Between a Road and a Hard Place: One Clueless Wanderer's Story

By Marlin W. Marx

Most people hitchhike only as an emergency measure.  As soon as all is well they toss their thumb back in the drawer.  Some do it for a little adventure between semesters, and then they continue with their planned out lives.  Marlin did it because there was little else he could handle emotionally.  His emergency was never over.  He had no college to return to, or home for very long at a time.  The road was the closest thing he had to a life plan.  Blessedly for him, God had a better one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: May 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634135252

Book preview

Lord

DEDICATION:

This little book is dedicated to my Heavenly Father, my earthly father, my precious mother, my brothers and sister, my dear longsuffering wife and children, anyone else who ever had to put up with me, and fellow losers of all sorts.

FORWARD

This is a song I wrote for my dad.

SOMEONE I KNOW

I know a man who’s part of me

He’s known me from the start

Since then he’s changed and so have I

But we share a broken heart

Broken by the world around us

And the world within our minds

And we’re longing for a new world

Only those who seek can find

And although sometimes…

We see the dawn but not the light

The days just interrupting night

Our hope remains…

That when the Lord returns

His purest light will never leave our sight

I know a rebel with a cause

A pillar in a house of cards

And while kings and queens are cut down

He stands among the shards

He never waters down or questions

The unrepentant Word of God

And he’s not afraid to walk paths

No one else’s feet have trod

And although sometimes…

He sees the dawn but not the light

The days just interrupting night

His hope remains…

That when the Lord returns

His purest light will never leave his sight

I know a sinner with a saint’s heart

A ghost with old man’s bones

An everlasting spirit

In a world of flesh and stones

A drifter on a lonesome highway

The sun his only guide

And pain a close companion

He feels with every stride

And although sometimes…

I see the dawn but not the light

The days just interrupting night

His faith and strength reflects the Lord

And helps me, every day, to carry on the fight

-Robert Benjamin Marx

Author’s note: Wow.

INTRODUCTION

Some of us don’t connect well to the rest of the human race. It isn’t because we don’t want to. We watch and wish and hope and muster the courage to try, only to say or do or be the wrong thing and retreat to our solitude again. We are the last to be picked for the team, or be invited to the party. We get laughed at and talked about and picked on.

Most of us eventually learn the finer points of the people game and blend in to society enough to get by. A few of us grab a hostage or two and make a tragic last stand in front of the TV news cameras, or usher ourselves into oblivion alone. Some of us float between those two extremes, in a no-man’s-land of sorts. We are like benign tumors; unsettling annoyances that no one wants to think or talk too much about.

You may have seen us. In school we tend to be the quiet ones in the back of the classroom, and the ones who sit alone at the lunch table. We walk close to the hallway wall or playground fence with our heads down, hoping that no one notices us…and praying that someone does. Or we are the overboard-obnoxious ones who get noticed in a plethora of negative ways. Sometimes we are both; at the same time.

As adults we are frequently between jobs and relationships, and falling through cracks in the system. Everything is moving too fast for us. Everything is too complicated, too loud, too bright…and too cruel. We sweat and tremble and twitch, and our mouths get dry from the mere thought of talking to anyone.

Some of us are born this way, others become this way from outside forces. I am the result of both causes, so I have been a problem for those unfortunate enough to be around me all of my life, especially during my youth. Did I mention that I tend to be a tad cowardly, lazy, and selfish too?

But when I was a boy I heard a preacher say none of our lives are a waste. At the very least we can be a good bad example. It is in that spirit that I wrote Between A Road and A Hard Place. I figure if I tell my tale of confusion and despair turning into an ode to joy and peace, it might comfort others like me by reminding them they are not alone. It might encourage them to hear that there is hope for a solid connection to themselves, other people, and God. Not earth bound false hope. Hope with grit. Hope with teeth. Hope that invites wonders.

It took me over three years to write this book, and it has been the most difficult task I have ever attempted in my sixty years on this planet. I couldn’t have written it any sooner in life because I had to get far enough away from the events which occurred in it to even attempt to describe them with any degree of correct perspective. I couldn’t have written it any later because my memory would undoubtedly have faded even more than it has already. I almost didn’t write it at all because dredging up some parts of my past was so painful I could hardly take it, and exposing them is uncomfortable to say the least.

Between A Road and A Hard Place is the cleaned up but frank account of my bumpy childhood, my merciful conversion to Christ at sixteen, and my epic struggle to grow spiritually despite my inner demons and well-meaning but emotionally decimated father; including my near abandonment of society and subsequent two decade flight of fancy, which God, in His great long suffering wisdom, turned into manifold blessings for all concerned.

Between a Road and a Hard Place is the result of honoring a request from my son to chronicle his favorite parts of my long and arduous journey from chaos to cohesiveness, which I hope has turned out to be more than that, for someone out there.

Chapter 1

Hard Start, Tough Guy

One green Michigan morning in 1973, six weeks after my nineteenth birthday, I walked off my job, stuck out my thumb, and disappeared. Several mind-bending days later I scooped up the Pacific Ocean in my palm.

It was the first time I hitchhiked, and I was hooked. Hitching was instant freedom from can’t, shouldn’t, wait, and don’t. Of course it was also freedom from regular meals, humane accommodations, routine personal hygiene, and…a life. But I couldn’t get a life anyway, so I continuously resorted to it and similar surreal life substitutions for over twenty years.

Why did it take me so long to get even a loose handle on day-to-day reality and stop being either intimidated or angered by most of my fellow human beings?

My dad said it was because of my plain old bad attitude, and he didn’t know where I got it. Well…I’m guessing he was about half right, according to my present adult perspective.

When I was an ankle biter I practically worshipped the ground Dad walked on. And why not? He was a regular Man-Mountain-Dean, as people in his generation say. When I told other kids my dad was stronger/bigger/badder than their dad, I had good reason to know it was so.

As I got a little older I came to the shocking realization that despite his obvious and impressive attributes, he wasn’t perfect. I didn’t listen to him as much after that, and I think I kind of started trying to punish him for his betrayal of my belief in him.

Though I couldn’t know or comprehend it at the time, he was ill-equipped to deal with child rearing complications, especially those of a rebellious nature, due to emotional damage he sustained from atrocities foisted on him during his youth. Because of that he dealt with me more like a full grown adversary than a tender, malleable young soul.

That was probably the last thing I needed, and speaking as an adult again here, I would guess that it contributed considerably to my already developing plain old bad attitude.

The first and worst atrocity foisted on Dad was his biological father abandoning him when he was one month old. The second one was his desperate, impoverished mother marrying two hard core alcoholics in a row before he was sixteen.

When each new step-disaster went from just making him feel unwanted to beating him, she sent him to relatives or foster homes until it was relatively safe for him to return, only to have to repeat the process over and over again.

Eventually he stopped trusting almost everyone, and started getting into fights, which he tended to win.

The local official in charge of Dad’s case was Judge James V. Creech of Grand Marais, Minnesota. He was a very wise and kind man. Dad trusted him slightly, and tried to follow his advice, including advice to stop fighting; but fighting was such a handy problem solver because he was so good at it.

His truly honorable honor had a daughter. Her name was Gladys. She was Dad’s only friend and consoler when other kids laughed at him for wearing patched up rags, and for being the talk of the town’s son.

Dad liked her…a lot. He used to walk around on his hands to impress her. (He kept that up into his sixties.) She liked him too, and saw the basic decency in him that no one besides herself, her esteemed father (Pa) and a handful of other perceptive souls did.

Imperceptive souls helped make life in general, and school in particular, a living hell for Dad. So despite Pa’s advice to stay the course and graduate, he quit the first day of tenth grade.

He set about trying to make a living instead, so he could support Gladys as her husband if she would have him whenever he dropped the just friends bit and proposed to her.

His first idea for income was to work for the relative he was shuffled off to the most throughout his childhood.

Gramps, his step-grandfather, had discovered Dad’s aptitude for solving mechanical puzzles early on, and had given him many opportunities to develop it by letting him maintain and repair his small-scale metal scrapping equipment. Unfortunately, Gramps couldn’t afford to actually pay Dad money for his labor.

Next he tried to get hired at the tourist resort he had split wood and piled rocks for during parts of several summers. But of course they were scaling down on employees toward the end of the season as usual. No exceptions.

He could have found something in the area, maybe even something full time eventually, if he would have stuck around long enough and kept trying.

But he didn’t have the patience for that, so he looked for work in the twin cities of Minnesota and beyond, via his thumb and the rails.

He found more trouble than work. He didn’t have to look for trouble. Trouble seemed to follow him. Actually he thought it was always being pushed on him, and whoever did the pushing needed to be pushed back, some more forcefully than others.

Like a Minneapolis, Minnesota bully he went berserk on. He bested him, beat him, and knocked him out, and then severely broke one of his arms for a memento of the encounter.

He sent several other malefactors off on ambulance rides with similar issues, but he never spent a minute in jail for any of it (his brief stint in the brig for chasing a naval officer overboard while swinging a hefty length of loading chain occurred a little later on), usually because no one connected to what happened wanted the law involved.

He eventually found all the steady work he could handle in the United States Navy as a jet engine mechanic. He had severe difficulty adjusting to some aspects of military life, but he breezed through the physical part.

The Navy appreciated and encouraged his fighting skills and honed them to perfection.

They put his formidable appearance to good use by assigning him shore patrol duty when his aircraft carrier, the Essex, was anchored.

Essentially that made him a military cop, whose main duty was to break up bar fights and round up boisterous sailors. His nickname in those days was One Punch Marlin because that’s all he needed to knock the average drunken brawler out. He drank some himself, but he had an iron clad, zero-tolerance policy for habitually violent drunks. Imagine that.

One night he had to hit an extra-large hooligan extra hard to keep his reputation, with infamous naval-folklore-like results. Dad broke his nose, both sides of his jaw, knocked out all of his front teeth, and blackened both of his eyes with that one devastating blow.

Another night he even had to adjust his method and risk his moniker to subdue and apprehend, which he did, in Agent 007 style.

An old sea dog, who towered over Dad’s admirably sculptured five feet, eleven inches, and outweighed his rock solid one hundred ninety three pounds by a hundred, was being a bad giant by literally throwing all of the customers out of a particularly riotous drinking establishment.

As Dad approached, Towering Thomas strode toward him across the parking lot, roaring threats as he came.

Dad ran toward Tom, jumped up on a car’s rear bumper, then onto its trunk lid, then into the air, kicking him hard under his jaw as he flew. Tom