Fellow Spotlight, video transcript:
“My name is Ernesto Pérez Rolo, and I’m the Jakob Wintner Distinguished Fellow here at the American Academy in Berlin this fall and an associate professor of history at the University of Wyoming. My research project concerns the oral histories of American veterans of World War II, like my father was, and their reentry into civilian life after 1945. I’ve collected over three dozen narratives now, such as the one by Harold Carpenter, who was a tour guide in the Tetons facing an uncertain retirement when I interviewed him six years ago. He is now unfortunately deceased, as most of my subjects are. Because of this attrition, access to these veterans’ important stories is rapidly dwindling. My project preserves their experiences of the war and its aftermath, and how it subsequently affected their lives back home. During my time here at the Academy, I’ll be transcribing, compiling, and editing these stories for a book that’s under contract with Yale University Press. I hope you can join me for my lecture on November twelfth. Thank you.”
[Cut.]
Subject #22, Harold Carpenter, interview transcript:
[Subject sits at kitchen table. The room is bare and peaceful.]
“Well, so these days, I take kids up into the mountains, teach them the names of things I know: trees, plants, rock formations; the animals we meet, from moose to pika. The birds: grouse, hermit thrush, red-tailed hawk. Just easy day hikes. I charge enough to cover my costs, and they keep coming, kids just out of high school, out of college, out in Jackson Hole for the summer with their folks or drifting on their own. Hippies, some of them, but I don’t mind. It makes for a quiet life: I know where I am and what I’m doing.
“But back in the war, I was in Austria, and I knew nothing, and my mind burned with what I saw. I was one of the troops that arrived first at Mauthausen. Liberated it, the papers said.
[Subject clears throat, takes drink of water. Stares out the window for over a minute.]
“After that, I finished out my tour and wandered around a while. A few years in Europe: drinking, smoking, meeting women, traveling on trains. When I finally came back home to Wyoming, all I wanted to do was to get my mind clear of it, all of it. I’d read Hemingway and knew how all that worked, so I went out into the Tetons like my brother and me had used to do, tracking bear. Only now Frank was dead and I was alone.
“At first, it was good. I ate fish from the Snake, carried everything in my new Kelty. Hiking around Jenny Lake, I started to breathe deep and easy again. It felt just like old times. The snow was good and melted, so I hiked up Cascade and out past Lake Solitude. Then I was up in high country. The peace started to seep into me good then, and my muscles relaxed at night.
“Six days in, when I came upon the grizzly sow at the stream, I didn’t take her down. She was alone. Her fur was a glossy golden brown, shaggy, and she seemed gentle-natured. No cubs yet. I watched her most of the afternoon, my rifle and pack in the dirt at my side. She’d scoop up trout in her massive paws, munch, and then just stand there, looking around at the day we’d been given. I had a clear shot, but I let her be. I just lay there with my rifle, watching her easy, heavy grace. I don’t know how much time passed.
“Then a big old grizzly waddled out of the brush, and the shaggy brown gal I’d been watching dropped to all fours and did that slow lope to get out of his way. Wading into the stream like he owned it, he reminded me of a particular lieutenant I’d known in the 11th, this guy who was always shoving us around. A pissed-off feeling flared up in my gut. It was like he’d run off a friend of mine. I had a beautiful clear shot, and I felt no hesitation. It felt sweet and clean to fire.
“But when the bullet hit, he screamed, pawing the air before he dropped, and I swear the sound was a human scream, high and desperate. I was alone out there, and the echoes unnerved me. A long time passed before I could walk over to where he lay.
[Subject passes hand over his eyes. Sits silently for some time.]
“When I could, when I did, when I skinned it in the dusk and pulled away the heavy pelt, what was left lying there looked for all the world like a human body, curled and flesh-pink on the ground.
“And suddenly I was standing at Mauthausen again. Its quarried stench filled my lungs in the fading light. The misery of that place, the hell of it, the needless suffering beyond what any of us GIs had ever seen or imagined. None of us could talk about it after.
“That pink bear curled there, leaking slow blood on the grass. I fell to my knees, vomiting my sickness and remorse onto the earth.
[Subject closes eyes, takes off glasses, pinches bridge of nose. Sits quietly for a moment.]
“That was the end of hunting bear for me. I couldn’t do to wild things what I’d seen done over there. I went back to Jackson Hole and got a job. Two years I worked as a handyman, and then I drove a truck. I met Jolynn and married her. She had the kids and seemed like they took over her life. She didn’t seem to be so interested in me anymore.
[Subject stares down at his knees. Clears his throat.]
“But somehow I wasn’t lonely. So I let Jolynn be. She was a good woman, did a good job with the children. Even cooked me vegetarian meals when I started asking for those, and that’s not easy in Jackson Hole. She looked up special recipes. I had no cause to complain. But we drifted apart, and eventually I built this cabin to stay out of her hair. It worked for us.
[Subject shrugs, pushes chair away from table.]
“Me, I couldn’t stay out of the mountains. I went on the weekends, like sneaking, like visiting a woman I couldn’t leave alone. The peace of it. Unzipping the tent at dawn. A moose and her twin calves wandering to a stream at dusk.
“Since I couldn’t kill things anymore, I began reading books instead about how it all got here: geology and botany and the Indians that lived here first. I studied up on plants and bugs. I memorized the names.
“When I started taking people out, it was just a couple of buddies at first, and then their friends, and then the friends told folks, and it grew, and now it’s the young ones that seem to like me. Some offer me extra money when we get back to the dirt parking lot. Some come twice. Some want to stay longer.
“So maybe I could make something out of it. Maybe someday I could start a school out here or something. Some kind of institute. I don’t know. A place where people could come and watch the wild things and just be quiet. For God’s sake, just be quiet for once.”
•••
Born in Miami, raised in England and West Virginia, and educated in Texas, Joy Castro is the author of the memoir The Truth Book; two novels set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hell or High Water and Nearer Home; the essay collection Island of Bones; and the short fiction collection How Winter Began. Her work has appeared in numerous venues including Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, and the New York Times Magazine. Editor of the anthology Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, she is the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska.