"Last Night We Climbed a Mountain"

A recent CBS Sunday Morning program featured a piece on nostalgia, and its value to our lives--a theme constantly returned to in these blogs. I find myself perhaps-too frequently going back in time through my long-ago letters to my parents, seeking the comfort of things and people now so long and heart-achingly gone. I am well aware that I now see my Navy days through a more rosy lens than I was wearing at the time, but because the experiences described were written down almost immediately after they happened, they are safe from the cloudiness of memory, which grows thicker with each passing year. And while it is fairly clear in the letters that I was, even while living them, able to appreciate aspects of my service days, their closeness in time prevented me from appreciating them more fully.

Here is one example.

1 April 1956

Dear Folks

Eight-fifteen on Easter Sunday, 1956—a holiday on the calendar only. The whole day has passed in that state of passive nothingness so many of the days do around here. Two months and six days and we’ll be on our way home. 133 days before my discharge.

Tomorrow we leave San Remo for Valencia, from where I hope to go to Madrid. But nothing is certain around here, so we shall see.

Last night we climbed a mountain. Lloyd, myself, and two other mess cooks were out wandering around when we ran into two American girls going to school at the Sorbonne in Paris. One was from Georgia and the other from Louisiana and they had just the syrupy-est drawls you evah did heah. We talked to them for awhile—they speak French with a Southern drawl, which is no mean accomplishment.

After awhile we left them, and Bader (one of the guys) said he knew a nice place “up on the hill.” San Remo is surrounded by “hills” that would stand out like sore thumbs in Illinois. We said OK, and he said: “We can either walk or take a taxi.” Only having about four dollars between us, we decided to walk.

So we walked—it wasn’t so bad at first. As we got into the older part of the city, where the houses cluster together and only grudgingly permit narrow streets, it got a little steeper. At last we came to the “suburbs,” where the houses are more scarce, but where the paths are hemmed in by garden walls. An occasional dim streetlight emits a bare light. The paths became very steep, and on the other side of the walls, the tall silhouettes of poplar trees stand black against a black sky. Now and then a dog barks, but otherwise it is deathly silent, with only the ghostly street lamps far apart.

We came, half dead, to a place where we could look down on the city, twinkling like scattered diamonds, with a necklace of light along the shore reflecting from the water. Out in the water was another group of lights, echoed in long shimmering lines, that might have been a small village on an island—it was the Ti. I could have stayed up there and just looked for hours.

When we finally reached the restaurant, 787 feet above sea level, we had a large plate of spaghetti (for only 50 cents).

Where I’d had trouble coming up, Lloyd had trouble going down—somehow, though the path twisted and turned and there was only one way down, we lost the other two, who’d walked on ahead.

Not wanting to come back to the ship, we went back to the little bar we’d visited every time we’d been ashore, to say goodbye to Maria and her folks. We stayed there for awhile, watching the Milan Opera Company do “Madam Butterfly” on TV, and returned to the ship at about 2300 or so.

And so to bed, after first sweeping down the office—which I am quite sure Boswell never had to do.

Love

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