|
By Homer Hirt
The “Katzemjammer Kids” and “Krazy Kat” were just two of the comic strips that I lived for as a pre-reader.
I eagerly awaited our daily Tallahassee Democrat or Jacksonville Times-Union, and would carefully remove the “funny pages” and run to my mother’s lap, holding them out and demanding that she read them to me.
I was four years old when she laid down the law.
“You learn to read by your birthday or you will never know what happened to these characters” she threatened.
And she meant it. It was not a threat, but a promise.
Within a week of that fateful date I was reading… somewhat haltingly it is true… the words enclosed in the balloons suspended over the characters.
Then came the summer of my seventh year.
I awoke one morning to pain and paralysis. From the waist down I could not move. The local doctor diagnosed infantile paralysis, known today as poliomyelitis or “polio” for short.
There was no effective treatment; little to ease the pain; nothing to put a small child back on his feet except to wait it out. I was confined to a darkened bedroom with a nurse caring for me and my mother assisting. My father watched occasionally from the doorway.
In thirty or so days the feelings returned to my legs, and I was able to sit upright for a time each day… days made bearable by the plethora of books that showed up at our door. I devoured them: novels and short stories and biographies.
Then one day an atlas was left.
It may have been one from the National Geographic Society or Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia.
It did not matter to me.
I opened the front cover, and I was immediately transported to the world that was out there. The center page showed the world in Mercator projection. Islands were on inserts within the pages illustrating the continents. There were descriptions of flora and fauna and of the people who lived within the boundaries.
Oceans impressed me the most… great expanses of water colored blue and green and marked with great swirls of ink that designated known currents….rivers of water flowing through the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Antarctic Oceans.
Cities and countries were listed in the margins, with letters and numbers cross referencing to letters and numbers that were at the top and bottom and sides of each page. Eager young eyes could locate Mount Kilimanjaro or Adak or Tierra del Fuego, and dream of traveling there.
I was able to go to school that fall, with my mother driving me each day. My strength was returning, but I could not venture onto the playground. Principal Williams marked off a table for me in the high school library, and I was set free!
I found great books.
I went Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea with Captain Nemo, and scoured the writings of Nordhoff and Hall in their Mutiny on the Bounty and Men Against the Sea. Explorers took me around both Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, in spite of the notations on the charts: “Here Be Dragons” that kept the fainthearted away from the passages to the riches of the East.
|
|
|
Lands were explored, also. Rudyard Kipling’s poems and prose took me On the Road to Mandalay and to the frozen north of our own continent. The Greek writers, especially the translations from Homer by Chapman, of The Iliad and The Odyssey, awakened in me the desire to scan that wine-dark sea of the eastern Mediterranean.
Then the world changed.
The conflict between Japan and China in 1936 brought new names into my purview. I found Manchuria and Shanghai and Nanking on my maps. In late 1941 Pearl Harbor jumped into the headlines, followed by the Philippines and Corregidor. I read of our ships moving through the North Atlantic in convoys, chased by U Boats in wolfpacks. Murmansk, the Russian terminus of the most dreaded runs, was brought close to home by letters from my cousin who commanded a Naval gun crew on a merchant ship. All of these places sent me to my atlas.
In 1947 I entered college, accompanied by masses of ex-GIs, men (and an occasional woman) who took advantage of the “GI Bill” and sought education. With them came more names of more places: The Cliffs of Dover, the D-Day beaches of Normandy, North Africa and Sicily, combat on the islands of Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, all described vividly by those warriors-turned-students.
The year 1951 saw me enlisted in the United States Navy and trained for the Korean conflict. I saw for myself the foreign ports, the remote islands, the passages that were once sailed by famous men.
I made my first turn into Kingston, Jamaica, through the channel transited two centuries earlier by a young Alfred Lord Nelson. On Saint Thomas I sat on a rocky outcropping that overlooked Magen’s Bay. Labeled Drake’s Seat, it is supposedly where that great sea master, part pirate and part patriot, sat to watch for enemy sail.
I learned the passages into Naragansett Bay and into Norfolk (through Thimble Shoals Channel where the USS MISSOURI once ran aground) and the river passes that would take me into New Orleans.
My return home put me back amidst my books and my maps, sailing, in my mind, with mariners of fact and fiction. I changed my main room into one that reflected my past: books of the seas, portraits and paintings of famous leaders and of my ships.
One day my Favorite (and only) Son Mark and his son Stuart were pressed into mounting on one wall a six foot high by nine foot long National Geographic map. It is properly framed and lighted and now I can stand and, even with my dimming ninety year old eyes, look at my world … as I once did as a boy of seven years… and find where I have been and where I would like to go…following the sea trails of famous men and stout ships.
Lagniappe (A Little Something Extra)
“Great God! I had rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, have glimpse that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
(William Wordsworth)
|
|
