicinity of Ceske-Budejovice, Czechoslovakia when Germany formally surrendered.  Since the autumn of 1944 the 26th Infantry Division had been in combat for 210 days; the 104th for 177 days. But the war was not over; the 26th and the 104th were deployed to the area around Linz, Austria to train for eventual re-deployment to the Pacific.  Luckily that war ended before they had to go and finish the work begun in the forest and hills of northeastern France almost a year earlier.

It is difficult for me to imagine doing what my dad did at the age of 19 and 20, or seeing what he must have seen during those months of combat across Europe.  One grew up fast in those years of peril and hardship not knowing if one would survive.  Dad was a young man from rural Michigan barely 20 years old when called upon to defend his country.  He was lucky to survive, and he pretty much put the war behind him when he returned home when so many did not . . . even when his young son would ask him what he did during the war. I imagine I was like many young boys my age when they first learned that their fathers had served in the military during World War II.

Dad told me a few stories although I was perhaps too young to understand just what he was telling me or how painful these memories must have been for him.  Dad never really went into many details about the war, or exactly what he did, but there were a few stories he shared, and I still remember them as clearly now as the day he first told them to me.  All sons look up to their fathers as heroes.  So I knew the few stories he did tell me, but so many others – how he earned his Bronze Star, or his role in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp – I would not learn about until after he passed away.

I had so many questions and there was no one who could answer them for me.  Dad and his comrades-in-arms were just young American boys who learned very quickly how to become men.  They were all young heroes sent to a dark and desperate place.   It is important that each generation of citizens understands the sacrifices of the generations that came before. There is no way we can ever repay them for what they did, and the price exacted from them.  Those of us who have never experienced the dangers and deprivation of military service, whether it be in wartime or not, must try to better understand what others have endured in the defense of our nation.

After the war, Dad returned home, married Mom, and attended the Michigan Institute of Technology, in Houghton until he eventually transferred to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta where he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in industrial engineering. Then it was off to Chicago in 1950 to work in the engineering department of Montgomery Ward, the job he held when I was born the following year.  He later worked for the Chicago-based consulting firm Stevenson, Jordan & Harrison for several years, a job which took him, and sometime his family, around the country.  Still, Dad was gone a lot, flying off on Sunday afternoon only to return the following Friday night to spend a couple days at home before he was off again.  In 1958, he took an engineering position with Champion Paper Company, in North Carolina, for almost six years. During that time he served in various professional organizations and taught engineering mathematics at Western Carolina University.  Our home in Asheville, NC was the first house we ever owned, and the four years we lived there was the longest time I spent in any one location until I moved away from home after graduating from high school in 1969.   Dad ended his professional career with J.C. Penney, joining in 1968 as engineering manager for Penney’s catalog division, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  He later held that same position at the corporate headquarters in Manhattan until his retirement in 1984.

Dad and Mom moved to Florida’s Gulf Coast where they lived until 1994 when they moved to Ohio to be closer to family and friends.  Mine was a family history that followed the trajectory of so many others of my generation.  Mom and Dad provided well for me and my sister; a safe and relatively happy home, opportunity to travel around this country and abroad, and a good college education.  

But it would not last. Things began to come apart after my sister and I had moved on with our own lives.  My parents eventually divorced shortly before their 50th anniversary, in 2006.  Dad moved back to Florida where he eventually remarried, and I did not see him very much after that; certainly not as often as I would have hoped.  His life, for whatever reasons that I will never fully understand, took a new direction.  In some ways I can help but think he was haunted by what he had seen (and perhaps done) during the war. I will never know, and perhaps I don’t really want to.  But I was happy that he was happy, or so he seemed whenever I did have a chance to visit him.  

I missed the time we should have spent together in those final years of his life.  We talked on the telephone occasionally; it just wasn’t enough. I never doubted his love for me, or mine for him.  We just had a difficult time showing it.  With the passing of time, various physical and mental issues began to take their toll.

I did spend more time with him during his final illness, but these were visits to the hospital and the nursing home in Florida where he lived the last couple of years. It was tough to watch him wither away.  During my last visit with him a few months before he passed away, he and I sat in his nursing home room and watched a baseball game together.  At least I thought we did.   I pulled out my notebook and scribble down this poem.

DEMENTIA

My old alien body is a foreigner

Struggling to get into another country

–Jim Harrison (1937-2016)

he draws long and hard on the chocolate shake

I brought him in the hospital & a smile crosses

his face between the final slurps sounding

like a Shop-Vac sucking water off

a flooded basement floor     “Thanks for this”

he says holding up the empty cup still smiling

“Better than the tapioca they feed me here”

his eyes focus on a baseball game on TV

“the Tampa Bay Rays are having a good year”

Detroit is leading 12-0 in the third inning

I ask him about the book on his night table

he thanks me for it but it is not from me

none of this seems to matter to him at all

it will be forgotten by morning if not before

I sometimes wonder if someday I will end

up just like him     my own memory slipping

I see faces but no longer remember names

a favorite song but I can’t remember why

a poem I wrote but can no longer remember

it is becoming a constant reason for concern

will I descend into this mental midnight

we sit quietly and talk about nothing special

& he asks me if maybe I can bring him

a chocolate shake the next time I come to visit

he continues to stare at the TV on the wall

Detroit is now leading 16-0 in the fifth

“Looks like the Rays may go to the Series”

The man of the hour is gone, but I am still blessed to have my mom who is in relatively good health and very sound mind at age 99.  And she just renewed her drivers license for four more years!

April Was a Very Cruel Month . . . But With a Happy Ending

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

– T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

These are the memorable first lines of Eliot’s seminal long poem.  It was the focal point of my senior essay in a modern poetry seminar, in the autumn of 1972, coming as it did on the 50th anniversary of its publication.  Little did I know what resonance it would have a half century later.  

It has been over a year since I posted anything of significance here, but not for the lack of want or thoughts I had hoped to share.  Shortly after that last post on March 26, 2023, I traveled to Ohio to help my mother celebrate her 98th birthday. It was a pleasant visit until the day it was time to return home when I woke up feeling very much under the weather.  We immediately hit the road figuring it would be better to be close to my doctor should something come of it.  What a fortuitous decision on my part!

Two days after returning home I collapsed and could not get up.  SallyAnn called the EMTs and the next thing I knew I was in the back of an ambulance and on my way to the hospital attached to tubes and monitors.  After some time in the emergency room, I was moved to the ICU where I remained for three days. I did not feel terribly bad, but I had a sneaking suspicion it might be serious. It was.  My kidneys were beginning to shut down as the result of a nasty blood infection attributed to my chronic lymphedema in both legs dating back to late 2017.  I would spend the month of April and half of May 2023 in the hospital and rehab, thankfully avoiding dialysis as my health slowly improved.  I eventually returned home to several weeks of additional physical therapy, happy in the thought that my life had been given back to me thanks to the wonderful care afforded by the doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and a dedicated hospital staff.

I had planned to write about this after settling in at home, but I could not steal myself to relive those days of uncertainty.  It was just nice to be home again, sitting up and getting back to a normal routine.  I relished the mundane as I focused on my full recovery while returning to my various projects.  By late July I felt well and strong enough to return to Maine for our annual summer hiatus.  Little did I know at the time what restorative powers emanate from fresh sea breezes.    

We returned to Monhegan Island situated twelve miles off Midcoast Maine. We had been doing this since 2000, and it seemed that two weeks on this small, quiet island was just what I needed.  And SallyAnn, too, after all I put her through that spring.   We spent two delightful weeks on this barely one square mile of paradise, and home to less than 100 souls far removed from the hustle and bustle of the outside world.   Monhegan has long been a destination for artists – the Wyeths, Edward Hopper, Robert Henri, Andrew Winter, Reuben Tam, George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, James Fitzgerald, just to name a few – and art lovers, and there are ample opportunities to enjoy all the island has to offer.  SallyAnn enjoyed combing the small beach looking for sea glass for her jewelry creations, and I was always in search of a quiet and out-of-the-way place to read and write while soaking in the dramatic land- and seascapes that have drawn so many artists and writers to the island.

We spent another week back on the mainland at dear friends’ small cottage in Harpswell, on Bailey Island, with a wonderful view of Casco Bay.  We enjoyed the local lobster and oysters and all the sea has to offer while visiting so many old haunts and friendly faces from our many summers spent in Maine over the past four decades.  We briefly hosted a dear friend from home taking a break from his transit of the Appalachian Trail.  This provided an opportunity to spend some time in the mountains of western Maine, and to make a detour to my favorite lodge in far northern New Hampshire for a couple of days in the Great North Woods along the Canadian border.

Our travels also took us to Down East Maine which we had not visited in a number of years.  It has a completely different ambiance than other regions of the state.  It is hardscrabble country and sparsely populated, yet it afforded us wonderful opportunities to spend some quiet time along the shores of the Bay of Fundy with its highest tides in the world.  During the long pandemic and my illness, I had allowed my passport to expire so we were not able to cross the border into Canada for a return visit to Campobello Island and Deer Isle, but we were afforded nice views of these lovely coastal islands from Lubec and Eastport, the easternmost towns in the continental United States.

We returned to New Hampshire to revisit the lovely Shaker village at Canterbury, followed by some time on the beaches at Hampton and Portsmouth with a day trip to Gloucester and Rockport on Massachusetts’s picturesque Cape Ann.  The summer was made all the more perfect with a return visit to Newport, Rhode Island to visit with dear friends and to explore the local environs (and enjoy the local clams and other seafood).  Then there was an exploration of nearby Fall River, Massachusetts and various sites connected with the case of Lizzie Borden, including the house (now a bed and breakfast) where she offed her parents with 29 whacks of an ax.  This had long been on SallyAnn’s bucket list.  

After several weeks in northern New England, we returned home healthy and in a good frame of mind.  Even with my somewhat limited mobility, we both immensely enjoyed our summer escape from the heat and humidity of Washington, DC as we looked forward to the onset of autumn and cooler weather.  In October we returned to Ohio to help a dear college chum celebrate her 70th birthday, followed by a return visit with my mother and sister and her family.  Thankfully, that visit ended on a much better note than the previous one.  Then came the holidays during which I tried very hard to get into the spirit of the season knowing I had so much to be thankful for.  2023 didn’t turn out too bad after all things considered.

We spent January and February in Florida with some side trips into Georgia to visit family and friends.  It began with two lovely weeks at an oceanfront condo on Crescent Beach, south of St. Augustine.  I have never spent that much time in this area of the state, although SallyAnn has, and so we discovered and re-discovered all that it has to offer – a wondrous variety of local seafood, the ability to cruise the wide beach expanse in one’s automobile and staying just a few hundred feet from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ beach cottage where she wrote many of her stories.  There was also the former colonial Spanish Fort Mantanzas, as well as the colonial sites in and around historic St. Augustine, one of the earliest European settlements in North America.  It was a relaxing visit, and I had an opportunity to finally begin assembling the manuscript for Aspiring to a Full Consent: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2024, which I hope to see in print by the end of the year.

After our time on the Atlantic coast, we headed inland to spend a month in a quaint cottage in Evinston.  This tiny hamlet on the western shore of Orange Lake is situated on the edge of Paynes Prairie and the Great Alachua Savanna just south of Gainesville.  The English naturalist William Bartram visited this region in the 1770s when the main inhabitants were bands of Seminoles.  He recorded his observations in The Travels of William Bartram (1791): "how the mind is agitated and bewildered, at being thus, as it were, placed on the borders of a new world.  On the first view of such an amazing display of the wisdom and power of the supreme author of nature, the mind for a moment seems suspended, and impressed with awe."  I find it difficult to argue with his impressions over two centuries later.  Once a center of Florida’s citrus industry, this region is now known for it cattle and horse farms.  My late her-in-law ran cattle on Paynes Prairie when he was young and continued to work at several cattle ranches throughout central and north Florida.  The largest cattle operation in Spanish Florida, Hacienda De La Chua, operated here in the late 1600s.        

It was a very relaxing month exploring the many back roads in this region in addition to outings to the Gulf Coast and Florida’s Great Bend country, reliving memories of time spent here in years gone by.  Ms. Rawlings’ farm at Cross Creek, the inspiration for her novel The Yearling (1929), was only eight miles from the cottage . . . half that as the crow flies.  We visited the Alachua Sink on the southern edge of Gainesville.  It is the deepest of Paynes Prairie’s sinkholes and acts as a conduit for water entering the Florida aquifer at a rate of up to 6 million gallons per day.  Upon visiting the Alachua Sink, Bartram was amazed by the number and size of the alligators, "so abundant that, if permitted by them, I could walk over any part of the basin and the river upon their heads."  You can almost say that even today.  The gators share the sink with a rich variety of bird life – egrets, Blue Herons, Sandhill Cranes, various hawks and vultures only to mention a very few.  

We returned home to Maryland in early March, visiting friends in Atlanta along the way.  We spent time examining the museum at the Carter Center and the nearby historical sites associated with the life and career of Martin Luther King.  We also wandered the downtown campus of Georgia Tech where my father received his degrees in engineering after the war.  He and my mother moved to Chicago in 1951 shortly before I was born and so I have always felt a kindred spirit with this dynamic southern city.  Our very satisfying winter adventure concluded with a visit to Asheville, North Carolina where I lived for a few years when I was a boy.   I always enjoy a return to my old stomping grounds.   

The spring passed without serious incident or illness.  A year after my hospitalization and recovery, I remain healthy, and I continue to move forward with what I can only hope will remain a life well-lived (save a brief Covid relapse a couple weeks ago . . . nothing quite as bad as the first bout in late 2022).  And now we are preparing for yet another summer hiatus on Maine’s Monhegan Island and elsewhere in northern New England during which I plan to finally complete my first novel, The Skunk Compass of Compass of the Big Magalloway.  Wish me luck!

In return, I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous summer 2024.