Mobile to Managua: Rites of Passage
With a cylindrical package of Wet-Ones® in one hand, and a transfer ticket for Orlando in the other, I found myself alone on a worn, wooden bench in the middle of the Greyhound station in Mobile, Alabama. It was 5:30 AM, Saturday, June 14, 1975. I was 13. How my mother let it come to this, I’m not sure I’ll ever completely understand, but I’m so very glad she did.
Life is sometimes defined by moments. The moment you decide to jump from a twenty-foot roof suspended by a giant, homemade hang-glider. The moment you decide to call out the gym-teacher in defiance of racism and in defense of friendship. The moment you discover how angry bleach becomes when you ask it to share a Mason jar with ammonia. Or that moment in the summer of your 13th year when you climb aboard a bus on a Friday evening to see your best friend, 900-miles away.
I wasn’t afraid. I saw nothing unusual about the idea of trundling along narrow two-lane highways through the Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama darkness with 40 smelly strangers on a Trailways bus. Perhaps it hadn’t occurred to anyone what this dynamic in the Mobile Greyhound Station would look like through the eyes of a yellow-haired, 13-year old boy — or to the Department of Children and Family Services. But there I was. Awaiting the transfer that would take me to my final destination. Waiting in the company of weathered old men seeking temporary shelter on benches in lieu of beds. Waiting in the company of hundreds of anonymous travelers fanning out across the American South. Waiting alone.
A year earlier, Ronnie Korth — my best friend of nearly five years (an eternity in the life of a 13 year-old) — had left our hometown of Clear Lake, Iowa with his family, for permanent, sunnier climes in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park, Florida. I think his father was an architect. Or maybe an engineer. He was something special, I knew that. He was a lean, angular man with a kind but serious nature who owned two navy blue Ford station wagons, each with an AC plug hanging from its grill. Block warmers, I was told. Whatever that was. Important; that was the key. His mother, whose name was Delores, I think, was definitely one of the cool moms in the neighborhood. Mrs. Korth — Delores — was full of charm and positive energy, with an endless supply of Dr. Pepper in glass bottles, BBQ potato chips, and bologna and cheese sandwiches for the army of famished youngsters who would swarm her kitchen on summer days. She did Amway. Her spotless vinyl-tiled basement was chock-full with boxes of fragrant laundry soap and other janitorial inventory. Our gang was especially interested in the dozens of high-capacity pump-squirt bottles we could routinely borrow from Mrs. Korth’s Amway inventory for our watery assaults on one another across the battlefield that was our neighborhood from 17th to 19th Street West.
As 10 year-olds, in 1971, we were still playing out our version of the battles of World War II. Even at 10, Ronnie was a student of The War. And he was proud of his Norwegian heritage. I think the entire Korth family was, and deservedly so. A few years earlier, growing up in suburban New York City, just west of Raritan Bay near Sayreville, New Jersey, Norwegians hadn’t factored into my childhood Army games. But in the Scandinavian-settled, upper midwest — the buckle of the Lutheran belt — Norway was a thing. To hear Ronnie tell it, The War was all about half-tracks and fjords and frogmen. He used to be able to hold his breath longer than any of us down at the public access dock on Clear Lake’s North Shore Drive, next to Alan Price’s house. Alan’s father would later make neighborhood news for stumbling, drunkenly, into the path of not one, but two passing snowmobiles. One right after the other — in rapid succession — outside of Witkes, a lakeside restaurant and watering hole. The first one knocked him down. The second one clipped his jaw with it’s left ski, knocking him out and creating a nasty scar which, no doubt, served as a reminder he’d, perhaps, had too much to drink.
Frozen or not, our days revolved around that lake and, in the summertime, the public access dock next to Alan’s house was home base. We’d gingerly negotiate the sharp, iron steps on bare feet down to the dock. We’d fish for bullheads, or run and see who could leap the farthest off the end of the dock. Ronnie taught us a classic dock-side game in which we’d approach the older teenage girls from the water, who would often sun themselves on the dock with their bikinis untied in the back, and shout, “SNAKE!” This never produced the result he promised it would, but it was fun trying. And we tried a lot. He was also a self-described ‘fire-bug.’ I remember him dousing a comic book with something he called ‘naptha,’ and dropping a match on it. It was his parlor trick, and I was predictably amazed when the flames consumed only the highly evaporative fuel, but left Spider Man intact. At ten years old, that is quite a thing to behold. When we weren’t at the lake, or chasing each other around the neighborhood on bikes, we were at the golf course. All Vets Golf Club was a classic 9-hole course, which abutted our neighborhood, and doubled as an extended playground. In the winter, we’d organize massive sledding parties on what were the largest hills within walking distance for ten year-olds pulling sleds. In the summer we searched for, and sold, stray golf balls. We’d offer our services as caddies for a few bucks. We’d play in the occasional youth tournament. But the highlight of our interaction with the golf course was the game of cat and mouse we played with the course Pro, Hyle Lowman. We would camp out beneath the stars at the practice green, eight or nine of us, with our sleeping bags neatly arranged around the perimeter, just daring Hyle to activate the sprinklers before we could clear out at first light. Once, a few of us managed to get into the large shed just west of the clubhouse where all the gas and electric golf carts were stored, and spent most of the wee-hours driving them around in what became our version of NASCAR. But most nights when we’d camp at the practice green, we’d just wait until after our parents had all gone to bed, and then hitch-hike the 2-miles to Clear Lake’s 24-hour grocery store, Easter’s Super Valu, and spend our golfball money on chips, beef sticks, and Bugles. Ronnie and I were always doing things like that. So when my friend moved to Florida, I was devastated. And the next year, after my own family made a move of their own to southern Illinois, and I was struggling to find my feet, my mother thought a little best friend therapy would do me good.
Impossibly shy and still a little unclear as to why my mother made Wet-Ones such a priority on this journey, I was keeping my own counsel in Mobile that early morning. My singular mission was to listen carefully for the announcement of ‘ORLANDO!’ The diesel fumes wafted through the terminal in competition with handfuls of Old Spice and plumes of cigar smoke. As I sat there, whiling away the 4 hours until I would catch my bus to a less pungent place, I wondered how Ronnie had changed. Would he still be lighting things on fire? Would he still be able to hold his breath underwater for two minutes? Would we still be friends?
I arrived in Orlando, as predicted, and for the next two weeks Ronnie and I continued the childhood we’d begun six years earlier. We swam in the pool of his family’s condominium with Elton John’s ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ blaring from the boom-box of the half-past-tanned, bronzing beauty slung poolside in her impossibly bright white, skin-tight bikini. She must have been 27 years old, ancient to our 13 year-old selves. We ran through the open hallways of his new school, and Ronnie regaled me with tales of his junior football exploits in the ‘kumquat league.’ We saw ‘Jaws’ as a first run film in the theatre the day before we went to Daytona Beach to swim in the Atlantic surf, scared shitless we would be the next victims. We visited Cape Canaveral, St. Augustine, and the newly opened Disney World, where we ran unmonitored and unattended for the entire day, experiencing that sublime window in time when it meant something special to hold an actual ‘E-ticket,’ gaining access to Space Mountain and winding up on the platform of the monorail in the Contemporary Hotel watching the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom. The Korth’s goldenrod 1974 Mercury Montego served as our vinyl-topped chariot across central Florida for what would be the most amazing, slow-motion slice of my childhood, before pimples and teen anxieties took over.
A few days after his Birthday on June 17 — a birthday now shared with my oldest son — I said goodbye to my best friend, and promptly lost touch with him for 35 years. When I decided to reconnect, he wasn’t as easy to find as you’d think in the era of Facebook and Google. He seemed to defy both, but I was able to get his number from his older brother, David. I held on to the number for more than a year. I didn’t have the foggiest idea how or where to begin. What do you say to a childhood friend with whom you haven’t spoken in nearly four decades? One summer day in 2010, while floating in the pool and listening to Elton John, I dialed the number. “Hello?,” came the still familiar voice from the other end. We talked for 45-minutes like not a day had passed. A few months later, he arranged a detour and stopped by to meet my son and say hello while en route from Northern Iowa to Central Florida. Last year, on June 17th, I received a text from him wishing my son a happy birthday. That’s how Ronnie always was. Quietly thinking about other people. He now works in fire and rescue, a profession for which he was literally born: helping other people with his courage and strength and ability to hold his breath longer than anyone else.
The day before yesterday, as I put my 15 year-old son on a plane, traveling solo to Nicaragua to spend two weeks with a family friend in the caribbean tropics, I thought about how my mother must have felt that Friday evening 41 years ago. I thought, for fun, about loading him up with Wet-Ones, but decided he’d be better off just whiling away his 10-hour layover in the Managua International Airport with his mechanical pencil, Moleskin, and cool-blonde confidence — something I would have given my left nut for as a kid his age. But as my mother knew in 1975, I know now; he’ll be safe. And with a little luck, he’ll resolve his doubts and be better for the journey. If not Old Spice and cigars, maybe the smell of a Miskito-Creole food vendor in the Managua airport will lodge in his primal brain, and stir good memories forty years from now. Our respective solo trips bear some resemblance, but are in most ways quite different. For my son, it’s less about the end of childhood and more about the commencement of adulthood. After all, in less than two weeks, he’ll turn 16 and be largely in command of his own chariot. Still, if this last trip on the outer fringe of my son’s impressionable childhood years can conjure the wonder and magic of his time; if he can come away from Corn Island, Nicaragua with even a small dose of the kind of memories I harvested in Winter Park, Florida in 1975, it’ll be a win.
