Uprooted: The Ralph Kand Story, Part 14. Americans--First Encounter

Upstairs, Ralph and the other prisoners were taken to a makeshift desk where German police prepared their release papers. From there they were escorted to a storage room to retrieve their belongings.

The process took time, and Ralph complained.

“Don't be a brute,” one of the policemen told him. “We're civilized people. Keep your head.”

Ralph in his mother's arms, 1924

The officer took Ralph into the storage area. Though Ralph had arrived with very little, what remained in his pack mattered to him. He had photographs of his mother, Karl, his cousins and Eitzi. The German searched the shelves until he found it. “Is that yours?” the officer asked.

Ralph nodded. A few minutes later he was outside.

Released prisoners were moving in different directions. Some had homes to return to. Others appeared to have nowhere to go. Across the square Ralph could see the damaged courthouse. Other buildings nearby had also been hit during the bombing raids.

Franz found him. “I'm going to Munich,” he said. “It looks like the war is almost over.”

Franz had heard that the Germans were emptying the jail because the police were needed elsewhere and the authorities no longer wanted responsibility for feeding and guarding prisoners. “The Americans are coming this way,” he said.

That caught Ralph's attention.

Franz wished him luck.

“Auf Wiedersehen.”

The two men embraced.

“Auf Wiedersehen."

Ralph started west. Within an hour he was outside the edge of town, walking through farmland and rolling countryside. Other people were traveling the roads as well, some carrying packs or suitcases.

By mid-afternoon Ralph was walking along a winding road when he saw German soldiers coming toward him. There were hundreds of them, moving quickly in the opposite direction.

Ralph stepped onto the shoulder of the road and kept walking.

Then he heard a cannon. An explosion struck near the German column. The soldiers scattered into the fields on both sides of the road.

With the road suddenly clear, Ralph could see what was happening. Coming from the other direction an American tank appeared over the rise, American infantrymen moving with it.

Another round exploded nearby. Ralph realized he was between the two forces. He saw a farmhouse and headed for it as quickly as his bad leg would carry him. An older German farmer stood at the doorway, waving people inside and directing them toward the basement. Ralph went down with the others as gunfire continued outside.

When Ralph nobbled down about a dozen people were sitting along the walls of the basement. “Where are you from?” a woman asked.

“Czechoslovakia,” said a heavyset man.

She looked toward Ralph.

“Estonia.”

“You're a long way from home.”

“Yes.”

The skirmish outside did not last long, but no one moved. Eventually they heard footsteps upstairs. A door opened and floorboards creaked above them. Then the basement door opened.

A soldier came down the stairs carrying a rifle. Another followed. They were Americans.

The soldiers looked around the basement. They were searching for German troops. Finding none, they lowered their weapons. One of them spoke. “Anybody speak English?”

No one answered.

Then Ralph said, “I speak a little English.”

The American looked at him. “Ein bisschen?” he said, laughing.

Ralph understood.

“Tell them they're free to go,” the soldier said. “We're looking for German soldiers.”

Ralph translated the message into German. The people began getting to their feet.

Outside, Ralph could see bodies in the field. The American soldiers left to rejoin their unit. The German farmer offered the others something to eat and told them they could stay the night if they needed a place to sleep. 

Ralph declined the offer. Ralph declined the offer. "I'll press on," he said, stepping down to the stone-terraced walk. As the others chose to accept the farmer's kindness, Ralph headed back across the grassy field toward the road.

CONTINUED

RELATED 

UPROOTED: Intro and Part One

UPROOTED: Part Two

UPROOTED: Part Three
UPROOTED: Part Four
UPROOTED: Part Five
UPROOTED: Part Six

UPROOTED: Part Seven   

UPROOTED: Part Eight  

UPROOTED: Part Nine

UPROOTED: Part Ten

UPROOTED: Part Eleven

UPROOTED: Part Twelve

UPROOTED: Part Thirteen

Uprooted is a true story about a man with a singular quest: Freedom. This longing for freedom is one of the primary reasons people leave their homelands, often at great personal sacrifice.

 

When Getting What We Want Isn't Enough: A Pascal Reflection

Blaise Pascal once wrote, “It is not well to be too much at liberty. It is not well to have all we want.”

This runs against nearly everything our contemporary culture tells us. We tend to think of freedom as the removal of restraints. More choices are better than fewer choices. More money is better than less. If something stands between us and what we want, remove the obstacle.

But Pascal--a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious philosopher of major significance--understood something about human nature that we sometimes forget. Limits are not always our enemies.

Years ago I wrote something similar in one of my journals: “When we get what we want, we usually get more than we bargained for.” We may want the promotion, but discover that it comes with headaches and responsibilities that we hadn't anticipated. When we go for a bigger house, we discover that we've also acquired higher taxes, more maintenance and more rooms to clean. The pursuit of unlimited choices may leave us paralyzed because we're unable to choose or decide what we want.

The old saying, “Be careful what you wish for” is a word for the wise. The expression has survived because experience keeps proving it true.

The Paradox of Limits

Nearly everything worthwhile depends upon some kind of limitation. Consider music. A piano has only 88 keys. Western music is constructed around a limited number of notes. Musical composition has rules governing harmony, rhythm and structure. Yet Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan somehow managed to create astonishingly different things within these limitations. The limits didn't prevent creativity. They made creativity possible.

The same is true of a football field. There are sidelines. There is a clock. There are rules about what you can and cannot do with the ball. Remove all the restrictions and you haven't created greater freedom for the players. You've destroyed the game. (Suppose, for example, that defenders could rush before the ball is snapped.)

Language works the same way. Grammar limits how we arrange words, but those limitations enable us to communicate. A sonnet has fourteen lines and a particular structure. That restriction has not prevented poets from writing beautiful sonnets. It gives them something to work against.

Could it be that life works that way, too?

Freedom From What?

We often speak about freedom without completing the sentence. Freedom from what? And perhaps more importantly: freedom for what?

There is obviously much to be said for freedom from oppression, coercion and arbitrary authority. But there is another kind of freedom that sounds attractive until we examine where it leads: freedom from obligation, responsibility and consequences. 

Marriage is an obvious example. When we marry someone, we voluntarily surrender possibilities. We make a promise that closes certain doors. That sounds restrictive because it is restrictive. But the restriction is precisely what gives the promise its meaning.

If I promise to meet you Tuesday but reserve the right to change my mind whenever something more interesting comes along, I haven't really made a promise. Commitment limits us. It also makes trust possible.

The Gift of Resistance

Some of the things we initially regard as obstacles may actually be doing us a favor. Deadlines force us to finish. After forty-five years of freelance writing I have never missed a deadline. When I was in fourth or fifth grade we were paired with other classmates to do a collaborative report for geography. The day before the report was due, my co-author notified me that he had done nothing. No research, no notes. I complained to my mom ho unfair it was, but she was smarter than me. She said I had to stay up and write the report, no matter how late it was when I finished. While working on it, I witnessed something miraculous that I've never forgotten, that I never would have seen had I not been required to finish that night.

Budgets a likewise a challenge because they force us to prioritize. When money is tight, we discover what really matters to us. 

Physical limitations force athletes to train. The difficulty of mastering an instrument makes playing it well satisfying. The resistance of the blank page forces a writer to think. What am I really trying to say? 

Even boredom may have its uses. Generations before ours didn't carry a device in their pocket capable of filling every empty moment with entertainment. They occasionally had to sit quietly. Or ponder. Or notice what was happening around them. Whether eliminating boredom through reels news clips has made us happier is another question.

Modern technology has steadily removed friction from everyday life. We can buy nearly anything without leaving home. We can watch thousands of movies without waiting for one to appear on television. We can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the planet. And thought these are remarkable achievements, every solved problem seems to bring another problem with it. 

More Than We Bargained For

This is where Pascal's observation becomes interesting. “It is not well to have all we want.”

He isn't necessarily saying that wanting things is wrong. Nor is he suggesting poverty, hardship or oppression are somehow desirable. The deeper point concerns human nature. We aren't always particularly good at knowing what will make us happy.

A child may want all the candy he can eat, but an adult understands why that isn't a good idea. On the other hand, adulthood does not necessarily eliminate the impulse. We simply acquire more sophisticated forms of candy. 

We pursue these things believing satisfaction waits somewhere on the other side. Sometimes it does. Sometimes we arrive and discover another appetite waiting for us. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia), the White Witch seductively lures Edmund away from loyalty to Aslan and his family with what C.S. Lewis called Turkish Delight. In the story Turkish Delight becomes a metaphor for all the various temptations that lure us away from our true calling and higher self: money, recognition, possessions, pleasure, status, power, freedom from obligations.

There is always a little more money to make, another achievement to pursue, another possession to acquire, another experience we haven't had. The finish line keeps moving, and the reward of tasting more Turkish Delight propels us forward.

Perhaps that is why wisdom traditions have generally placed such emphasis on restraint. Temperance, patience, faithfulness, discipline and self-control sound old-fashioned because each involves voluntarily accepting limits.

The real bottom line is this: a person incapable of saying no to himself isn't really free. He is simply governed by his appetites.

Getting what we want isn't necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, some doors are better left closed.

Great Grandpa and the Caves of Yellow Rock

Every region of the world has its own geography. Beachfronts, prairie lands, deserts, mountainous cascades, fertile farmlands, variegated arctic and equatorial contrasts, glacial highlands, tundras, tropical rainforests, and the Eastern Kentucky hills where my own kin were born and raised, forming a filial chain those traces back to Daniel Boone and the era of the pioneers.

In a few minutes here I want to share one of the features of this region where my great-grandfather Grant Newman was born, lived and died, specifically the abundance of caves and caverns in what is known as Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau near Yellow Rock. The caves are the result of a specific geological phenomenon called karst topography.

My great-grandfather's home sat on the side of a mountain above the meandering Kentucky River just across from the quarry in Yellow Rock, in Lee County, 75 miles southeast of Lexington. In addition to the quarry, Yellow Rock featured a post office and maybe five residences. Historically recorded in geological and federal mine datasets as the Yellow Rock Mine & Mill (or Yellow Rock Quarry), the site's primary commodity was crushed and broken stone used for local construction, roads, and infrastructure aggregates. Visiting my great-grandfather's place on the mountain is one of the fond memories from my childhood. 

View from Kentucky River at Yellow Rock
House is visible in upper right quadrant.

To reach my great-grandpa's property by car you had to find the trail that ran down from the Spencer Fork Road that snaked along the crest of the mountain. Once you descended through the canopy of forest--mostly hardwoods of the beech, poplar, hickory, black walnut, maple and buckeye varieties, along with a smattering of pines--the trail would flare out to unveil his miscellaneous outbuildings and two-story ramshackle home.

I can't remember all the animals he kept--chickens, a dog, maybe cats--though the two massive hogs were to be definitely avoided. He must have had a cow because I seem to recall a butter churn. He also had an abundance of mice. My cousin Gary, brother Ron and I slept upstairs in the double bed and throughout the night we could hear the scampering of little feet about our bed. We made sure none of our sheets or blankets hung down to the floor.  

At one time great-grandpa had a couple rattlesnakes which he used to "milk" to keep them from being deadly. I was told that on one occason he went too long between "milkings" and got bit by his now-venomous rattler. He not only survived the bite, it also cured him of his rheumatism. As descendants of Daniel Boone I remembered from my research that Squire Boone, Daniel's father, suffered from rheumatism. For years that factoid made me wonder if rheumatism were genetic. I've since learned it was an informal, non-medical term used to describe a range of painful conditions affecting joints, muscles and connective tissues.

Great grandpa raised eleven kids on the side of this mountain. Roscoe, my grandfather, was the firstborn. His story and many others may appear in some other collection of digressions. What interested me at this moment were the caves that permeated this part of the country along with a few associated memories.

These Eastern Kentucky caves were formed in limestone left behind by an ancient sea more than 300 million years ago. Over time, slightly acidic rainwater seeped through cracks and slowly dissolved the rock, enlarging them into tunnels and caverns. Protective sandstone layers helped preserve the caves. Later, dripping mineral-rich water created stalactites, stalagmites and other formations which you will see in abundance at Mammoth Cave National Park southwest of Louisville.

The week we were at my great-grandpa's in the 1960s, my dad told us about a cave across the river that his dad showed him when he was young. To get there we scrambled down the side of the mountain on a path that led to the river. There my brother Ron, cousin Gary and I found an old rowboat with a oars and a little shovel in it. The oars were for rowing, of course, and we quickly understood the presence of the shovel. The boat leaked. If you weren't rowing you were shovelling.

The brown, languid water flowed without enthusiasm, but our hearts raced, eager to find the mouth of that cave as if it were a family heirloom. Once we reached the other side we tugged the skiff up into the weeds and headed off on our quest.

The post office and quarry were off to our left, but Dad said to cross the road and follow the railroad track along the base of the mountain to the right. The distance was perhaps a couple football fields. The opening, he said, was so low that you couldn't crawl in on your hands and knees. You'd have to scoot on your belly about ten feet before the cavern opened up and you could explore.

Armed with flashlights, we walked a ways along the track looking for some clue as to where the entrance might be. Spying the opening became challenging because of the brambles, witch hazel, weeds, shrubs and flora that flourished at the base of the mountain. After a while we supposed we'd missed it and began tracking back in the direction of the post office. I don't whether it was my cuz or my brother who first spotted it, but there it was. Five minutes later we were inside the mountain, armed with flashlights.

Temps in these caves generally hover around 48 to 54 degrees F. The feeling is distinctive as is the smell--clean, chill and intensely earthy. With no solar energy to evaporate the moisture the air is heavily scented, crisp and tangy from the limestone and calcite.

But the big thrill is the absolute darkness once you turn off your flashlights. 

This particular cave may have been 20 feet high or more. Though narrow at the base where we scrambled over rocks, it may have been 20 feet wide or more. Up ahead it was like a long tentacle wending its way through the mountain. We explored but never went as far as we might have been able.

At one point a train passed while we were in the cave and the mountain trembled.  

On another day we located some other caves not far from our great-grandpa's house. He told us to be careful. He once had a hunting dog that chased an animal into one of those caves and got lost in there. For three days he could hear his hound howling until one day it stopped and he knew he would never see it again.

Nevertheless, having been forewarned, we did enter one of these caves. It had a low opening and my cousin went first I believe. Around ten feet inside there was ledge and a large room, but also a dropoff so you couldn't go any further forward or to the left or right. When you shone your light down over the edge we could see a rotted ladder. In other words, someone had been here and used that ladder to climb down further into the cave. What if there was treasure in the cave? Well, we weren't the ones to go looking for it. 

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