11: The Delicate Operation

            It was during the Montreal Olympics that Mary and Paul came to my hospital bedside to give me a whimsical get well present — a coloring book. I had been admitted due to intense stomach pains.
             "So what happened, did you overdose on green milk?" Mary asked. Paul must have had told her I spiked my milk with food coloring to prevent the technicians from pilfering it. But it was no use; someone was probably drinking it straight out of the carton, and hadn't noticed.
            "I think it was my hamburger soup." Paul handed me my journals; having stopped by my place to get them. The intravenous unit had just been removed and the Olympics were beginning. The doctors had thought it was possible appendicitis; but the tests were negative.
            "Did I ever tell you the story of Hospital Socks..."
            "No, But I've a feeling you're going to…"

Hospital Socks

            The only souvenirs I have left from Norway are a pair of 'hospital socks', a few scars a black and white photograph of Anita, who looked like Liv Ullman but with a million freckles. I also have this postcard from Lucy:
            Hospital socks are what they put on you when they intend to operate. They were flat like Christmas stockings with two words on them: 'Gjovic' and then a long word starting with the letter P. This second word had lots of 'O's ' and 'A's ' with strokes and double dots over them. Gjovic was the name of the town I was in, about 69 kilometers north of Oslo; the second word probably meant 'hospital.'
            I was traveling with Lucy and friends in her brand new, orange pop-top camper-equipped Volkswagen van. Lucy was a millionaire's daughter from California; a stocky girl with long blonde hair who thought erroneously that she was homely looking. She complained that boys used to walk her home from school just so they could see her beautiful sister.
             Lucy would sing me novelty songs as she drove along and would do rusty Joni Mitchell songs every time we stumbled on a piano. She taught me how to play Last Thing on my Mind as we drove along. She was in love with Dominique.
            The first thing that Dominique would say when he met a woman was, 'I am Dominique; from France...' He would then flash a bracelet with his name on it. He was in his mid twenties, had curly dark hair and usually wore a scarf around his neck. 'There is only one word to describe me,' he'd say, 'that's— Liberty — with a capital 'L'. One part goes to the horizon and the other to the zenith.' Dominique was not in love with Lucy, but was stringing her along. Whenever Dominique danced, he proved just what a popinjay he really was.
             There were two other travelers with us, I only mention them to show that it was crowded sleeping in the van. I had met them all in Helsinki; had seen Dominique and Lucy before at the student cafeteria when they were planning a trip to Leningrad. They found it too expensive and made other plans. We all had buttermilk, served by a girl wearing black lipstick. They were planning to travel through the north of Finland and come down around the coast of Norway. I had just landed in Helsinki at the time, after traveling for three months in eastern Canada.
            One night, after finding temporary lodging at a nurses' dormitory Lucy and company showed up with the van. At first Lucy didn't want to take me along, she thought I was too sarcastic, but the rest convinced her because I had a guitar and could entertain them.
            Our basic routine was to drive two hundred miles a day, eat occasionally in cafeterias and cook in the van. Lucy was a vegetarian and into Buddhism. We stopped at every art gallery, tourist’s sight and discotheque. In the mornings when we brushed our teeth we had 'toothpaste parties,' where we tried to squirt each other with sprays of paste. Lucy made reference to the toothpaste parties on her postcard.
            On the trip north we were always ahead of the weather so there were endless scenes of tranquil lakes reflecting forests of orange and emerald. By the time we passed the Arctic Circle and went down the coast of Norway it was getting cold, but it was still warm enough to sleep in the van.

 It was a sunny morning, the last Sunday of September when I was lying in the front cot that straddled the two front seats. I had to curve my body to fit into the mummy sleeping bag. That particular morning I twisted my legs somehow and cut off the circulation to my testicles. Lucy and Dominique were arguing and the others were making breakfast. After taking a short walk, I realized something was very wrong and inched my way back toward the van, and asked to be taken to a hospital.
            At the hospital a doctor took me aside, looked at me, and said he would have to perform a 'delicate operation'. I asked for a second opinion and he called in a janitor or an intern — I'm not sure which. This person nodded his head and the next thing I knew there was an ugly old nurse giving me a shave with no cream. They wheeled me away and seven beautiful nurses waved goodbye….
            When I awoke later that afternoon I was in a room with six men, all Norwegians. My friends came in and Lucy gave me a kiss on the cheek. 'Taking advantage of poor helpless man' I said. They gave me a card and a hairbrush. Lucy gave me some books to read, Siddhartha and Demian by Herman Hess. With dramatic feebleness I lifted the covers to observe myself. I was still intact but there was a huge bandage. Everyone chuckled at my grimace. Leaving for Oslo, they took my remaining clothes and guitar with them and said they'd return on Wednesday.
            The man in the next bed would hold out a piece of meat on his knife so that I could walk over very carefully, pop it into my mouth and smile ecstatically. That was when I was restricted to Jell-O. I walked up and down the corridors, very slowly, wearing my housecoat and the hospital socks. The socks were tied by a cord at the top and would slowly fall, so that by the time I was at the end of the hall they would be in a heap around my ankles.
            Whenever the doctors and nurses came on their rounds I was always introduced as a følksinger which they pronounced, følksånger'. It had two dots over the 'a' to give it a nasal twang.
On Wednesday they took the stitches out and I got ready to leave town. I asked a hypothetical question; The Doctor said, said 'Two weeks.' I waited for Lucy and the van but they didn't show up. The next day they had still not returned so I took off, leaving a scribbled note with the receptionist. The note said, 'Meet me noon Saturday at the Canadian Embassy in Oslo.' While I was walking through the little town I saw an attractive girl with long thick raspberry hair and a million freckles.
            I hitchhiked into Oslo, moving very carefully, getting several rides and arriving when it was dark. As I climbed into my bunk an Englishman noticed my discomfort and asked what had happened. I had a very succinct line, the kind you might hear in a locker room. At least I could joke about it, especially after being to the Embassy where everyone had thought, from the information my friends had heard, that I would be in hospital for a long time. Finally I met Lucy and we continued on our tour.
            That Saturday evening we returned to Gjovic because Dominique had a party to attend. We went to a bar and there I met Anita, the beautiful girl I had seen in the park. She sang me a Norwegian funeral march and it was love at first sight. While I danced with her I knew I would write a song about meeting her. Some people from the hospital were amazed that I was able to dance in my weakened condition.
            Anita and I returned to the van and sang, That's What You Get For Loving Me. I was slightly embarrassed by the jacket she wore. It was like a white version of my hospital socks, only larger. She said later that it had been her father's when he was in the Norwegian Ski Patrol during World War II. The jacket was pure white and in the sunlight with her red hair, Anita looked marvelous. She would say, 'yes' in a really charming way.
            After seeing her for a couple days I asked if I should stay a while. She said 'no,' in a charming way. We exchanged addresses. I went back to the van and said, 'Let's get out of here.'
            As we headed for Oslo I began writing the song, The Tree and the Wind. On the night I finished it, October 22nd, I wrote a letter to Anita. I always put the date I first completed a song, and enclosed the lyrics with the letter.
The van broke down in Copenhagen and one morning we woke up on a hoist in the garage. It was awkward for Dominique and I to leave Lucy that morning. We should at least have waited for the van to be let down from the hoist.  

            Dominique and I went to Hamburg for a week, then to the Netherlands where we split up. He went to the ski resorts and I began singing Tree and the Wind all the way through Germany to Salzburg, Vienna and Prague where I saw Romeo and Juliet for 22 cents. At the opera house some people noticed my buddy's team Canada T-shirt and one looked at me through his binoculars. When I made a face at him he handed the binoculars to his friend who looked too. By that time I was straight faced again but when the first man looked again I made another funny face at him. But that's a digression. When I arrived in Athens and played my song in a cafe the woman at the next table had already heard it.”

TREE AND THE WIND

"A forest of people
Swayed 'round in a dance,"
"And some were inclined to romance."
"Mine was the wind
Dancing 'round an oak tree,
So strong And so free."
"The tree is free
Cause its stable and sound,
To be stable I must be able
Able to move around.

But other winds
Might make you sway."
"It's only with you I would stay..."
"I want you too
And for that you must go
That is the reason
The wind doesn't blow."
"The wind's not free
Cause it's unsound—"
"You are free
Cause you are bound."

"Well I have my roots
But my leaves must soon go..."
"They can"t if the wind doesn't blow
They just get wrinkled
And fall to the ground."
The tree must stand"
And this wind must blow
"I cannot stay"
"And you cannot go."

            Anita's answer to my letter was waiting for me at the post office in Athens. I made immediate plans to return to Norway. I wanted to spend Christmas with her and arranged to travel with two men from Burlington, which is near my hometown. We got very drunk on ouzo on our last night in Greece and I was singing So Long Marianne with risqué lyrics. At that time it was one of my favorite songs and there were all sorts of Greek men standing on balconies humming along.
            I sat on the back deck of the ferry and learned to play Mr. Bojangles watching the sunrise over the mountains as we passed Albania. Halfway through Italy I encountered my long lost forest fire-fighting buddy, David at a youth hostel. I'd met him two summers before in Golden, BC He was on his way to Africa after having been in Europe since fire fighting. I tried to sing Talking Forest to him but he wouldn't listen. He did laugh at the line "The lunches were unbearable as a matter of fact, the bears would steal them and then bring them back." I had spent a day with him in Golden when a dragonfly lighted on my shirt and stayed there longer than his attention span.
            I stopped briefly in Switzerland to buy a Swiss army knife, a Toblerone chocolate bar, and had a few pictures taken of me holding up the signs I had made to get me to Oslo. Traveling nonstop after that, each day my enthusiasm and strength diminished and I began to feel that by the time I rolled into Gjovic I would be ready for another delicate operation. It was a few days before Christmas when I arrived and a hospitable family let me stay with them. They helped me find Anita.
            When I saw her house I realized why she hadn't let me see it. It was a mansion built on the mountainside overlooking the town. That evening her parents interviewed me. Her father was a millionaire. I remember mostly the ripostes I had to fight myself not to use against questions designed to make me look like a bum.
            'Does it get cold in Canada they asked.'
            'Yes,' I told them.
            'How cold?' they insisted.
            'Canada's a big country,' I answered cryptically.
            Anita's mother asked haughtily, 'Do you have fireplaces in Canada?'
            'No, they'd melt the igloos,' I cracked. I played a few songs on my guitar and Anita sang along, but we sounded terrible. I told her parents that I was from a town called Acorn, which they looked for in an atlas but couldn't find it.
            Anita's mother drove me to a youth hostel; I had the feeling something was wrong. When I called the next day Anita said she couldn't see me but we arranged to meet in the street to exchange Christmas gifts. I met her early that morning; we simply handed each other our gifts and walked away from one another.
            Her father had told me Anita was sixteen, her mother said fifteen, her friends seventeen, she herself eighteen and I had guessed between nineteen and twenty. Sometimes when I sing The Tree and the Wind I say that she was thirteen... but I was eleven at the time… On the ferry to Copenhagen, on my way to the plane that would fly me home, I tore Anita's letter into a thousand pieces and tossed them into the sea.