Park by Hudson River along empty stretch of road. Low, sandy, no-man’s land. Mountain behind us. Odd to find riverfront undeveloped this close to New York City.

Walking along road shoulder, discover why. Line of scrub opens to reveal two giant concrete domes. Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear power plants. No sign of people or activity over there. Stillness like a monument.

Roadway littered with usual plastic trash/broken bottles. Also, 100 or more spent highway flares: white plastic caps, few inches around. Major accident? Or prank? Kids want to take some home. “Maybe later.”

Start hike just past old sand quarry. Low willows and swamp maple, tangle of blackberry, leaves with that dusty, side-of-the-road look. In undergrowth, sections of carpet, rusted machinery, a bedspring. Kids delighted. This is better than nature.

As trail heads up, forest starts. Oak and birch, exposed gray granite. Then, suddenly, set of moss-covered stone steps. Kids sprint up, whooping. Discover tunnel –  twenty-foot long tunnel – in middle of woods. Goes nowhere, connects nothing. Inside, not quite dark. Man-sized sandstone blocks let light seep in. Spray-paint everywhere: “Fuck,” “Jesus Saves”; lots of names/dates. Like a cemetery. Or a news flash. “I was here. I was here. I was here.”

Outside again, check guidebook. Tunnel is from proposed Spiral Railway. 1889. Visitors meant to dock by river at hotel/restaurant (near sand quarry), then ride train to top of mountain. Two big steam generators – one halfway up, one at peak – to haul trains by cable over this tunnel, 900 feet to top. Ten minute trip. At peak, another hotel with observation tower/gardens.

“Visitors will be startled and awed by the sublimity of the views on every hand. Near and far they will behold a panorama of scenic grandeur that can be equaled nowhere on the globe … Elevations of thought and impulse, as well as bodily vigor.”

Elevations of thought and impulse!

But real pay-off to follow: trip down via gravity. Nine-mile spiral, three switch-backs, swerves, swoops, zoom through tunnel to starting point by river. Whole mountain transformed to thrill ride! Estimated train speed: fifty m.p.h. Estimated visitors: 2,000 per day. Site only thirty-five-mile boat trip from NYC.

“The toiling millions of people who take an outing once or often during the summer in search of strengthening, invigorating, life-giving oxygen of a pure air, and the healthful stimulant of a radical change from the monotony of their daily toil. …”

Life-giving oxygen of a pure air.

Ruins more obvious higher up. Old packed gravel rail bed, scars from dynamite, boulders stacked to side. Out through treetops: bits of blue river, houses on hillsides, green lawns. Routes 9 and 9-West follow curve of Hudson. Off in distance: Bear Mountain Bridge, traffic circle. Path gets steeper. Adults short of breath, kids looking for shade. Buzz of insects amongst oak, maple, pine. Then, boom!, woods gone.

Whole region hit by forest fires this summer. Newspaper pictures of men in smoke masks. Here, groundcover burnt black; big trees on ground, tops still green. Like pick-up sticks, or giant safety matches. Standing oaks have blue jelly residue around trunks: flame retardant. Kids’ sneakers gray with ash. Orange plastic “EMERGENCY” ribbons. Discussion of causes: global warming, natural cycle, bad forestry, God.

In spring 1890, crew of 200 worked here. (Italian immigrants?) No trees then: forest all clear-cut for lumber. “… A vast track of inhospitable mountain and rock. ….” Deer next-to-extinct. Workcamp down by road in flats. Big canvas tents, cookfires, streams of pack mules climbing barren switchback trail.

Eight months later: “[Progress is] considerably impeded at present by some trouble between the contractors and the company.” Grading two-thirds finished, huge steam generators ordered. National economy booming, but major strikes in Homestead, Pennsylvania; Coeur D’Alenes, Idaho. Wall Street panic on the way. Newspapers predict the full force of men will go back to work [on Spiral Railway] after the first of January.” Never happens.

Past fire site, kids find another tunnel. This one dug straight into mountain. Dank air at rubble entrance, walls cold. As eyes adjust, floor littered with soda cans, trash. Too dark (high?) to see ceiling. This to be sudden shrieking entrance into chill passage, then back out into roller-coaster sunshine. Never completed. Pick marks still in rock, drill holes waiting for dynamite. Not a tunnel, after all — a cave.

Outside, sit on cliff edge, feet dangling. “Panorama of scenic grandeur.” Tiny cars on tiny roads, no sound. Keen of marsh hawk riding thermals. Dark river cutting green hills, making pine islands: how many thousand years? Glimpses of suburban houses. Pop. more than 17,000 within two miles; 75,000 within five miles; 250,000 within ten. But hidden by trees. On opposite bank, almost small enough to forget, concrete domes.

2:31 p.m.: Snack on pepperoni and cheese. Below, sensor in Indian Point 2 shows temperature problem. Workers assume false alarm (similar incident four days earlier). But reactor automatically shuts down; emergency generators kick in. Management decides routine glitch: good chance to catch up on regular maintenance.

3 p.m.: Start back down. Circuit breaker pops in back-up generator. Calculated odds of this malfunction: once in 1.4 million years. Later explanation: “Auxiliary transformer load tap changer” left in manual position by mistake. Emergency generator no longer feeding batteries. Water pumps/emergency core-cooling equipment not receiving enough power. Potential result: inability to cool reactor, meltdown.

No sirens, no sign of disturbance.

3:45 p.m.: Reach bottom after climbing over railbed, past scene of forest fire, through lower tunnel, down stone steps. Kids told to leave old highway flares alone. Car safe where parked, hot from sun. In case of “risk significant event,” escape plan calls for mass evacuation along this two-lane road.

4:35 p.m.: Slow drive home. Radio playing pop tunes, sports talk. Stop for ice cream.

8:30 p.m.: After dinner, kids to bed early. Tired from climb. Sweet snoring within minutes. Adults watch TV: nothing on. No news flash.

9:55 p.m.: Back-up batteries providing electricity to plant fail altogether. 75% of control room instrument panel goes dark. Start of official “Unusual Event,” level one. (Three Mile Island, 1979 = level four.) Public still not notified. Per owners of reactor, “operated in the red region of risk” but only one-in-500 chance of damage to nuclear core.

One-in-500.

10:30 p.m.: Adult bedtime. Management of Indian Point 2 makes first call to notify local authorities that plant “continually deteriorating” and on “Hot Standby.”

3:43 a.m.: Everyone sleeping. Reactor enters “Normal Hot Shutdown.” Plant exits “Unusual Event.” No story in next day’s paper. Six months later, when pipe in steam generator leaks, Second Level Emergency declared. Radiation escape. Again, no sirens.

6:21 a.m. Sunrise. Mountain in silence. Vegetation growing over Spiral Railway. Marsh hawk?

Daniel Wolff

Two soliders await a helicopter in Long Khanh Province to evacuate their fallen comrade. (Pfc. L. Paul Epley, 1966)

Sometimes wars are not between people, but between countries. Sometimes people just get in the way of wars between governments, like pawns in a chess game. Expendable, inconsequential, beside the point. Not involved, yet present — and in present danger. Individuals in a hostile country simultaneously serve as victim and perpetrator, refugee and criminal, innocent and guilty.

I think that message might have been hidden in President George W. Bush’s October 7, 2001 presidential address to the nation: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies.” According to our president, we were at war with the Afghani government but not with the Afghani people.

I am not sure what his statement means. I hope the soldiers knew what Bush meant as they dropped the bombs, the bombs that were dropped by people and fell on people. People who were Afghani, who hated the Taliban, who loved their country, who were enlisted in armies, who feared for their lives and safety. Nationalities and loyalties, homeland and security, can get all mixed up in the process.

During 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, when we began bombing Iraq, starving the Iraqi people, and interrupting their water supply, I worked in Washington, D.C., at a scientific society. I watched two of my Iraqi coworkers — father and daughter — come to work with heavy hearts. They didn’t support Saddam Hussein, but they had family and friends who were still in Iraq. They knew children who were living under the fear of bombs. The footage on CNN every night was not abstract to them. And yet, each day they came to work, and their taxes were taken out of their paychecks. And those same taxes went to fund the bombing campaign.

As the war in Iraq lingers again, I find myself thinking of them. The daughter worked for me, as a temp, doing some filing. She had been evacuated in the dead of night from her Peace Corps posting because of an uprising in a small African country. She was to start law school in the fall, but at the time she was straightening out the membership files for the society and trying to heal because she never got a chance to say goodbye to the folks she left behind so suddenly. The twenty-three-year old loved punk music and hid a tattoo on her wrist by wearing a watch. Growing up in the D.C. suburbs, she was as American as you or I.

Her father, a director of the association, was leading an Iraqi peace-through-understanding movement in his spare time. He was frightened by talk of internment camps in the United States for Iraqi Americans. The father had a heavy accent; there was no mistaking that he was from the Middle East. Yet, he had seized the American dream. He had risen to a good management position and understood how citizens could create change.

His was a familiar story to me — being taxed to fight the homeland and the confusion of loyalties. Even though my grandfather and my father were Jewish Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States, they were still German. This concept eludes many people in this time of consciousness about the Nazi concentration camps of the 1930s and 40s.

An American soldier wounded in France during World War II. (1944)

My family was German and spoke German. They loved German things. Instead of hotdogs, we ate knockwurst and bockwurst with sauerkraut flecked with caraway seeds and coarse spicy mustard. While other families made potato salad with mayonnaise, we used bacon and vinegar. I grew up loving sliced tongue, pickled herring and landjaegers, while my classmates ate ham, bologna and American cheese. We grew German raspberries in our garden, sweeter and brighter than what everyone else knew as raspberries (I see them now in markets as “wineberries”). When my mother bought a bright yellow 1972 VW Beetle, my grandfather yelled and screamed, but truth be known, he loved riding in it. Even though he didn’t smoke, he had a sterling silver cigarette case from Mercedes until the day he died. It was a gift for having a perfect driving record for twenty-five years. He loved German cars, even though he wouldn’t buy one. He collected German postage stamps. My grandparents insisted on living amongst other “refugees,” but they would only socialize with the German ones. They wanted nothing to do with the Eastern European Jews, who were, in their minds, “dirty.”

About ten years ago, when I was about twenty-five years old, I was dating a man whose mother, as a teen, had come from Germany with her family in the 1950s. His parents and mine led parallel lives, living in Philadelphia, attending the University of Pennsylvania, traveling in the same circles, having nearly identical small weddings a year apart, having their first born in 1966. Our grandmothers said “miserable” with the same accent — “me-sir-rah-bell.” I loved the story of his mother making pickled herring every New Year’s Eve, using beets and sour cream even though no one would touch the pink gooey mess. It never occurred to me, when I traveled to his parents’ home in Tennessee, that he didn’t tell them my family was also from Germany. That I was Jewish. Nor would I have thought that he might, I guess. We’d been friends for years. I was a name and some stories to him, not a religion to be announced and worn like an arm-band.

We were sitting at the dinner table with his parents when his mother made an off-handed comment about a cousin who perished during World War II in France. I blanched. I was sitting at a table with a woman whose first cousin was killed in Paris during the occupation. He was just sixteen at the time. I lost my appetite. I was stuck in this house in Tennessee for several more days. I confronted my friend after dinner. I’m not sure what I said, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, “Gee, you never told me your mother was a Nazi sympathizer.” Sure, I knew that she had to have been in Germany during the Holocaust. Sure, I knew they weren’t Jewish. But I had this image of them being fearful and hating the government — not fighting for it. I felt that hating the German government was a moral imperative. At the time I thought there was no other sensible way to feel. I don’t remember what I said to my friend about my feelings, but I remember his response: “There are tragedies on both sides of any war.”

I try to think of this sixteen year-old boy who was drafted and killed as a tragedy. This Nazi, this boy, this enemy, this murdered child. I remember helping the mother clean up the kitchen later, telling her my father was from Stuttgart, but not having the courage to mention something innocuous like Hanukkah or Passover to see her reaction, which I’m sure would have been a politically correct one. His parents were educators and liberals. I’m sure it would have been fine to mention my bat mitzvah, but something stopped me from bringing it up. I was a guest in their house, and my flight home was still several days off. In some ways, I wasn’t comfortable with bringing it up, making an accusation, starting a conflict. The topic was surely too sensitive for both of us.

In light of my friend’s child-soldier cousin, I have to remember that my grandfather, a Jewish refugee but also a German, was gassed twice by the Allies as he fought side-by-side with Germans, with the likes of Erich Maria Remarque in the trenches during World War I. Twice he lay in the hospital, his lungs filling with blood. Fighting for the country whose Final Solution, less than twenty years later, was to see him dead.Being gassed by the country that would welcome him to its safe haven in 1938, when he fled for his life with his family.

I have a box of pictures from his time fighting in the war. Him sitting with fellow soldiers drinking beer, smiling, laughing. Standing near monuments. He was having the time of his life.

All the while, the chemical weapons that would be used against him were being developed at my alma mater, American University, in the very building where my office is now. Perhaps the very place where, now as a professor, I meet with my students. My grandfather survived, but many other Jews who fought as Germans during World War I went on to die in concentration camps. I have proof of this, a rare German book that was put together as pro-Jewish propaganda — a list of Jewish men who died or were wounded during the Great War.

Burial at sea for the officers and men of the USS Intrepid (CV-11) who lost their lives when the carrier was hit by Japanese bombs during operations in the Philippines. (Lt. Barrett Gallagher, 1944)

Tragedies on both sides, sides on both sides

The chemicals that the Army developed during World War I to gas the German soldiers were carelessly buried all around American University. The leaking canisters are causing cancer clusters to this day from the high levels of arsenic. Instead of the Axis powers, the Allies are today gassing the wealthy residents of Spring Valley. The Army Corps of Engineers is still scrambling to end this final battle of a war that most believe to have ended nearly one hundred years ago.

My grandfather, after being naturalized as a U.S. citizen, adopted a young German so that he could enlist near the end of World War II. The young man never returned from the war. A Jewish refugee who had lost his entire family, he wanted nothing more than to go back and fight against the country of his birth. He died turning against the country that turned against him first.

My father was a member of the U.S. Army military intelligence force in 1950s Germany. Though this was during the Korean conflict, my father had been tapped to return to Germany because of his language skills. There, he was driving a Jeep through a pre-wall West Berlin. He was getting shot at as he acted as a Cold War era decoy — real spy, cloak, and dagger stuff — wearing a tan U.S. Army uniform and carrying a brief case stenciled with the words “Top Secret” lying in plain sight on the seat next to him. A German-American, spying on Germans — East Germans perhaps, but Germans nonetheless — and being set-up by Americans.

And now, America wages another quick war with Iraq. A country we supported — a regime we supported, armed against Iran — against the theocracy we thought was evil in 1979 when they held Americans hostage. After decades, Saddam Hussein’s Stalinesque tactics became too much to bear. We fought one war, then another. Ten years ago, we dropped our Patriot missiles and smart bombs. We instituted economic sanctions. Iraqis starved. When that didn’t work, we attacked again.

Just like my family — Germans in America — Iranians and Iraqis in America keep paying taxes and hope for an end. They watch the news and vote. They’re glad a tyrant is gone, but they’re confused by the suggestions, by the ever-shifting policies and alliances. They wonder if it isn’t the punch line to some macabre joke when Bush asked Iraq to look to Iran for a model Muslim government.

A neighbor who emigrated from Iran in 1979 looked aghast when I asked him how he felt about the Iraqis fashioning their government after Iran’s. Had it gotten better? He couldn’t even speak. He’d gone back for a visit just a few years back. “No,” he said. “It’s still much the same.” His two toddlers frolicked in the yard. He looked down and continued to rake the fall leaves — hurrying to get them all to the curb before the arrival of the county leaf collector.

Iranians and Iraqis, like most U.S. citizens, are confused by the possible lies our government tells about Hussein’s weapons, about the pretense for war. Yet, ever still, they’re Americans. They’re hopeful for the promised enduring peace. Not only for their adopted homelands, but for their motherlands, friends, neighbors, and family as well.

STORY INDEX

SPEECHES >

President George W. Bush
Oct. 7, 2001 address to the nation
URL: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html

FOOD >

Landjaegers
Photo of the traditional German food
URL: http://www.sacredrock.com/Nowicki’s%20Landjaeger%20in%20smokehouse.jpg

ORGANIZATIONS >

Army Corp of Engineers
Spring Valley cleanup project
URL: http://www.nab.usace.army.mil/projects/WashingtonDC/springvalley/overview.htm

PEOPLE > REMARQUE, ERICH MARIA >

Biography
URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/remarque.htm

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Despite being born in New York and raised in Tennessee, I can say that for most of my life I haven’t felt like an American. My citizenship couldn’t overcome my race. I’m black, a member of the group that has been the quintessential “other” in this country.

Just the names we embraced illustrated our position outside the mainstream. The first Africans came to this country as slaves, who could in some extraordinary cases buy their freedom. Within two generations, though, black skin and bondage had become so intertwined that the word “slave” became a synonym for “black person” by the end of the 17th century. After Emancipation, former slaves and their progeny wore and discarded a host of names: colored, Negro, black. The word American didn’t become part of that designation until the late 1980s, when black leaders lobbied for the term “African American.” Their justification made sense: We could claim both halves of our identity, grabbing hold of the present without rejecting the heritage of the past.

But being something is different from talking about it. I was and am more comfortable with the word black than I am with African American. I like the way the one-syllable word explodes from my lips. At 49, I’m old enough to remember when calling someone black meant a whipping — not a spanking — for a child and a sure enough fight for an adult. I enjoyed the transformation from insult to compliment.

Besides, I just didn’t feel like an American before. However, that’s beginning to change. Although I’m still black (and will be until I die unless something miraculous happens to change my skin color), I am now constantly struck by how American I really am. It’s not because American society has become more accepting of black folks. Something more mundane is motivating my revelation.

I’m shopping, more and more, at ethnic grocery stores.

Nowadays I live in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the old, Midwestern cities that is fighting economic decay. This was a manufacturing town, and that past has left it completely unprepared for a world where factories in Asia make everything so cheaply no American company can compete.

When folks think of Cleveland, they don’t think about diversity. In its heyday — from the early 1900s until the bottom fell out of the manufacturing era in the 1970s — people came from all over the country and the world to work in this region’s factories. Cleveland became a city of Eastern and Western Europeans, Southern blacks and whites, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Chinese, and Lebanese. Everyone came and set up churches, clubs – and stores. One can eat his or her way around the world without leaving the seven counties that make up the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.

Within a fifteen-minute drive from my house, I can buy palm oil at the Ghanaian market, or cardamom coffee at the Lebanese store. I can stop at the Korean place for a bottle of that extra-hot Vietnamese pepper sauce that my African friends adore. The Indian store sells the brand of loose tea that has replaced those Lipton teabags I bought at chain stores like Tops and Giant Eagle. And the Russian deli sells the chocolate candy I give to kids in the neighborhood.

I shop at these places because they are nearby and they have the things I want. But running into the Indian store isn’t the same as a quick trip to the twenty-four-hour supermarket. In fact, I can’t really run into the Indian market; I walk in slowly. I browse and ponder. The minute I enter one of these little markets I realize I’m an American. While the stores are in America, they are not American places. They are enclaves, a little bit of home for the people who shop there, and a reminder, to me, of where I come from.

These are places to buy hair oil that smells like sandalwood, not like citrus. The chocolate drink on the shelf is Ovaltine, not Nestlé’s Quik.

These are places that carry the frozen goat meat and instant fufu flour that makes home cooking taste authentic, not desperately patched together from substitutions. These are the places where, on the most basic level, the regulars speak the same language: the language of food and life and experiences. When I walk in the door, it’s obvious I don’t belong, but the reason I don’t belong isn’t because I’m black. It’s because I’m American.

Even though I go to the Ghanaian market for a container of palm oil for my peanut butter stew, I unconsciously expect to see bottles of Mazola and cans of Crisco. I know that the Indian store carries jars of ghee, not sticks of butter. Still I habitually walk to the refrigerated food section, not the shelf. These little assumptions and habits betray my identity in a way I can’t control. Yes, I’m black, but I’m a black American. I look at the world the way an American does, craving wide, open spaces and places to expand.

Perhaps that’s why the stores look so tiny to me. We shop at “big-box stores” and “mega-markets” where goods come in cartons and you can buy enough toilet paper to last a year. We want shelves that rise from the floor to the ceiling. We want to choose between ten kinds of whatever we buy because more is better and we want access to as much as we can.

At the ethnic markets, the shelves are sometimes fully stocked and sometimes they aren’t. Sons and daughters tend the cash register; friends stop in to chat with the owner. The stores resemble the corner stores of my youth: intimate places that disappeared when Americans sprawled farther into the suburbs.

But while these stores are quaint to me, they’re more of an excursion than a place to run errands. How can a family-owned shop fight against a superstore that can crush its competitors by staying open twenty-four hours per day, selling food at low prices and marketing to diversity by including an aisle of “ethnic” groceries?

Perhaps the small ethnic shops could market what has been for me an unintended consequence of multiculturalism: They’ve shown me how much I belong, however uneasily, to the mainstream.

And all for the price of a box of tea.

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs