The Bowdoin Orient

December 8, 2000
Volume CXXXII, Number 12

Two Years Beneath the Pines: From Pines to Palms

by LUDWIG RANG, ALUMNUS CONTRIBUTOR

   LONDON-My first American Christmas was even more memorable than my first Thanksgiving. To start with, Hal and I got a ride with a college friend as far as Washington, D.C., where we spent two nights and one day sight-seeing.
   Arriving late at night, I remember being driven down Pennsylvania Avenue, with my first glimpse of the Capitol dome at one end and the White House at the other, both lit up. (Years later at a London antiquarian's, I was to buy a series of prints of early American scenes, including one, on the wall behind me, of the Capitol under construction, with the dome still missing).
   Early in the morning of our second day in Washington, Hal and I boarded a Greyhound bus bound for Jacksonville, Florida.
   It was already so crowded that we only just managed to get a couple of seats in the back where, to my surprise, sat only black people, eyeing two white kids curiously, or indifferently, except for one or two who gave us hostile stares.
   Whenever the bus stopped on its way through the Deep South, I was amazed to see restaurant and toilet facilities marked "Whites Only" or "Colored," into which our seat neighbors obediently trooped.
   It was the first time I was directly confronted with the iniquitous practice of racial segregation. Yet this was the year 1954, and the Supreme Court-the third seat of power in the famous system of "checks and balances" that Professor Whiteside used to talk about-had handed down a historic decision banning segregation in public schools, heralding the beginning of the end of US-style Apartheid and the dawn of an entirely new era in racial relations.
   Another thing that amazed me even though I was by now fairly fluent in English and attuned to the way most Americans spoke it, was that I could barely understand what the blacks sitting with us said, their southern-accented speech being all but incomprehensible to me. Fortunately, Hal, not the least bit prejudiced, sat on the aisle, and I marveled at the way he responded in kind to their good-natured banter.
   Hal's father, a big man with big hands, met us on arrival in late afternoon at the Daytona bus station. Taking both of my hands in his, he welcomed me as warmly as Simon's mother and aunt had, after hugging his son. I can still see his big, kindly face beaming down at m   The next day, with temperatures in the high seventies, we went for a swim in the ocean, and on Christmas Eve, we went to midnight mass in the Reverend Tucker's church.
   Emerging into the balmy night, standing beneath palm trees and looking up at the starry sky, I couldn't believe it was Christmas. The next morning, sitting on a sofa in the Tuckers' living-room with Hal, his little sister Kathy between us, we exchanged presents.
   I forget what I gave Harold, but he gave me (I must have asked him for it) a book called The Invisible Writing, by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-born Jew and lapsed Communist, author of Darkness at Noon, a post-war bestseller pillorying Stalinist Communism.
   Kathy's present from me was a Bowdoin skunk that, according to a diary I started that day, she named Lou, after me, because she said she liked him as much, and, "he'll always be with us." I wonder what's become of that little toy and the little girl it gave such pleasure to.
   (Kathy did incidentally spell her name with a K, as I see from one of my letters written home, reporting on my Florida Christmas, beneath which she scrawled her name.)
   Hal, already a chaplain's assistant at college eventually became a Reverend like his Dad. Sadly we lost touch, and a letter I wrote to him last summer care of an address in Wiscasset, Maine, given to me by the alumni office, has gone unanswered or astray.
   The little diary, bought at the student union shop on campus, with RECORD in gold-embossed letters on the stiff black cover, begins thus: "Thinking makes me happy. Koestler confirms that speaking and thinking in a new language transforms one's pattern of thought." This profound (even if not entirely original) insight is followed by the bit about Kathy and her Bowdoin skunk.
   On the penultimate day of the year, Hal and I drove over to St. Petersburg. Standing on the seashore together looking out over the Gulf of Mexico, I said to him, again according to my little friend the diary, that sometimes I thought I too might become a minister. "But it wouldn't work," I pencilled in afterwards.
   I was to keep up the diary till nearly the end of the school year and shall quote from it again. In my second and final year at Bowdoin, I kept a more voluminous one, more of a journal, in conscious imitation of the famous one of André Gide, a new favorite author, not on the reading list either. Another was Thomas Mann.
   Starting back for Brunswick on the last day of the year, we stopped over in Boston-incredibly enough staying at the Parker House Hotel (Nellie must have given me the money, since she spent Christmas with friends in Bogota, still safe)-and celebrated New Year's Eve by going to the movies to see There's No Business Like Show Business, with Ethel Merman.
   Besides Merman belting out the famous hit song, there was a scene, or rather a sequence, in the film I never forgot. It showed the image of her partner or lover-movie buffs will remember the actor's name-superimposed on railroad tracks along which he is seen walking away on tour without her, with large calendar leaves falling like real ones all about him to indicate the passage of time.
   The sequence struck such a cord because it reminded me of a similar scene four months earlier, almost to the day. On August 30, standing at the back of an express train speeding through perfectly flat countryside towards Rotterdam, where my fellow Fulbrights and I were to board ship for New York. I was all but mesmerized by the two gleaming parallel lines seemingly converging at some hazy point in the distance, beyond which lay my home in the Rhineland. I had come a long way.
   With that image, I'd like to leave kind Orient readers who have faithfully followed the author's travels and collegiate travails over a sitar span of time, and who will hopefully resume doing so next semester, beneath wintry pines.
   In the meantime, here's wishing you Fröhliche Weihnachten, and a happy new year.