Dr. Frank Einstein (2 page)

                       Chapter Two

    Nineteen year old Adam Koppenbanger disembarked from a train which was pulled by a cast iron steam locomotive to Champagne, Illinois.  He gets a ride on a horse drawn wagon.  Eventually he ends up in Clinton.  He gains employment as a farm hand on Peter and Virginia Bowles' farm.  The Bowles had two children: nineteen year old David and Jeanette, thirteen. 

    When the harvest is done Adam takes off for more work. Seven months later fourteen year old Netty gave birth to Cyril Adam Koppenbanger.  

When the boy is six he rides in a small buggy to his school with his mother for the first time.  They scaled up the stairs of the schoolhouse.  The teacher stood in front of the door.

  
The teacher greeted them. “What's your name young man?

 
The boy replies to her, “My name's Adane Bowles.”

    His mother had a surprised look, but then represses it.

    “Welcome Adane!” the teacher says the boy.

    “Thanks, Ma'am.”

   “Are you Adane's sister?”

   
“Why, yes. Yes I am.”

    Netty returned to the farm.  Flabbergasted, yet a bit amused.  At lunch she revealed to the whole family.

 
    “At school Adam told everybody there his names were Adane Bowles.”

   
  David snickered; their parents looked bewildered.

  
  “Well,” Peter said after some thought. “Everybody else in the family is named Bowles why shouldn't the boy's too.  What rules says a child has to be surnamed after the father. Alright forget Koppenbanger.  It's a horrid name.  Adane Bowles!  I like it.  Don't you?”

  
  “What a smart grandson we have,” laughed Ginny in her chair.

 
   “Oh, yeah” Netty said to them, “I told them I was his sister.”

   
   The table had a stunned silence.

      A short time later my great grandmother, Netty, married a man named Taylor.  But it did not last.  From that union they had a daughter, Virginia.  Despite all this, my grandfather keep the name Bowles not Taylor and always refer to his half-sister as his cousin.

   
   Adane was convinced that he was alone in the world, even though he did not leave the family farm until he was nineteen.  He did not join the Army in World War I.  It was over at this time.  He became a salesman.  He sold around the country.  In nineteen twenty seven he found himself selling in Western Massachusetts.  He courted twenty five year old Irene Sampson.  She was a directed descendent of Miles Standish and John Alden who led the Mayflower.

 
    They were married.  They moved to bar Harbor, Michigan were Adane had a partnership that owned a box making company.  They had three children David, Virginia and my mother Barbara.

 
    World War II consumed most of the country's supply of paper.  Without paper the factory could not make boxes.  They lost the business.  My grandfather blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt for taken away all   the paper.

  
   The story of his family that he told his children and grandchildren was as follows: His mother died in childbirth.  His father died when he was six. So he had lived with his Aunt and Uncle and his cousin Virginia.  

   
The truth was no one knows what happened to his father (not even a death certificate.)  His mother lived until Adane was well passed thirty.

    What I remembered of Papa was he telling me stories of the past and why Christians were all hypocrites.

                                                    
Chapter Three

     After I graduated from High School I went on Outward Bound. Nestled on the border of Georgia, North and South Carolina was the base camp. The group comprised six boys and six girls sixteen to eighteen; Plus a man and a women leader.  Twenty three days of primitive camping lay ahead of us.

     We took off with everything we need for twelve days on our backs. We drunk iodine treated stream water.

     Every day it rained, soaking all my clothes and me.  I had Blisters on my feet.  All we did was hike. Sometimes we did study the flora and fauna.  My socks soaked through with water—weird dirty rainwater.  My steps fell squeezing squashy on the ground.  Footfalls going over and over—hour by hour. I felt blisters forming by the squeeze squashy.  Something oozed down my legs.  Was it blood or water—or both?  The path hugged tightly against the mountain.  The path narrowed to cause me to lean against the mountain; constantly feeling like tripping and falling throughout the hike.

      I did Outward Bound for recreation but half the participants did it in lieu of juvenile hall. These were spoiled white kids that w
ere caught several times with pot. I guess it was pot.  I never asked.  They never said.  It could have been drunk driving.  Pot was the rage.  Low lives had just started using crank; not yet in vogue. Heroin had yet to be accessible.  Y’know like oxy.  We always have had cocaine—coca cola is coke.  But it had not been popularized yet.  Yeah pot it was.  After all, this was the seventies.

      One girl seemed more streetwise and did not fit in with the other criminals.

      For four days, she complained that six months in juvie would have been better than this.  Then on the fifth day and from that time forward she stopped complaining and became cooperative and sweet.

    
One of the non juvies talked incisively about short wave radios.  He had black horned glasses and long black hair –strange for the seventies because his type of glasses did not fit his hair length.  He stood tall and gaunt.  When not talking about radios he did not want to talk.  Which was fine because all we did is hike in single file?  You can’t talk to a back of a head.

     No roads, no other people.   From sunrise to sunset we hike through rudimentary paths.  We followed the leaders at a rapid pace.  W
e had very little interaction because of the intense hiking.  The grass, the trees, the brush, the bush, the wet clay all of it strangling my will to succeed.  The fourteen filed on the straight line on the leaning trail.  In the middle of the week we came upon twelve canoes just lying in nowhere.  They lay completed with paddles.  The rain ceased by a full sunshine.  We paddled down the river to a new kind of monotony.  Paddling the whole day—dawn to dusk.   We get up at daybreak.  We ate breakfast.   We launched the canoes.  Everyone paddled until lunch.  Ate lunch.  Paddled until nightfall.  Ate supper.  Everybody went to bed.  This went on for three days.  Every day it down poured on the current, drops pelting the river.  The ponchos came out.  The wind bashing our faces with rain pellets.  Then the sun dried up the rain as if the environment shamefully hid the rain. My feet did not rub blisters my hands did.   Then we left the canoes as inconspicuously as we found them.   We sauntered off because we were not responsible for them.  Hike, hike hike for three days.  No stopping for lectures or learning activities.  It was not the boy scouts.

    A tarp was the only protection from the elements at night.  However we had quite expensive sleeping bags that kept absolutely all water away from our bodies. I woke up in a gully filled with water, but my body was dry.

     This reminded me of when my high school did the musical, by Gilbert and Sullivan,
HMS Pinafore
.  In the chorus I stayed at the helm.  I looked off stage at the captain smiling at me; knickers down pointing at his slong.

     After a few day of this I was fed up with all the rain. As I walked the uneven trail; rain dripping through my poncho--soaking my skin, I realized I had hit my threshold of tolerance. Fungus had imbedded itself between my toes right next to my popped blisters. 

      In the mid
dle of the program, occurred a three day experience where the participants would be left alone in the middle of nowhere with a minimum food and water.  It was then up to the participants to find more food and water for survival.  They would have to purify the water with iodine—yuck—whilst building inner strength. Or, starve for three days and build even more inner strength.

      I thought there was no way I could do the three days solo with extremely limited amounts of food and water.  I kept pondering how miserable that would be.

    As I stepped in an impassable huge puddle I remembered that a few summers before I had been on a church trip in Colorado.  I knew how dry it was there.  So I would have been so better off if   I had done Outward Bound there, or had done it in Arizona or California.   Any place away, please, from the mold and blisters.   My postulating that I would have   thirteen more days of this misery seemed unbearable.  Already one of the non juvies, the guy who was obsessed with short wave radios, had quit the program.    Two days later:

   
“I   can’t do this” I told the male leader.”

   
“Let’s discuss it tonight at the campfire,” he suggested to me.

    
Rain flooded down for an half an hour.  The campfire glowed back the pitched black night. “I don’t think we been giving Eric enough support,” Reported the male leader to the group.  “What can we do for, not only Eric, but for everyone here so that they will succeed here?”

     
Besides the juvies who just wanted and had to get this through with this misery or face jail time, there were three other girls and one other boy.

     
As the fire crackled I wanted to tell them that it was about my blisters and the three day solo and not anything about their lack of support.  But I did not say anything. “Eric, do you know Christ?” said one of the non juvie girls to me.

   
“That’s kind of personal. “The leader continued with the group, “No, actually what I mean is we should each individually give Eric the feeling that he belongs.”

     I trudged through two more days of Georgia’s entangling forest. The Christian girl did have a pleasant conversation with me. She was quite pretty. Maybe if there was more there than friendship with her then, maybe I would have been enticed me to continue with this program.  Even if one of the guys really buddied up with me I might have stayed with them.  But it was only too little too late bonding with the street wise girl and Christian girl.  No romance.   To buddy up with either of those two girls would have just frustrated me.

  
Twelve days into the hike we arrived at base camp. We   had not been there before. On the first day we just left the buses      that transport us there. We retrieve the generic gear immediately going on the hike.

   
The other ten prepared for the dreaded solo.  I looked forward to quitting the next day. I stayed by myself in a rustic room.  I guess I could have opted out the solo and waited at base camp until the rest finished their solo. Then we’d resume the final portion of the program.  I never thought of that.  The director of this outward bound wanted to talk to me.

   
“You probably think you failed but you didn’t,” he told as sat me in an outdoorsy office.  “Twelve’s days of primitive camping are quite a feat.  You should proud of your accomplishment.”

   As I
laid in a single bed with a roof over head blocking out the rain, I was proud of myself.