To be around the Falls and the Niagara River was a natural thing for me, I had never lived or gone to school at any distance farther than one could walk in twenty or thirty minutes, that was the first two decades of my life. That muffled drum roar was the last thing I heard falling asleep, that was present every morning.

Not nearly as constant, but always known, were the stories of the barrels that had gone over the falls, names that I used to know, descriptions of barrels that had held beer or bulk goods, the large rubber ball that was supposed to bounce off rocks and to be unsinkable. Later barrels were custom made of steel and aluminum, custom made for going over the Falls or else down the Niagara Rapids.

This particular afternoon I was at the Rainbow Bridge, about a mile and a half downstream from the Falls, I was working. During the summer the border at Niagara is the focus of heavy auto traffic, the Rainbow Bridge in particular has heavy traffic all day long during tourist season, all of this traffic was crossing the international border, and so it was subject to inspection by both the United States and Canada, and that’s where I came in. As an aid to university students and to seasonally increase the staff at the border, Canada hired university students for the summer, we were Canada Customs Officers or Canada Immigration Officers; a really cool job for undergraduate guys, we were all male at that time.

It was rumored that a barrel would go over the Falls that day, probably in the middle of the afternoon when there would be the most people watching. Going over the Falls in a barrel was definitely illegal, there were specific laws forbidding it, there were other civil laws that prohibited doing this kind of thing in public and dangerous international waters; that it was forbidden was the relish on the hot dog.

This barrel was different, it had always been important to have a different design or idea than those who had gone previously, whether they had lived or been killed. This barrel was made of inner tubes; made by guys who were not people who might otherwise be working for NASA or Boeing, they were a bunch who had known each other all of their lives, drank draft beer at the same ‘beverage room’, they were the examples that parents used to drive children to do better in school. There was one family in particular who were at the core of this and various other river feats, the Red Hill family.

Red Hill Jr. and his pals had put together a cylinder of inner tubes, resembling a package of “Life Savers”, the ends were tapered by using smaller and smaller tubes; the whole thing was held together by heavy fish net; inside was a harness to hold Hill and his bottle of oxygen in place during the tumult. The oxygen was to be used in that time that the barrel was underwater at the base of the Horseshoe Falls.

The special thing about the Horseshoe Falls was the quantity of water that went over the brink, the water had carved the limestone into the shape of a horseshoe, had worn the falls backwards for millenia, the amount of water was so great that after a fall of two-hundred feet it made a spray that easily went that distance above the brink, some days even higher; no one has seen the bottom of the falls for the density of the spray; the power was known to drive timbers so deep that it might take five minutes for them to surface. It was to make an unquestionably buoyant vessel that made these guys think of inner tubes; the driving force of the water holding the thing below the surface necessitated the bottle of oxygen. No one can argue successfully against a simple idea for a difficult problem (Yes, I know I am borrowing that from H. L. Mencken).

At the last minute Hill’s associates convinced him that the fishnet wouldn’t hold, that it would break under the pounding water; so they wrapped the whole thing in heavy canvas that was sewn in place, there was an opening at one end through which Hill would be stuffed inside. Some argued that the canvas would hold water inside the barrel, reduce its buoyancy, keep it under the hammer of the falling water.

At the Border we were alerted about twenty minutes beforehand that something was underway, that the thing had been spotted in the Upper Niagara, too close to the brink to risk the police boat retrieving it; Hill’s people had avoided police attention in one of the creeks and inlets upstream of the Falls.

The water above the Falls runs at about twenty-seven miles an hour, or did in those days, as the riverbed descends towards the brink; great stones had been put out in the water just above the brink in attempt to lessen the erosion caused by the friction of huge amounts of speeding water on the soft limestone. This man-made rapids means that boats cannot come closer than a mile from the brink, that includes police-boats. All boats have two smaller engines, never the one massive motor seen on lakes, it is to have an other engine if one fails.

Hill’s barrel looked to me like a trimmed black log as it came down the center of the river towards the middle of the Falls, just the right place, where the water was deepest. It fell, and for the first third of the way down it was visible, then it disappeared into the mist.

Below the Falls the river becomes a wide pool that is as deep as the Falls is high, the surface is smooth enough for the tourist boat “Maid of the Mist” to have puttered upon for decades; but under the surface there is great turmoil, billions of gallons of water that has fallen hundreds of feet has tremendous kinetic energy that causes swirling as it dissipates that energy.

You can’t accurately remember how long it takes when waiting for something like a barrel to surface, no one without a stopwatch could ever be accurate. It seemed like five minutes, it might have been one or ten, I am sure we holding our breathes but who would remember that, staring at that great pool a mile or so ahead, and a couple of hundred feet below where we stood on the Rainbow Bridge, we had the best of all observations. It would be easy to see the black rubber stick against the flat surface of the green and white water.

Someone else yelled, something had been sighted, he pointed and we all stared; and we all began to see and to understand.

The first inner tube surfaced, then another, and then another came to the surface, just as a submerged balloon pops up after being released from your fist. They could all be seen floating downstream, separately.

There are eddies and pools of the lower river where bodies surface when they are ready; when the gases of decomposition inflate the corpse, make it into a balloon, or an inner tube, a gas filled cylinder. Local lore says that there is no need searching for a body until three days have passed; then go look at those particular places where bodies surface. There used to be a body found almost every week, Niagara Falls was a convenient place for suicide, climb over a five foot rail, walk into the shallows, continue walking until the water was swift enough to knock you off your feet, and that would be it.

The guys we called ‘river-rats’ knew the pools, the eddies where Hill’s body might come up, and they knew Hill, he had been a ‘river-rat’; they used small flat-bottomed boats to recover bodies in return for the small bounty from the authorities. Eventually they found Hill, on each of four days they found Hill; the force of the water had driven his body apart.

I knew the Hill family in that I delivered their newspaper at one time, my sister was in the same class as one of the daughter’s; doing river stunts was what they were famous for doing, my dad went to school with Red Hill Sr.

And that is the way it was.
]]> http://rogerjohnson.wordpress.com/2008/02/11/over-the-falls-in-a-barrel/feed/ 0 Roger Johnson http://rogerjohnson.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/eat-an-orange-for-breakfast/ http://rogerjohnson.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/eat-an-orange-for-breakfast/#comments Sat, 02 Feb 2008 16:07:54 +0000 Roger Johnson http://rogerjohnson.wordpress.com/?p=124 ]]> The person who promoted the idea of eating an orange for breakfast got it just right; a couple of days ago I tried cantaloupe, good but not quite the same; an apple is a great thing to eat, but more of a mid-day edible; grapes are definitely for late afternoon before a nap; a banana is good in the morning, with cereal, a banana requires something, it makes a great partner, when I was a kid peanut-butter and banana sandwiches were my all time favorite. An orange offers that necessary jolt of sugar, a ton of flavor, and the juice satisfies a mouth that is parched in this mid-winter absence of humidity; an orange has all the elements for life in the morning.

This morning I ate a good orange while waiting for the kettle to boil, it was a big fruit, the size of a small grapefruit, could have made two snacks if I hadn’t forgotten to light fire under the kettle. One can eat a lot of almost anything while waiting for the kettle to boil on a cold burner. I did, finally, light the fire under the kettle, after that things went along pretty much as one would expect; and I got the opportunity to eat a large orange, a really good orange.

That first paragraph went on for longer than usual because I don’t have in mind what I want to say this morning; ordinarily I lay in bed, letting my mind sort and choose an idea, one that is ready to come out of incubation. Not this morning, the brain ain’t running quite right, popping and farting, not getting out of first gear; so here’ are the elements I have so far, and I’ll see if writing them down will help me make sense:

-I read a review of the recent book out on G. W. B., it resonated in me as it described how George had to make himself what he is in order to stand against his dad. Obviously that isn’t exactly what the reviewer or the book says, that is what I remember sitting here the day after, this is what the review meant to me. What George figured out he had to do to survive and become a man.

-At 2 a. m. I woke, I had fallen asleep after dinner, now I was in that part of the day that has nothing at all going for it, the doldrums, the television was on, an infomercial was pushing something or other that would make my fantasy life a reality, another channel promised similar exaltation with their product, finally I found an old, very old movie, one made just after the development of the talkie; so I fired up the computer, if nothing else I could play a couple of games of solitaire, in hope of stupefy myself. Naturally I first looked to see who had been reading my stuff, what searches had resulted in readers coming here. I saw a post by a woman who is troubled, someone who is fixed on the idea of killing herself, going through those familiar old arguments about why suicide is the only action open. I wanted to respond, know that nothing I can say will change her situation, yet I can’t turn away without something; I did write a few lines about how I had found my way out of that hole. Then I went back bed.

-None of my family talks to me since I broke with my father, and then he died without my being there. I didn’t know that he was about to die, don’t know what I would have done if I had been told earlier; as it was I received a cold call after he was dead, and just prior to the funeral, so there was no way I could have gone there either.

These three items are on my plate this morning, I see the connection, I just don’t see how to make something more from them; but the guys-in-the-backroom of my mind know, they sent out these three items with instructions to make a good thing from them, something that I will be happy to share with all of you.

Maybe it has to do with the two posts I wrote recently, the ones having to do with admitting that I felt down-in-the-dumps, the ones that received more first-day responses than anything previous. It is as if I had offered permission for others to feel bad occasionally. All of that would have been forbidden in the house was raised; my mother would suffer migraine after migraine with her attempts to contain herself, the marriage was a model of control and restraint; I won’t comment on the effects on my siblings because they are still alive.

Those of you who have read the “Lydia” thing know how close I came to shutting it down forever, about ten minutes from throwing the switch. It is neat to be able to point with accuracy to the point where the logos turned upward after its long trip down. It is the place where I had the revelation that was to lead me to the religious and theological stuff that is so relevant now and the future.

That’s about it; I could have wrote that I have nuthin’, but that isn’t the case here, I have everything–maybe that’s it, I have everything now, so make something of it.

If this all appears solipcistic I apologize, or maybe I don’t. After all it is my choice to push the “Publish” button at the bottom of the screen, and it is my choice to have my name at the top. Maybe what I am trying to say is that we all have opportunity to make what we would be; Bush had his, I had mine, you have yours.

—————————————————

There isn’t much going on outside the window right now, on a whim the flock of brown commas disappeared to the east, they’ll be back. They have been feeding heavily after the storm, I can’t remember so much being eaten in one day. I was enjoying watching one sparrow who would sit on a branch beside the feeder, he would chase away any bird that came his way, he wasn’t feeding,he was resenting; there are a number of ports from which to get access to the food, he couldn’t chase off all of the birds, and he was certainly not the biggest one out there–he just had to chase others away. Perhaps he is a neo-conservative?

As I am about to edit this piece I put Elgar’s Enigma Variations on the stereo, enigma is how I started writing this thing, and how I end it.

All my bridges were burning, there was no way out of this horrible mess that my life had become, death was my only option. I had gone over my situation repeatedly, had burned out a number of therapists in attempts to find a solution to the depression and anxiety that destroyed all that I might have been. I truly believed that I was going to use the setup I had made, that I would no longer be alive in fifteen minutes, no hope was left unturned.

It was the absolute belief that nothing I held important was useful, no cavalry troop was going to ride in from off stage at the last minute; no smooth, moist thighs were going to open as a safe harbor; that is when I began to sense something else, I now call it ‘Presence’ even though it was and is not a thing, a presence. It is more like a verb than a noun, and it has no character other than it was through me, about me, it was me and more than me, I would never be alone again.

In the months and years to follow I went through James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, fought my way through a number of Tillich’s books, listed myself at the University of Wales, Lampeter where religious experiences can be registered. I have come to believe that I had what those others have had over the millenia, and it has led me to a few notions:

Jesus couldn’t have experienced the ultimate transcendence if he had not been brought to death by the Romans, Jesus the man teaching what all men can know.

That the guy who stood on the dessert and said ‘God is God’ pretty much said it all, and I empathize with his experience.

That people who have spiritual knowledge did not all stop two thousand years ago, there is no reason to think that there is less opportunity to know the divine than there was in Palestine back then, no reason at all.

That it is the goal of everyone to have this knowledge, whether that goal is expressed or kept hidden, there is intuitive knowledge of what it is.

I will post this as is, even though I know its inadequacy, know that what was experienced can never be portrayed accurately and fully: not by Bach, Jackson Pollock or Jesus, but we feel the need to try.

LYDIA AELLO LOOKS AT ME

©

I was a skinny, noisy kid who had an answer for everything, and an inability to keep quiet about it. Although I grew to six feet tall, before puberty I was usually the shortest kid in class, and had an answer for everything.

It must have been in fifth grade that this thing happened, I know that it was just before lunch time, that the weather was warm, I remember the walk home for lunch after it happened.

I read everything that came into sight, I was bright, considered myself brighter than anybody else in my class or at home, along with being small, considering myself the brightest led me to having a difficult time in grade school, and not that much easier in high school.

The teacher’s name was Miss Orr, at least I remember it that way, this happened about half a century ago, I know that it wasn’t Miss Coulter, because Miss Coulter gave me the strap a few times, she frightened me, which was her modus operandi.

When it happened I was sitting in the third row from the windows, it was a nice day I had been looking outside often.

Lydia Aello, whose father killed chickens, was looking at me. I’d known Lydia since I started at Memorial Public School three years before, she was the girl who walked to school with Norman Hope’s sister Muriel, they had a poultry business behind their house, she was bigger than I was, she had long dark hair, that’s about all that I can remember about her. I can’t remember much about any of the other girls either, they just didn’t figure for much in my world.

Anyway, Lydia was giving me this look, looking right at me with this funny smile that somehow told me that she liked looking at me. This had never happened to me before, I had never considered it happening to me, there was nothing in my vocabulary for this. The difference between boys and girls was a fixed thing, they were what they were, and a girl looking at me as if she liked doing it? I didn’t know what was going on. I can remember looking away, then looking back, there was no mistake, she did it again, right at me, with this funny little smile. For once I had no answer, and I always had an answer for everything.

I can remember walking home across the fields we called the ‘hydro’ fields, because the high voltage electric lines from the hydro electric power plants, that surround the falls at Niagara, ran through them, I didn’t have much to say to Tommy, Gary or Bob that noon hour. If I had been hit alongside the head with a sandbag, I would not have felt differently. That afternoon I smiled back at Lydia Aello.

Since that time I have not always been in love, but I can definitely say that I have never doubted its existence, would not even consider the question. I don’t understand love much better now than I did then, but that it exists is obvious.

What Lydia’s look signaled was that I was acceptable. I don’t know that anyone had ever given me that message before. Those were not the words that would have been used, the child’s term “she likes you” is as close as it ever came.

The notion remained as a ungerminated seed in my soul, not nourished nor often repeated, just buried in the soil, waiting.

My thing with Lydia Aello lasted two weeks, or a little less. I got teased about it, I can remember a smile from Miss Orr when Lydia chose me again to answer the multiplication exercise that she was monitoring, I chose her when it was my turn. I never did get to hold her hand.

Now jump forward about four decades to when I am about to kill myself.

A variety of pills are in the coffee grinder, stuff to make me drowsy, a glass of milk in which to mix the ground medications sits on the counter, a vinyl shower curtain is draped over the kitchen stove. I will drink the milk and drugs mixture, blow out the pilot lights and open the circuit breakers, and then climb under the tent, there will not be an explosion from the gas when I open the oven valve. The plan has been fixed in my mind for some time, simple, clean, final.

I am going to kill myself because there are no options left to me; over fifty years of fighting major depression that continues to worsen, I am divorced for the second time, my daughter wants nothing more to do with me, any career is long gone, there aren’t any friends left. I have looked for help since 1959, that is the first time I lived in a city big enough to have a psychiatrist, it had continued in half a dozen places, and with about a dozen and a half therapists, all the medication had been tried, multiple shock treatments, and it just gets worse, the hole gets deeper, all options are gone. This list of failure keeps running through my mind, the conclusion never varies, there is the only way to end this pain.

The list of rejections and failures went again through me, this time there was no “perhaps” that I might insert, my position allowed me for no excuse, there was no person, no endeavor, or place that wanted me.

I am standing, next to the stove, leaning on the counter, everything is in front of me. This is it.

I now see the void of death, in just a few minutes I will be of it. I have never considered the blackness before, there has always been some myth or platitude diluting it, but not now, this is pure, this is reality as I had never known it.

It was as if I was naked, standing on a rock, with a storm having blown every reason to live downwind. I stood there in this experience, the second hand didn’t move.

And then my stomach heaved, I began to gag, I ran to the bathroom, to retch out something bitter and nasty from my belly.

It took me a weeks to know that in that moment of nakedness, I had experienced something else, something other than the feral instinct to live, a notion that I couldn’t and wouldn’t see.

Regarding the depression, I made one more effort, using an technique that someone from Mayo Clinic had suggested years before, I started asking around, “who is the most effective person in Chicago treating depression?” The emphasis was on ‘effective’. I attended a couple of lectures, searched bookstores, and asked whatever doctors I could find that question. As had been promised me by the Mayo doctor, physicians are not loath to tell give their opinions. One name and one method came out of this. And the nightmare began to end, the depression was vulnerable after all this time.

To get back to whatever it was that I experienced at the time when I truly believed death was next. I thought on that, have been thinking on that ever since; it has become the focus of all that has followed. I experienced presence, not a presence, just presence, more of a verb than a noun. And even though it is more ineffable than love, it has been the subject of writings for several thousands of years, and continues to be.

It has another thing that cannot be doubted, no more than that love I felt when Lydia Aello first looked at me.

I assume that everyone I meet has been in love, it may not be true, but it isn’t far from it; I sometimes forget that not everyone has had a religious experience, the two seem so natural and obvious, available to everyone, when the situation comes to it.

I realized that it was at this point that the seed planted by Lydia Aello had sprouted, it came to life. That I am acceptable, not by any person, any code, but as an inherent part of me.

The Presence I experienced is that of Being Acceptable.

A truth that needs no argument. It just sits there as testament to my being.

Roger Johnson: April, 2007.

The weather person on last night’s news said that today’s weather would be “miserable”, an adjective that caught my attention; the sky is gray, the temperatures above freezing, but nothing is miserable, except perhaps what was in that guy’s mind. The weather is whatever the weather is.

Someone asked me last week what it was like to do hospice volunteering, my answer was that a person had to be comfortable in one’s own skin-accept that I am acceptable. As I remembered this conversation I understood that what we offer the dying person is the reminder that he is acceptable as is. It is an ultimate truth.

Brought up to be judgmental meant that I was discouraged from the concept that I am acceptable as is, that others are also not acceptable as is, that love was conditional. As a result I grew up to have a hardened case of major depression, one that began as a child and lasted until just a few years ago. I felt the need to fall in love with women who brought judgment to their relationships; believed that it was my right and duty to judge others.

To get rid of the depression it was necessary that I learn that I am acceptable as is, and a hard damned lesson it was; I fought that concept– gagged, spat, swore, did everything but hold my breath in my refusal to accept that I am acceptable as I am, but in the end I couldn’t refute it. It was as turning an ocean liner around at speed.

There has been a group, groups, that promote the idea that one is defective, that one has inherent guilt, that one cannot approach the divine—this is wrong. How could it be that I am not acceptable? What separates me, or any of us, from being simply animal is that I know that I am, I know existence and the end of my existence. It would be an oxymoron to state that know I exist means that I should accept guilt, believe that I am defective, that I cannot know what others have known of the divine.

Being mindful of my being is the fundamental and most powerful notion there can be, and with it comes acceptability.

I can’t say it stronger than that; it is when I denied that idea, that I was miserable. It is when my friend Joe couldn’t buy into that idea that he had to hang himself on a rope in a stairwell. I was going to come up with other examples but I realized that anyone who reads this knows dozens of examples.

Old Bert comes out of his dementia for a minute or so, the first thing that he does is to ask my forgiveness for not being able to hold a good conversation with me. As if I was sitting with a dying man in order to have polite conversation. I suggest that we just sit and watch the passing parade: ladies with their walkers, nurses going after one patient then another with medications, cleaners doing the incessant cleaning that keeps the place from tipping into nauseousness, just enjoy the parade, just be.

There are a number of definitions of God, the one I like most often is “the ground of being”: it encompasses acceptance, infinite love, mindfulness, and just being about the day’s business.

Before I turned on the gadget to write this I lay in bed, framing a few phrases, remembering some things I wanted to tie together here, and feeling that this is an idea that I would like to roar from the rooftop. Luckily I can sit inside, drink strong coffee, use a keyboard instead. Now that I have vented I can finished getting dressed, go for a long walk, get on with the day.