Road Rages

The life of a repo man is always intense

2011-08-10T22:11:00.001-04:00

Another story dug from the crates, this one is from 1990, and was published in the West Hernando News and Independent Press. Basically a single source story, backed up with some simple research, it was a pretty quick study. Still, I had a fun conversation with Mr. Taylor at a diner in Central Florida, where he poured out too many stories for me to recount. When he left, I challenged myself to see what his car looked like, but he disappeared into the parking lot. He was that good.

Joe Taylor's wrecker truck idled at an intersection in a small town in Marion County.

He spotted the car on the right of way down the street, and he knew from experience he needed backup. He radioed another agent, who arrived shortly thereafter.

The other agent pulled in to block the front of the car they were about to repossess, and Taylor pulled the wrecker in behind. He was hooking the car when the delinquent owner appeared at the front door of his mobile home, about 30 feet away.

"Hey, leave my car alone," he yelled. He cursed. He pulled out a long-barreled .38 and fired six rounds, sending Taylor and the other agent for cover behind the vehicles. Four bullets hit the wrecker, two whizzed by.

"I'm gonna get this damn car," Taylor thought as he lay on the ground. "I'm gonna get this car." He couldn't fire back -- state law prohibits him from carrying a gun.

The owner disappeared into the black of the trailer, apparently to reload. By then, Taylor was towing the car down the street. He had his car.

Taylor repossesses vehicles for banks or auto dealers. These financiers don't want to spend the time and money looking for a car and going through the courts, so they call Taylor's Ocala-based company, Chek-Mate, who can get the car back.

"There's an element of danger in each case," he later said. "You gotta know everything about a car, be able to get in it and start it, usually within 30 seconds.

"You have to know everything about the neighborhood you're going into -- how late the people stay up, how many neighbors there are, if there are dogs."

Situations are especially tough in drug-ridden areas, he said. "When you're on crack, you don't know what you're doing."

Taylor said Hernando County is relatively drug-free, so he doesn't have to worry about the things he encounters in poorer areas.

Most of his Hernando County business is conducted in Spring Hill, where there is an interesting cross section, he said, between elderly and itinerant. But the area, like any other, is unpredictable.

He said he makes a list of all the variables in every situation, more to test himself than anything else, because that list always proves to be unnecessary. The only variable he cannot predict, he said, is the person -- and people are usually very protective of their cars, even if they don't pay for them.

Chek-Mate covers the 12 counties surrounding Marion, including Hernando. Taylor also knows repossessors, or skip tracers, around the country. Other area repossession agencies, with names like Falcon and Blackjack, compete with Taylor's outfit.

Joe Taylor began repossessing cars in 1961, and at 53, he's still at it. "You gotta love it. The money's good, but you gotta be in it for more than the money," he said. Taylor makes anywhere from $200 to $1,000 for each vehicle he repossesses, depending on how complex the case.

"A lot of my friends who are in the police see that it is good money," he said, "but they don't want any part of it." It's the dangers and benefits principle, only the dangers are unique to the field -- people still believe the stereotype of the repo man.

In the 60s, he said, repo men would do anything to get their cars. A repo man could have impersonated a police officer or carried a gun because no one would stop him. Today, the field is regulated.

"There is still a stigma of the guy who's not high in intellect, who wears a baseball cap and greasy clothes, and drives a beat-up tow truck and goes around harassing the public," he said. "He's not someone you wanted to deal with."

These characters, typified by the movie Repo Man, abounded 20 years ago. "There were no law covering the industry," he said. "It was really wild and unregulated. What it came down to, is that if you were tougher than the other guy, you got your car."

Today, "tough" would be replaced by "more clever" or "more professional." The Florida Legislature recognized repossession as a profession in 1971, and requires repossession agents to undergo rigorous training and be licensed, and take out a minimum of $300,000 in liability insurance.

Recovery agents must know how to break into all models of cars and start them.

Taylor said the Division of Licensing in Tallahassee has helped improve the image of the profession. There are many legitimate, professional repossessors, he said, but like any other field, there are crooks.

These people perpetuate the lawless repo man stereotype, he said.

Several months ago, a so-called repossessor was arrested in Orlando after he stole nearly 40 cars from a shopping center parking lot. A store manager called him in to tow a single car parked illegally on the lot, and he towed as many as he could. He ended up having a criminal record and no license to repossess.

"We're trying to improve the image of the industry," Taylor said. He is president of the Florida Association of Licensed Repossessors, who are working with the Secretary of State's office to reword repossession laws when the statutes are reviewed in 1991.

Sometimes the stereotype is unjust, Taylor said. Earlier this year, a recovery agent was killed in Texas. He attached his wrecker to a car at 2 a.m., and a neighbor came outside and murdered him with a high-powered rifle.

"The grand jury did not indict the man," Taylor said. "They said, 'This neighbor had done what any normal person would have done.'”

"We wrote letters to the state attorney," he said. "We tell them that we abhor that sort of thing. But there's not a lot more that you can do except put yourself on the record."

Agents shun cameras -- Taylor did not want his picture taken because he didn't want "evil people to know what I look like." And their only notoriety, he said, is within the field or among financiers.

There is satisfaction, though. Taylor's son Brian joined his father's business three years ago, when he was 23. "He's getting good," the elder Taylor said.

In one case, Brian went to speak to the delinquent owners of a mobile home. He had no way of breaking in, so he asked to see inside. When they pulled out the keys to open the door, he looked at the cut pattern, went back to the shop, and cut a key from memory. It worked, and he got his vehicle.

Taylor and his son sometimes work together. In July, they were contracted to repossess a pickup truck in Ocala. The people were moving out when they were told their truck was to be confiscated, but the Taylors caught them.

They followed the truck from Ocala to Dunnellon to Lecanto and then to Beverly Hills, where they pulled into a gas station. The Taylors pulled into a parking lot next door. While they payed for gas, the elder Taylor jumped into the loaded-down truck and drove back to Ocala.

Recovery agents are required to store in a warehouse everything they find in a repossessed vehicle, and must notify the law within six hours of recovery.

The angry couple came for their stuff, Taylor said, and ignored a sign posted at his office that says cursing will not be tolerated. His employees usually threaten to call the sheriff's department, he said. "It's a funny thing about human beings," Taylor said. "Basically a human being will blame an unfortunate situation on anything but themselves.”

"Maybe three of four people in my entire career came in and accepted responsibility for themselves. If we all took responsibility for our own action, maybe this world wouldn't be like it is."

But if that happened, Joe Taylor would be out of business.

Inside Job: Private industry in beginning to realize there is plenty of cheap labor in the U.S.--prison labor

2011-08-08T10:49:00.027-04:00

This article was originally published Dec. 13, 1995 in Moon Magazine, a Gainesville, Fla. newsmonthly.

Three prisoners in white scrubs and masks spray rows of dangling green loofahs with a pesticide. Twenty rows away, three inmates in prison blues inspect the struggling sprouts, making sure crows haven't pecked away their labor.

The future of prisons may be growing on these ten acres of mucky soil 35 miles north of the Florida Everglades.

The Hendy Correctional Institute near Immokalee is a sprawling 3,850 acre compound whose razor wire-enclosed landscape includes orange groves and cattle range, a catfish pond and tanks, a station for the work camp and the main prison building. The state started a program here in August that employs a few low-risk inmates to grow loofahs, the mammoth cousin of the cucumber that can be eaten if picked young enough or used a scrubber when dried and bleached.

"This is not the menial task usually associated with prisons," Clarence White, Hendry's assistant supervisor of operations, said. It is hard work, though. Inmates work six hours a day, five days a week, inspecting budding plants, making sure the vegetables have room to grow along a wire, trying to keep water from rotting the plants off the vine and spraying pesticides. Of 1,300 inmates at Hendry, only a dozen or so work on the farm.

Florida hasn't offered the fruits of prison labor to private enterprise since the bad old days of turpentine camps and railroad crews at the turn of the century. The loofah farm is part of a 16-year-old national trend--allowed by federal legislation--where private, profit-driven companies may contract inmate labor or buy prison-made goods to sell on the open market.

Menial tasks such as cleaning floors and doing laundry are still the staple prison jobs, and manufacturing products such as furniture and uniforms for state and local governments is still the traditional prison industry. Prison officials say these jobs help teach prisoners the work ethic and often prepare them for jobs when they leave prison. State and federal studies have shown that recidivism, the rate a freed prisoner commits another crime and goes back to jail, is reduced when inmates work.

But traditional work environments are not enough, some prison experts say. A 1988 U.S. Department of Justice study, "Work in American Prisons: The Private Sector Gets Involved," reported that a "real-world" workplace where prisoners made goods or provided services for the free market was the best work scenario because prisoners would be exposed to the ways businesses are run on the outside. Trained in "real-world" settings, prisoners could leave prison with the skills to get a steady job.

"There is discipline in the profit motive," according to Neal Miller, a principle associate at the Institute for Law and Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit research group that helps state corrections departments run their prisons and industry programs. "I don't think the profit motive is contrary to rehabilitation. It's necessary."

Examples of current private sector/prison businesses vary:

Juvenile offenders at a California reform school operate reservation phone lines for Trans World Airlines. Prisoners in Nebraska are telemarketers for TGS Marketing, a $3.5 million Nebraska hardware firm. And until recently, prisoners took reservations for Best Western motels.
Inmates in Tennessee sew jeans for Kmart. Oregon inmates make uniforms for McDonalds. Inmates in Nevada build limousines.
Prisoners in Chicago were hired by Toys R Us to stock shelves, but were stopped by union protests.
Inmates in Tennessee made wooden rocking horses for Eddie Bauer.
And Prison Blues jeans, "made on the inside to be worn on the outside," are the modern prison industry success story. Prisoners in Oregon are paid from 28 cents to 8 dollars an hour to sew jeans that cost about $20 locally to $80 in Europe, where they are considered hot property.

Though they number only a few small- to medium-sized companies, private employers have been working in prisons or buying prison-made goods for awhile. A 1979 federal law allowed state prisons to start "prison industry enhancement," or PIE, programs that couple private industry and prison labor. Products made in the PIE program--including Florida's loofahs--can be shipped across state lines, relaxing one prohibition that has long prevented private employers from using prison labor.

Another major reason private businesses haven't used prison labor more often is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, a product of the union activism and political pressure that established much of our present labor law. The FLSA requires works in the free market to be paid the minimum wage and be give resources to courts when they feel wronged by employers. Prisoners are not explicitly excluded from the FLSA, and federal PIC legislation requires inmates be paid the minimum or prevailing wage.

A bill to exclude prison inmates from federal minimum wage and benefits laws has been floating around Congress since the 80s.

"Implications for the Fair Labor Standards Act for Inmates, Correctional Institutions, Private Industry, and Labor," has been defeated several times, but keeps resurfacing, each time sponsored by a different senator or representative. The bill, if passed, would open the door to more private industry involvement in prisons.

Florida Rep. Bill McCollum co-sponsored this bill. In May 1994, he addressed the House Committee on Labor and Human Resources:

"We need to find...a formula that would allow us to bring private industry into the prisons more often and be able to sell prison-made goods across state lines in terms of the general open market rather than simply the confined areas today where those prison-made goods are allowed to be sold to other government agencies."

Captive Market

It's no surprise profit-driven companies are looking to prisons as a potential labor pool. American factories have been moving overseas and Mexico for years in search of cheaper labor. Proponents of private-sector involvement say prisons could provide products currently made by cheap labor in under-developed countries.

Prisons, they say, are a vast untapped resource. U.S. prisons house nearly a million people, many of whom lack job skills. Problems with training and discipline, private prison industry advocates admit, must be surmounted.

Florida traditionally holds more than its share of prisoners. In 1970, 9,412 criminals were incarcerated in state and federal prisons here. For each 100,000 citizens, 137 were locked up. The national average was 97 prisoners per 100,000.

By 1993, the state housed 53,048 criminals, or 385 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens. The national average was 351 prisoners per 100,000. Since 1990, Florida has added almost 10,000 prisoners. And the state plans to build 8 prisons and four work camps by 2000.

Faced with burgeoning populations and burdened by mandatory sentencing laws, higher costs, reduced revenues, and increased political pressure to make inmates get out of the bunk or away from the television, state prisons are looking more frequently to private industry.

"It's real world training," according to Miller.

Most of the people in prison are young, unskilled men. Most of the work in prison industries requires only a minimum of skills, which contradicts the argument that prison labor teaches convicts finely honed skills. Such arguments are drapery for a more rudimentary economic reality: Companies don't have to look beyond the U.S. for low-cost, unskilled workers.

"The flight of labor-intensive businesses overseas, driven by the search for lower costs, may be partially offset by private-sector prison industries," the Justice Department reported.

The Reagan-era report admitted, however, that this could cause a problem: "Evidence of the creation of a permanent underclass in the U.S., with concomitant decrease in the middle class, will mean more competition for low-skilled jobs."

And critics have picked up on the disparity between the promises of relevant work skills and the irrelevance of much of the labor-intensive work that attracts private industries.

"What are they training prisoners to do?" asks Joe Gunn, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. "Are they training prisoners to get jobs in Taiwan?"

Prisoners making Prison Blues jeans learn sewing skills, even though most textile factories have moved overseas or into cities where cheap labor often illegal aliens are plentiful.

Miller puts the underlying issue bluntly: "If you had a sewing factory in Los Angeles, and hired illegal aliens, you could get away with it for awhile. But if you could do that legally with inmates, that'd be terrific."

Labor's Hedge

Unions and businesses affected by prison labor agree that prisoners need to work. They argue, however, that when companies hire prisoners, they take jobs away from free citizens, exploit a captive worker for profit and drive down wages.

"States chasing the illusionary benefits of convict labor have produced a long and colorful history of unfairness, injustice, and corruption," John Zalusky, the head of the office and wages and industrial standards at the national headquarters of the AFL-CIO, told a Senate committee looking at expanding private prison industries to the federal prison system in 1993.

Zalusky detailed how wicker furniture workshops in an Illinois prison in the early part of the century destroyed the U.S. wicker industry, taking with it the Reed and Rattan Furniture Workers Union. The taxpayers, in effect, paid to undermine the free market.

"It's not just a threat to workers," Gunn said. "It's a threat to communities. I don't want people having to go to jail to get a job."

Gunn's gone up against private prison employers in Texas. Wackenhut, a private prison firm with a facility in Lockhart, Tex., incarcerates criminals for the state. To help the bottom line, they hired inmates out to private employers. Union workers in Austin were displaced when their employer, a circuit board manufacturer, set up shop in the prison.

"Convicts are slave labor owned by the government," Zalusky said recently from his Washington office.

And if you follow American philosopher Thomas Dewey's maxim that government is the "shadow cast on society by big business," then Gunn says the same thing: "Corporations want to make slave labor in America."

Gunn's not off the mark. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution the federal law that officially freed the slaves during the Civil War, specifically exempts prisoners: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Work Shall Set You Free

Prisoners in all states are required to work. Many do menial tasks such as cleaning floors or working in kitchens. Others clean parks and highway rights-of-way. And Florida recently joined Alabama and Arizona by reinstating one of the South's least picturesque postcards: the chain gang.

Hiring or contracting prisoners to private employers is not new. Prisons, often in the interest of private, profit-driven companies, exploited prisoners and drew jobs out of the free market.

The most notorious was the convict-lease system developed in the 19th century. States contracted out prisoners to private companies who exercised complete control over their lives. Prisoners built railroads and highways, toiled in rock quarries, worked huge farms. The American Siberia, published in 1891, details the harsh life of convicts working in turpentine camps and on railroads in North Florida. The convict-lease system was abolished in all states by 1936.

Humanitarians and organized labor helped push through legislation in the 1940s that limited prison industry to manufacturing goods for only government agencies.

Typical "state-use" products include uniforms, furniture, printing, and of course license plates. PRIDE, a Clearwater, Fla.-based non-profit company that has exclusive right to employ Florida's inmates in state-use shops, also grows crops and raises cattle, manufactures medical supplies and chemicals, and builds some government buildings.

Prisons had been operating these state-use workshops for years when population growth nationwide and riots at Attica in New York, McAllister in Oklahoma and Pontiac in Illinois in the 1970s drew political attention to prison policy. The Department of Justice released studies that characterized many prison workshops as sloppy attempts to emulate real-world factory settings.

Prison workshops did little to alleviate idleness, the force most prison experts say is responsible for violence. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger coined the term "factories with fences" in a speech to lawyers in Nebraska in 1981, and set the tenor for today's prison policy.

Most states operate PIE programs or have legislation that allows private firms to hire prisoners. No federal laws prohibit companies from hiring prisoners as service workers usually phone solicitors or reservationists.

PIE stipulates that state prison authorities have to inform unions and businesses that may be affected by the prison business. States are supposed to pay inmates the minimum or prevailing wage whichever is higher from which victim restitution, state and federal taxes and room and board are deducted. What's left the prisoner can save, send home, or use to buy cigarettes or magazines from the prison canteen.

But labor organizers point out that these stipulations are often only partially followed.

"I don't know of one who's done all these things," Zalusky said. In 1984, Arizona prisons leased a meat packing plant in Phoenix, promptly fired 400 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and gave their jobs to 60 convicts. This was a PIE project. The union asked the Department of Justice to revoke Arizona's certification, but no action was taken.

Wooden horses made by Tennessee prisoners could have been made by any number of woodworking plants in the area, according to Sue Perry, executive director of Prison Industries Reform Alliance. The Grand Rapids, Mich.-based PIRA is a coalition of 850 businesses impacted by prison industries, and has diligently studied the growth of inmate labor in the US.

Of the more than 900,000 people incarcerated in the US, 1,200 are employed by or contracted to private employers under PIE legislation. About 68,000 are employed in traditional state-use industries. PIRA estimates that by 2000, 520,000 inmates will be employed in prison industries, both state-use and profit-driven.

"The more we've looked at it, the more we've been shocked by the potential for abuse," she said.

The AFL-CIO, armed with the government's own record-keeping, reported that companies simply want cheap labor and that state governments are usually more interested in getting their money back on prisoners than giving them real-world job skills. The US General Accounting Office reported in 1993 that many state PIE programs pay less than the prevailing local wage.

And several states have illegally contracted prison labor to to private employers. In 1986, New Mexico sold office furniture made by 80 prison inmates at 25 cents to $1.25 an hour to several private companies.

Many of the jobs in PIE programs are similar to Florida's loofah farm: intense on labor, low on pay. "The reason farmers don't want to mess with it is because it's labor intensive and we've got the labor," Hendry's White said.

In this regard, the loofah farm does not technically compete with free labor in the US. Loofas are usually imported from China, a country, ironically, that gets criticized because factories are an integral part of prisons there.

Profiting Without Profit

The loofah sponge farm is tucked into the southeast corner of the compound near a highway where trucks carrying produce zip back and forth.

In August, inmates grew the seedlings in a greenhouse and in September transported them to the fields, where the loofas grow on a guide wire strung across support posts. In January, when the loofahs are about 2 feet long, the inmates will cut them down, peel and dry them, bleach them and cut them to size.

Some sponges will be kept for prison use as scrubbers. Some early plants will be eaten- the loofah is a member of the squash family. Some will be sent to the Walker Cancer Research Institute in Tallahassee where biochemists want to examine properties of the loofah for AIDS and cancer research.

But the bulk of the crop will be sent to a cosmetics firm in Michigan, who have promised to buy all the inmates can produce.

"The inmates are showing more interest," Sgt. Jesse Manzano, the corrections officer who overseas the loofah field, said. "It looks like they're disciplining themselves."

The inmates do not appear excited about their work, but in the lackadaisical, plodding fashion you associate with government work, they get the job done. Manzano would not allow any of the inmates to speak to this reporter.

"By doing their job by hand, physically, sweating in the hot sun, they appreciate what they're doing," Manzano said. "When they're out on the field, they can forget about their troubles" inside the main prison a few miles up the road.

Union organizers and prison officials agree that prisons should teach inmates work skills or at least a work ethic. They diverge, however, on whether private, profit-driven businesses should be involved or whether prisoners should be employed in a job that still exists in the free market.

Instead of competing with free workers, prisoners could be hired to do the kind of work no one wants to touch, according to Sue Perry, executive director of a group of businesses and labor unions who were affected by prison industries.

Perry said prisons could break down televisions and other electronic components, refurbish mattresses or sort recyclables, for example.

"It would be a great paradigm." she said. "It would be good for society and it wouldn't punish taxpayers."

Prison officials, think tank researchers, and union and business advocates are debating the trend as it evolves.

Miller says private involvement will increase if state prison systems can learn to understand the needs of private enterprise.

"From my perspective, the real problem is a lack of capital," he said. "Most companies (doing business with prisons) are small and under-capitalized &the question is how to get large companies and keep them."

Critics see the for-profit prison labor model as an outcome of a vicious cycle: the same broken economy that pushes low-skill jobs into ever-lower markets overseas and into Mexico will naturally find prisons--full of the men and women who have no place in that economy--an even more efficient labor source.

"We need more schools and less prisons," said Mark Neimeiser, the Florida legislative political director for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. "It's ironic that we take prisoners and give them work they couldn't get when they were free."

The Other Side of the Lake

2011-07-25T22:48:00.005-04:00

A short story.

The mist hung dead over the lake, a settled cumulus our canoe parted and wove through. The cloud, about a knee deep as far as I could see, absorbed all noise except the far-off whining interstate and the occasional swish when a little fresh water bass churned the water. My paddle dipped the surface, I splashed too much, and my father shushed me. The air was crisp and slightly damp, our warm trailer parked a hundred feet or so up the bank. Inside my mother and younger brother slept happily on thin vinyl mattresses.

My father commandeered the stern, I got the easy task of paddling when he ordered me in gruff blurts to help turn the craft. We weren't fishing, but we were quiet enough we could have been. When his aggravation percolated and he got angry when he knew it shouldn't, the calm was interrupted with a jagged directive. Turn, dammit, or, No, I said the other side. My father was a big man, much bigger than he wanted to be, with big tan, muscular arms disguised by flab. Before a couple heart attacks knocked him out of business, he was a plasterer and a bricklayer. These days he was too creative and industrious to sit still, and collected disability checks and moved us from place to place out of boredom, mostly. This time we were on vacation for a couple weeks from a house—a more permanent one this time—we were fumigating for roaches. We left it shut and dark and filled with poisonous gas. The previous owner had kept thousands of chirpy tropical birds in cages lining the garage, an avian warehouse, and the multitudes of roaches they had attracted stuck around long after the birds were shipped out. The bugs made the place unlivable. No one in that area could have as many roaches, I was convinced. I didn't have the sense to keep something like that to myself, so I would tell my friends, thinking that our wars against the roach kingdom would impress them, and they would tell their parents. The indignity of it drove my father mad. He was determined to rid us of the problem. When we were about to leave and had set off the insecticide bombs, he realized he forgot his wallet. He ducked into the cloud with a handkerchief over his face.

We traveled north on Saturday morning, towing a small camper trailer behind our big Ford sedan, into North Florida once again, and had stopped at this campground for a few nights. Silver Lake, with its crude sand roads, palmetto bushes and moss-draped oaks, was more quiet and rustic than the overnight, neon-washed campgrounds we had stayed at along the highway, the places that always had Good Sam stickers on the office door so you know it was acceptable for kids and fastidious parents.

My father lost his patience over many things, and when we got into the middle of the lake with the canoe at 6:30 a.m., I felt his frustration creep from the stern as my steering, the best an 11-year-old boy could muster, was not moving us forward. When he started complaining that I couldn't manage anything and threatened to turn the damn canoe back to the shore, I straightened up, dug my paddle in the black pool and sullenly worked with my father's rudder job. He was a big man, and there wasn't much I could influence. I would have preferred to just soak in the rippling lake, the mist crawling around us, and the slightly menacing far shore.

"See those ducks?" he said, wheezing a bit. "Let's take the canoe over there."

"Where?" I squinted, scanning the shoreline for blobs that behave like ducks. The brown mottled birds fluttered around a clump of tall marsh grass. There. I dug in again. Our paddles churned the smooth water rhythmically; we occasionally got into synch, but mostly we were at odds. The bow weaved and jerked. Those few moments when when we clicked, when the canoe surged confidently forward, these moments we were happiest, and that joy pushed us further. But our timing must have been off, and the bow shuddered when I lost my bearing on the wood for a second. My father groaned. He would complain, then catch himself, soften his instructions, and reassure me. We made progress. A hundred yards or so from the middle of the lake, where we had been tooling quietly, we cruised into more shallow, mucky water covered with dying brown algae and spiked with tall marsh grass that had been crushed by trolling sport fishing boats. Oak branches hung low over the water, and moss screened the bank's edge, which was crowded with all sorts of underbrush and vast spiderwebs. A little animal—a squirrel, a raccoon, an armadillo...a bobcat?—scratched through a stand of palmetto bushes. The fronds waved him off.

"Didja hear that?" I asked my father.

"Yeah, it was probably a raccoon," he said, but I knew he didn't know what it was. He rarely hiked through the woods, and he never told me about any experiences with animals more wild than guard dogs. When I finally saw a bobcat in the woods a few years later—after he died—I felt like I had earned something, or improved upon something he gave me. The big cat I had seen in an abandoned junkyard had rushed off like any old house cat.

Why did we come to this side of the lake? Because it was further away from the campsite than the middle? From here, our car was a light blue dint, our trailer a white blob. Maybe he had perspective here, could see all that was our life over there, with half the family sleeping. Maybe from here he could admit he didn't know where we going but that something good ought to come out of getting there. The car, the camping trailer (the third in as many summers), they where a way to somewhere, right? Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, through the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, along parkways and the interstates, we stopped at every kind of campground and state park, and they all broke down to the same experience: This is where we are, let's eat, let's take a walk through the woods, let's light the propane lamp and figure out where we'll drive tomorrow. Sleep, then breakfast at the creaky hour of 6 a.m. From the parched obliterating drone of the highway we could gradually forget about where we were before now and think about where we would be in a few hours. I wasn't even a teenager yet and already I was experiencing the displacement reserved for adults, torn between a dim nostalgia for a place I had visited but didn't get to know, and anticipating like a fool a mildly distant destination where the fun was about to begin. I guess I hadn't developed the cynicism to know it would be exactly like the place I was before, and that place was as good a place as any to plant ourselves. So my brother and I would just sit in the back seat, inventing stories and situations and playing word games until they bored us.

My father might have thought the flash of cars and trailers interspersing the scrubby oaks and palmettos along the far side of the lake was like any crummy landscape painting you might see in a motor lodge, but I know he was seeing the simple beauty in that scene, knowing that nothing was perfect, ever, and in that scene where a used car lot meets a tough stretch of lakeside forest lay all sorts of possibilities—a honeymooning couple sleeping in each other's arms, or a lonely old man sacked out in the back of his pickup truck with his tools, or high school kids sleeping black sleep from too much cheap beer the night before. But he would probably think those things only if the kids didn't make too much noise, or if he talked to the old man while he and my mother walked around the campground before dinner, or if he saw the couple through their tent screen, watching a television that was plugged into one of the electrical hookups. Otherwise, he wouldn't bother.

The light was growing harsher, and the mist dispersing, as the traffic on the far-off interstate grew steadily louder. The sun shone grievously. I saw a man jerk his arm up on the far side of the lake, and a second later the engine of his motor boat whined. My father and I silently watched our morning dissipate to noise and sun. He knew he didn't want to be in the middle of the lake, sweating and paddling to make up for my lack of direction and strength. He had to be back, or beyond. Just not someplace hanging between.

"Whaddaya say we get back to the campsite, then we can figure out which way we'll take," he said, leaning back. "And we'll figure out where we might be by nightfall?"

"Sounds good, Dad," I said, and as he propelled his large body and the sinking end of the canoe with a couple furious paddle strokes, I told myself I would try to keep in stride.

Bombs Over Baghdad

2010-06-07T16:34:00.006-04:00

Illustration by Tom Chalkley

This article was originally published Dec. 23, 2009 in Baltimore City Paper

On March 19, 2003, the most powerful military force on the planet began raining bombs on buildings across Baghdad, attempting to decapitate the most evil head on the planet from its oppressed corpus. A shattered leadership would soften the resistance for when the tanks rolled in. Six-plus years later, we know the premise was bogus: there were no bio-weapon tractor trailers, no chemical-bomb caches, and though a few right-wing wonks insisted otherwise, no connection to al-Qaida. Six-plus years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

My wife and I decided to get married in February 2002, well before the Iraq invasion, but well into the Global War on Terror. U.S. and allied forces had invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban. The president gave his "axis of terror" speech, so we knew it was just a matter of time. No way could we have predicted that 10 days before our ceremony bombs would drop on Baghdad.

There is never a perfect time to get engaged; we get married despite the world. Though I've had two friends deployed to the Middle East--one an Army reservist to Afghanistan, the other an Army enlistee who shipped off to Iraq--the war never really touched my fianc? and me. As one of the few men in my family who was never a soldier or sailor--and acutely reminded of it--war casts a complicated shadow. I felt its pull. I loathed it. I cultivated dread. I felt a mix of shame and anger. I became a war-buildup news fiend. It infused everything.

Marriage gave me hope. Yet it, too, seemed like going to war. It's the two of you against doubt and anxiety and the plain force of what can go wrong will go wrong. You say, screw the world, screw insecurity, we're doing this. You build the case in your head, a pact between emotion and reason, and you weave tiny compromises across your brain. You build a consensus through deliberation, instinct, and arm-twisting. You go in.

It sounds overwrought writing it now, but it made sense then. My fianc? and I went into it with our eyes wide. We were optimistic and a little older than the median marrying age. We were ready, shadows and all. We planned our wedding for March 29. Yet as the days approached, and we became more excited for the day, the dread increased. The president delivered an ultimatum to the Iraqi dictator on March 17: leave the country or we bomb. Two days later, the Baghdad skyline lit up with fire and tracer lines.

We went on with our plans, naturally. First, family arrived. Then friends. We coordinated sleeping arrangements, organized a party, put the finishing touches on the reception hall. I picked up my suit from the tailor; my fianc?'s mother and friends finished her dress. We wrote our vows.

There was no fighting, only warmness and light, and a really long ceremony. Our friends and family took turns speaking of the past, love, trust, duty, friendship, all the high-minded things we reserve for these moments. And so did our pastor. But he brought it back to the war: a brief mention, but it was enough. The world is fraught with fighting, death, and war. We fall in love and get married despite it all.

A few days later we were getting wasted in a pub in Doolin, Ireland. Folks at the bar bought us drinks. A stag party raged at the other end of the room. All was right with the world. There were no televisions. They would have showed U.S. tanks rolling into Baghdad. CNN would have reported casualties as troops encountered some resistance as they entered a city weakened by repeated bombing. We knew nothing of that. We stumbled back to our room.

We took a ferry from Galway to Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands. The midday Atlantic sun eased the early spring gusts that blew across the boat, and we felt warm, we felt grand. We checked into our B&B, a cottage used in Robert Flaherty's 1934 docu-drama Man of Aran, sipped hot tea, and ate cookies. We biked to Dun Aonghasa, a 3,500 year old cliff fort. The next day we biked to Dun Dubhchathair, another Neolithic fort. Both structures were tall rings of individually-stacked stones that formed a wide arc; cliffs plunging into Galway Bay protected the unwalled edge.

This place would be wide open to air strikes. Tanks and explosives would easily dislodge the maze-like walls that protected the hearth. Dun Dubhchathair, though, was destroyed by only time and wind. We sat on rocks, listening to waves crashing far below. We ate our packed lunch and enjoyed our solitude in this ancient place.

It didn't take long for the world to creep back in.

Any American who travels overseas becomes an emissary, so you'd best be ready to talk like a diplomat, whether you agree or not. The Irish (and English and Austrian) people we met wanted to talk war and U.S. foreign policy, and most, I sensed, expected to disagree.

The lady who sold handmade Aran sweaters wanted to talk war. The park ranger at Newgrange, a Neolithic ruin close to Dublin, wanted to talk war. Same with the owners of a B&B outside Dublin. So it went for several days, as we tooled across the country. We could offer nothing but a shrug. "Yeah, we don't like it either." Once we agreed with them, no one seemed to want to talk about it beyond a few generalities. I sensed disappointment.

At breakfast one morning, two British couples on holiday got the ball rolling, and one of the men asked, "What do you think of the U.S. invading Iraq?"

This time, I went into the breech: Americans hadn't experienced the effects of a devastating war on their own soil since the 1860s. We were hungry for a war with an Other. We were consumed with a near-fascist fever, fueled by psuedo-religious demagogues. We were on the verge of a right-wing revolution. I probably threw in the old sawhorse, "When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." I rambled off a list of anxieties, and once they left my lips and hung in the air, I heard myself. I sounded paranoid and ridiculous. What the hell did I really know? These are those moments when you realize you've been over-thinking something, and pouring your own prejudices into an event, mixing the fantastical with the plainly evident.

Marriage was marriage, war is war, and overdrinking an analogy is letting that schizoid beast out of its cave and trammel through your skull.

Our dining companions stared at me goggle-eyed. "Well . . ." one of the men trailed off, in a typical British demur, "let's hope it doesn't get that far." I smiled and nodded like an idiot and finished my black pudding and eggs.

As we were leaving, the B&B owners' pre-teen son helped us with our luggage. He asked, "What do you think of this war?" Before we could answer, he said, "I think it's fucking crap."

We laughed. "Yeah," I said. "You're probably right."

Our last night in Ireland we checked into a nondescript B&B in a Dublin suburb. The proprietress, a gentle older woman, hurried us into our room and flipped on our television. This is important, she said. The screen showed a statue of the Iraqi dictator tottering off its pedestal in a Baghdad public square. Hordes of men--a much smaller crowd than we would have expected--cheered its toppling. They swarmed, whacking it with their shoes.

"I don't think anything good will come of this," she said. "War begets war."

We watched the scene in silence. Once the proprietress explained the room and left, my wife turned off the TV, a gesture that said, there's really nothing we can do about this. We showered and got dressed. I thought about a long war, our soldiers being killed, Iraq being destroyed, and whether my reservist friend would be deployed. The same mixture of anger, anxiety, and shame other guys from military families must feel when everyone else is paying, or will pay, and you get the luxury of just reading about it. Though I made an ass of myself with the Brits, it felt good to get that stuff off my chest.

"Where is the metro station--we want to head into Dublin for dinner and some drinks," I heard my wife ask the proprietress. Fifteen minutes later, we were rolling through the northern edge of the city, ready to celebrate the last night of our honeymoon. There was the shadow, and the dread, but it receded. Now there was just our new life, our love, some dim halls and clanging glasses, some Irish music and a plate of delicious boxty, despite the world.

Maryrest Cemetery, Mahwah, NJ

2009-06-23T23:26:00.017-04:00

Suz, Owen and I left Kelly and Dustin's converted cabin in Glen Spey, NY Saturday morning, hoping to get to Brooklyn by about 2 p.m. to catch the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. Suz spent the last 2 days painting a mural in the nursery set aside for Kelly and Dustin's fast-approaching baby, which you can see on her mural website Wallybee.com (well, pretty soon anyway, as soon as yours truly updates the site).

Once we rounded up all our junk and said goodbye, we drove along the Delaware River, through Port Jervis and into New Jersey, pretty much following the same route as my trip to High Point a couple days earlier. Before we were to drive into the city, I wanted to do some more family soul-searching. After my ghostly experience at the High Point State Park, what better way to sort through the past than visiting the graves of my father's family? So we set off for a little Catholic cemetery near Ramsey, our old hometown. (My father is buried in the sandy earth of Spring Hill, Florida, the area where our branch of the family settled in the 70s.)

Maryrest Cemetery in the Ramapo Valley was once quiet and secluded, but I-278 now runs just beyond its southeastern edge, and the constant swoosh of traffic, however subtle and relatively far off, made for a modern soundtrack for the old burial ground. We drove in, parked along one of the narrow roads, and following some suggestions my cousin Al provided, started the search. Up and down rows, stone after stone of good Catholic names like O'Doyle, Janiewicz, Marcucci...the names and inscriptions became a blur. They were vaguely ordered by date, but the cemetery has expanded its boundaries over the years, so I couldn't figure out the pattern, if there was one. Finally Suz suggested I go knock on the door of the cemetery office, and like the moment I came to my senses in High Point state park, I said, "duh, yeah." I climbed over the cemetery's stone wall, walked to the office and peered inside. Dark. I knocked anyway. A man emerged from behind the front counter, opened the door, and when I explained I was searching for family members, he let me in.

He pulled up the diocese's database and asked for a name. I started with Marsico, my aunt and uncle, as I figured the name Hill is too common. He pulled out a photocopied map, circled the area, and jotted down the section and grave number. "Ok, another name?" he asked. So I offered my grandfather: Frederick Hill. Sure enough, buried right near the Marsicos. I leaned over his shoulder and scanned the list of Hills all buried in the same section.

Hill, Donald Albert, b. 8 Jun 1921, d. 30 Aug 1976, Plot #12 A 118
Hill, Fred L., b. 1887, d. 1952, Plot #12 B 12
Hill, James Henry, b. 6 Sep 1927, d. 27 Aug 1948, Plot #12 B 12
Hill, Jane F., b. 1919, d. 1993, Plot #12 A 118
Hill, Raymond J., b. 1913, d. 1992, Plot #12 B 12
Hill, Ruth M., b. 1892, d. 1951, Plot #12 B 12

I saw my uncle Jimmy's name. I saw my uncle Ray, uncle Donny and his wife Jane, and my grandparents Ruth and Fred, both of whom died before I was born. Another name, not on list above I cribbed from an interment database website, was Baby Girl Hill. That was my sister, who died in 1956, stillborn. There was another Baby Girl Hill, but my mother wasn't sure who that was, and I might have gotten the section (and therefore which family) wrong. That's another phone call to the cemetery.

I headed back to the plots and started my search. Suz was walking with Owen near the entrance, and I waved. She pointed to Owen, a signal that he needed a break, and headed to the car. Again, the ordering was somewhat vague, but eventually I figured out the discreet borders of Section 12. I walked up and down and back again through the rows, hoping for a glimpse, and I finally found the first clue: Travolta. Our family and the Travoltas--the parents of Battleship Earth star John Travolta--were friends, and my father knew his father well. He owned an auto repair shop, I believe. The Travoltas buried here are Salvatore, born in Italy in 1879, and his wife Josephine--John's grandparents. My cousin told me the Travoltas were buried nearby, so I had hit paydirt, so to speak. A few more steps, I found the family plot. I think this is the first time in my life I had seen it.

I brushed wet grass clippings from the low, flat plaques the Veterans Administration provided for Uncle Donny and Uncle Jimmy, and stood up between the rows of stones, trying to piece together the connections and the history. John Henry Hill, died in 1947--only 21--just after he got back from Europe. He was killed when his car hit a patch of ice. His death devastated the family, especially my father, who was just two years older than him. In a family of eight boys and a girl, the span of years is great, so I've realized over the years my father and Jimmy were really tight. I wonder if my father ever recovered from his death.

Another young family member was John Marsico, who also died at 21. John I remember fairly well: after he got back from Vietnam he had hitchhiked from New Jersey to Florida--to a 10-year old boy, here was a real live hippie. Once John attempted the impossible: to sit down at our dinner table shirtless. My father made him take off his hat and go put a shirt on. I remember my folks getting the late night phone call: John's van had plummeted over the Anclote River bridge, and all the guys he had been drinking with that night got out of the quickly-submerging van except him. John was a sweet guy, a pacifist who knew the Army was not his calling, yet his parents laid him out in his Army uniform, his long blond hair and beard shorn. If they didn't have the son they wanted while he was alive, they would have him in death. When my brother told me this story years ago, it broke my heart.

I always feel a bit awkward in cemeteries--I am not superstitious usually, and not given to prayer. I believe a person dies only when they are forgotten, their life energy joining a great cosmic flow we all share, and a patch of earth full of bodies encased in boxes is not really where they go when their bodies fail, whether in a violent or horrifying act or peacefully in their sleep, as my aunt Ruthie went. They live on in our memories and stories, as part of our own lives and of everyone whom they touched. Yet here I was--this graveyard is as much an embodiment of our family history as anything, as most of the stories were lost before I even set foot here. So maybe my aversion to cemeteries wasn't as fully thought out as I believed.

I had no flowers to lay or Lord's Prayers to offer. What's the point? Only a few words of acknowledgment, a sign of the cross in respect of their beliefs, and a few photographs to burnish the moment in my memory. Now I would have something to tell my own son, who perhaps one day would seek out this crowded place: too crowded it appears, for future generations to be buried here.

We left, and drove the few miles to our family's old house in Ramsey, and I snapped a picture. I felt like I hadn't left the cemetery, as this house was only ours in my memory. In the early 60s my father had refaced the house with brick, converted the garage into a rumpus room with a huge fireplace, and added the garage to the right. I used to lay in a hammock in the backyard and count the train cars as they trundled along the ridge that overlooked the lot behind us. Route 17 is just beyond that. It is North Jersey, after all, where interstates that cut along old cemeteries are no big deal.

High Point Monument, New Jersey

2009-06-18T15:37:00.005-04:00

Highway 23 in Sussex County, northeast New Jersey, is a steady, weaving climb from the Delaware River to the highest point in the state at 1,800-odd feet. This is the kind of road our diesel Mercedes is built for--the massive compression and torque just pushed the car up the incline. I kept pulling down the rear view mirror to smile at and talk to my 18-month old son Owen, who was strapped into his car seat, happily yammering to himself. The roads were slick, and fog drifted between the trees, revealing lush meadows and marshy clearings where birds took flight into the mist. We were heading for High Point State Park, a place I hadn't visited since 1975, when I was nine years old. That's when this picture was taken. I'm at far left, with my brother Mike and my mother. My father, with the camera, had worked at the state park when he had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1940s, but not on the construction of the monument, as family lore recalls. He was on a crew that improved the park or built some of the massive granite walls that weave through the park, because he would have been only five years old when the monument was finished in 1930. The park, incidentally, was designed by the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Central Park-designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and who left a string of beautiful public parks in their own wake, notably Druid Hill Park in Baltimore.

My father was probably between 16 and 18 when he was here--so that put it at, say, 1941-43. Nearly thirty years later, he was one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of men who labored on another sky-reaching monument across the state, on the other side of the Hudson River: The World Trade Center.

"Owen, we're going to go for a walk," I called back to my son, reassuring him we'd be out of the car soon. The poor guy has been sitting in that car seat too much in the past 24 hours. He'd been fine so far, and yesterday, when my wife, Owen and I took the five hour trip up from Baltimore to visit her friend Kelly and her husband Dustin in Glen Spey, N.Y., he was a real champ. "Looks like the park entrance is just ahead," I told him, as if he understood. I just assume that he does, and therefore, eventually will.

No park rangers sat in the gatehouse--I slowed and paused just in case someone showed up I could give my $5 to in exchange for a map or a suggestion. Nobody. It's the fog and the rain. I kept driving. No cars, no people anywhere. The park road passed a small beach area, and bore to the left, climbing. The monument is at the highest point in the state, so I was headed in the right direction. Still I passed no one. No cars, anywhere. I finally reached the end of the road, a concession stand ahead and a parking lot to the right. The fog was thick, and waves of mist rolled across the empty pavement. It was raining steadily, but a light, intermittent wiper kind of rain. I drove all the way to the back, looking for the road that would lead us to the monument, but all I saw was a small wooden sign, "Monument Trail." Ah, this must be it, I figured.

I parked, pulled out the child carrier/backpack from the trunk, and opened the back door to get Owen out of his seat. I placed him in the carrier, and put on my orange poncho. The rain was as light, but it was steady enough for rain gear. I inserted the rain cover in his carrier, and pulled him up on my back. He was strapped in. Ready for the trail.

The trail was narrow, cutting along a ridge that would have breathtaking views if the sky weren't thick with fog. I could imagine how beautiful it really was, but this walk had a simple, primal beauty. It felt prehistoric, with fog on all around us, trees limbs overhanging the trail and ferns and rocks underfoot. I kept pointing out rocks to Owen--rocks are one of his fascinations now--and taking care not to slip. As I trudged through the pools of rainwater, looking around at the lush canopy overhead and along our way, I thought my father must have spent lots of time walking through these same woods, perhaps even right here. The trail, as I found out later, was built by the CCC. The trip our family took here in 1975--which included drives to Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania, Skyline Drive in Viriginia, and nearby Luray Caverns--was one of the annual summer drives our family took when Mike and I were out of school for the summer. We often camped, but I think that year we stayed in motels. I remember my dad piloting our massive light blue '72 Mercury Montego up these same kind of hilly country roads, Mike and I occasionally forcing him to pull over for us to void our guts on the side of the highway. I think they both smoked then, too, so the combination of the gyrating roads, the stale cigarette air, and sticky dark blue vinyl was enough to upset any little kid's stomach. I recently found a box of slides from that trip, and frankly my brother and I don't look too happy in many of the pictures. Dark rings under our eyes, perpetual scowls, and I can imagine us never being in the mood to venture out at these stops. Plus my parents argued a lot. And my dad had a bit of road rage tendency that made for some harrowing mano-a-manos on the interstate.

Still I have lots of great memories from these trips, and our High Point trip in particular. I don't remember the moments in that box of slides, as much as they captured the weary mood. I do remember the terror of climbing the stairs inside that monument, and thinking that I didn't trust those steel bolts that held the stairwell to the inside of the monuments stone exoskeleton, as the whole thing shook under the shifting weight of climbers above and below us. My father stayed at the entrance. He had a heart condition, as they used to call it. Bypass surgeries, high blood pressure, heart attacks, all that. So Mike, Mom and I climbed to the top. I think. I can imagine getting up a few flights and saying, "ok, enough," so terrified of heights I was, and still am (though much less so).

It was something of a rite of passage. Visiting the monument of his youth, a bygone New Jersey place and something mystical for a family who now lived in Florida. It was when Dad was young, when Dad worked. When Dad built things. Or, actually, when he began building things--things with stone, brick, cinder block, plaster. A time when he felt a whole hell of a lot better about himself, when he wasn't broken by heart attacks and humiliated by drawing Social Security checks and reduced to building concrete walls in our front yard to keep himself from going mad. There was no more work for him, only what he remembered, houses he built on sheaves of notebook paper, and small projects around the house. Before he died at 55, he could look back on a past of building things, and High Point State Park was one of those holy places where the man was himself built.

Owen and I kept climbing the trail along the ridge, and around every turn I kept expecting the looming obelisk of the monument. I wondered if I could even see it, so thick was the fog. About 20 minutes or so up the trail, my senses got the better of me. No way would one of New Jersey's most important places be accessible from a tiny hiking trail. Then it hit me--I could use my iPhone to find the monument, get us on the right trail. The map application found us right away--must have decent cell reception here. I zoomed out a bit from the map, and right away saw the monument casting a long shadow the moment the satellite took the photo on a bright clear day. We were headed in exactly the opposite direction. The monument was on the opposite end of the parking lot--when we turned right, the monument was directly at our left. I hadn't seen it. The fog was that thick. Then I remembered the photo above. How could I miss this massive thing? We headed back, and at the trail head I strained to see the monument. Nothing.

We walked across the empty parking lot, and I kept peering up to see the monument. Still nothing. As we approached the shuttered concession stand the form of the obelisk appeared. A dark smeary smudge of charcoal on gray paper. My heart beat faster, and I yelled to my son strapped high on my back, "there it is!" We climbed the road to the monument, the one you see in the picture, and the it emerged from the waves of misty fog. I thought this was too unbelievable to be true--the stone rising from the earth, powerful and permanent, my father's presence dimmed only by the layers of thick fog the years have poured across it. It was a metaphor taken shape. Yet here I was, giddy, my own son with me, as I walked up to the war monument. Same steps. Same brass plaques. Same vista, whether the fierce blue sky exposed all things on all sides, or whether a cloud had settled on the mountain, hiding everything.

"There it is, Owen," I said as I craned to see the top of the obelisk. The rain started to come down harder, so I backed off, turning down the steps I ran up and down 34 years ago. With my road-weary son in tow, I tried to find a point where I could capture the monument in full. I walked to the bottom of the road, and stood not far from where my father stood years ago, and snapped this shot. I spared him the agony of posing him in front of it, satisfied with the moment of connection over the years, and headed back to the car.