"The Restless Traveler"

A grad student in Alberta sent me a note to ask if I could tell him where a little essay had appeared so he could include it in a bibliography. I looked, but couldn't find it. But I told him I recognized the events and specifics; I told him I remembered the original story, but I had no idea where it could be found. It was titled, the grad student told me, "The Restless Traveler." I couldn't find it, so he sent me a copy.

It's mine all right, but my guess is our restless traveler himself  picked it up in 2010 or so from this blog.

Here 'tis. And here, I think, is the man who used the essay, the interesting guy whose war memories came flooding back when he listened to a man explaining, the story of the 1862 Dakota War. It's a story I told and will never forget.

The man at the center of the photo, I think, is our restless traveler.

Somehow, I think I knew what was going on, in part, I think, because I knew the man, his history, and the sometimes stinging effects of childhood experience. He’d immigrated to Canada after the war, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and not all of that experience—hiding from conscription, living in fear day and night, the hunger winter—not all of that simply sifts out of one’s life when it's left behind. If there are jackboots on the necks of your neighbors, you don’t walk away whistling.

What happened was a kindly old retired professor walked up on the steps of the tour bus and began to tell the peculiarly German story of New Ulm, Minnesota, a town that celebrates its heritage of sauerbraten, schweinhocks, and polka bands. In his defense, the old prof was German-American, not German. In all likelihood, he spent the early 40s here in the States, picking ripened milkweed pods for parachute silk in the U.S. war effort, no more a Nazi than any of the other seniors on the tour bus.

No matter. Once he started talking—even though he spoke English with no accent—he was unapologetically German; after all, his chamber-of-commerce job was to sell the town, which means to sell the local, proud German heritage. And our tourist, the man who couldn’t forget the Nazis’ snarls in his boyhood backyard, got what the Dutch might call “benauwd,” so breathtakingly claustrophobic that he literally couldn’t stand it. He couldn't listen.

This 80+ year-old war survivor had distinguished himself already as someone who could be strong-willed, to say the least. He was, after all, a man who'd climbed the Himalayas—he warn't no marshmallow. And he’d lost a leg in an biking accident—he hobbled demonstrably, but never complained.

In just two days, he'd distinguished himself clearly, so when we noticed that something was decidedly wrong with him, he was moping sort of publicly, initially at least, we rolled our eyes. But my suspicions weren’t far afield.

Here’s what he wrote in a little summary he penned of his experience on our Minnesota bus tour:

“Memories popped up about the Second World War, when German soldiers occupied Holland—us. Then when someone was going to give me a small sticker to put on my chest, it bothered me. I left the room to go outside. There was something that disturbed me, my memory in the past, when the Jews had to wear armbands with the name ‘Jew,’ to separate them from (us) whom they considered other (Germanic) Dutch people.”

I guessed it was a version of post-survival stress. Something in the kindly old professor’s mannerisms, his tone, his story, his telling of it, something in that little tourist sticker unearthed memories our own “restless traveler” might well have thought buried, and he nearly fell apart.

“He was very knowledgeable and could not stop telling his stories about German history and Indian wars,” he wrote. “He spoke while the bus drove around, to our next stop. I fretted, but I could not get out of the bus; he was driving me up the wall. I was stuck in the back of the bus and could not escape him.”

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Tomorrow: the rest of the story of the "Restless Traveler."