Edge of the Earth

By Lawrence Edge

A memoir that is much more than an autobiography, this is a storyteller's recollection of an unlikely life: a landlocked Catskill country kid who surfed the world's best waves; a woodland-roaming farm boy whose employed life occurred on submarines; a northern skeptic who finished his course as a southern Believer; and along the way a host of unforgettable characters whose lives enriched and filled-in this well-written narrative. Take a trip with the author to the Woodstock Festival or to the streets of San Francisco in the late sixties; travel the world; find true love; live to tell about it; enjoy the ride. Laced with humor, this is a book that will leave you disappointed when the end arrives...wishing for more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lawrence Edge
• Release date: Nov 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996800303

Lawrence Edge

Larry Edge is an electronic and computer technician living with his award-winning artist wife and her cat in southeastern Virginia...an experienced yarn spinner, part-time author, fading surfer, enthusiastic fisherman and skilled backyard mechanic.

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Acknowledgement

Mr. Bragg doesn’t know me from Adam’s housecat, but he has helped me a great deal. Whenever I became stingy with words, or my writing became staid, stodgy, or stuck in the mud…whenever I was searching for my train of thought…I would simply open his memoir to any page and read, and his styling would kick my caboose back on track. Thanks, Mr. Bragg.

1

Thinking Thoughts

The Cruel Sea flashed into my head, dredged-up from some long unreferenced memory cells. I felt betrayed, as though I’d just found out a lover wanted to kill me. My sea was heartless, uncaring; I was near drowning, and it didn’t care. I finally reached the surface, and it pulled me back down before I could get a breath. I was starting to realize the sea is an inanimate object…it’s not my friend or my enemy. I was a lover of the sea, but it couldn’t love me back. It’s just water.

I popped up, along with a million bursting bubbles, and took a quick breath in case I sank again. It was time to stop thinking thoughts, a method I used to keep track of time and prevent the panic feeling of drowning while my fate was out of my control. Time to get back on my surfboard and get out of Dodge post-haste, before the next wave came and made life even worse, but I had to wait until the tension on the stretching leash fixed to my ankle relaxed and I could pull the board to me. The board, one I had made myself, came loose and rocketed backward at me across the surface, the pointed tail narrowly missing my face. Not good. I quickly got on it and started stroking hard for the safety beyond the impact zone.

My board slapped down as I barely made it over the lip of the next breaking wave, and I could see in the distance a darkening horizon as several increasingly large waves marched, unstoppable as freight trains, in my direction. Perhaps I could get over them before they broke, perhaps not…I had no choice but to try with everything I had.

Although I was in water, I could feel my palms sweat as the fearsome beasts approached. I stroked up the face of the first one accompanied by a light spray being created by wind the wave made as it displaced the air being pushed up and over itself. I made it over the top in a noisy hail of huge raindrops tossed up by tons of exploding water behind me. The next house-high wave had already broken, and I prepared myself for the roaring wall of white water that was about to thrash me.

Abandoning my board to its fate, I swam down as far as I could before I felt the leash trying to pull my leg off as the turbulence rolled by overhead. I came up, managed a breath, and dove again as the next noisy monster, only a few feet away, was about to repeat the scene. I didn’t get deep enough this time and was picked up and utterly worked-over in what felt like the world’s biggest washing machine. I ran a series of words through my mind, this time slowly, one at a time, thinking thoughts: I…know…this…is…going…to…end…sometime…today…

After a while I found which way was up and got to the surface once again; the next swells were smaller, and it became obvious I was going to make it, death averted once more.

On the distant beach of soft North Shore sand, kids played, surf widows sunned, and a small Circle Island tour bus waited for its Japanese photo club to re-embark. They were all blissfully ignorant of the life-and-death aspect of the drama being played out just a couple hundred yards away. I could relax with them now and enjoy the blue skies, scenic Hawaiian coastline, and adventure that the ocean provided…yeah…my friend the sea. My sometimes violent friend.

Sitting on the half-sunken surfboard, lightly bobbing around, watching for the next set of waves while my heartbeat returned to a normal cadence, I reflected on what a lucky guy I was. I’d been skiing in New England just two days prior, fully covered up against the chill of Vermont’s beautiful winter scenery, and here I was now, 48 hours and half a world later, wet and hardly clothed, enjoying 74 degree water with warm Trade Winds. I’d ridden mountains of water the past few days, some frozen, some not. I felt grateful; grateful for jet planes; grateful for America; grateful for my home; grateful for my job; grateful to be sitting there feeling grateful. Certainly a poor kid from the Catskill Mountains of New York was unlikely to wind up here, these years later, sitting pensively in the balmy breeze on a surfboard he made himself, at the best surf spot in the world. Then again, I was a lucky guy to have been raised in the Catskills.

2

The Jewish Alps

Of course the Sullivan County Catskill Mountains aren’t really Alps; in fact they’re not really mountains in the ice axes and pitons sense. They’re really the green rolling foothills of their larger tree-covered brethren to the north and east. But when 1920s New York gangsters would give Chahlie cement ova shoes and take him to da mountains to teach him to swim deez was da mountains to which dey was referring. More than one wise guy has spent his afterlife standing loosely at attention on the bottom of Swan Lake.

This is Bucolic Central. In fact, it’s so bucolic some character called Rip Van Winkle fell asleep here and didn’t wake up for twenty years! The western border of Sullivan County is the northern Delaware River, tenderly watched over and restricted by the National Park Service. The eastern half is bisected by a four-lane once selected for the annual honor of America’s Most Scenic Highway. Trout fisherman everywhere recognize the convergence of the Willowemoc and Beaverkill creeks in Roscoe as ground zero for a fly fisherman’s fancy.

One gets the impression that one is not being warmly welcomed while driving the bucolic roads. That’s because this area probably has more NO TRESPASSING signs than anywhere else on God’s green earth. Many more deer than people live here, and it is only one hundred miles to New York City. Those two facts are why mothers keep their kids close to the house during hunting season each fall. I mean, if someone had your goat strapped to the roof of his car, claiming it was an albino deer (true story), you’d keep the kids inside too. One farmer found one of his prize milk cows shot dead. Ironically it was the one he had put the letters COW on it in red paint. Some city people just can’t read.

Sullivan County has a long and rich history. Whether you were a Dutch settler, a pre-air conditioning city dweller in need of rejuvenation or an aspiring Jewish comedian, somewhere in those hills you’d find your final destination. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, hordes of fresh-air worshippers made the summertime pilgrimage from the teeming metropolis via train and trolley. Every hamlet and lake had at least one hotel catering to those longing to shed some baggage and relax. Those hotels and boarding houses are virtually all gone now, replaced by….well…nothing. The money vacationers brought cruised down Route 95 to Florida with them in the Cadillac Caravan of the fifties and sixties or jumped a jet plane to more exotic locales.

The winter dwellers, we who endured months of frozen ground and slush-covered roads so that we could live there year round, were poor by national standards…or, at least, short on cash, since there just wasn’t much to pass back and forth.

My father worked in the traffic department of Grossinger’s Hotel, a resort large enough that it had its own zip code. He worked seven days a week for little pay, although he did get a few perks, like giving blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield a lift to the city in a Limo. He was a favorite of Jenny and Paul Grossinger and would take my mom with him while serving their transportation needs as they went on vacation (to Florida of course). For a dollar we could go watch Muhammad Ali spar at the hotel or see ourselves on ABC’s Wide World of Sports as rink-side spectators at the World Barrel Jumping Championship. In the winter, the hotel let my Boy Scout troop use its impressive indoor pool with 3 meter diving board and underwater viewing window.

Grossinger’s gave a complimentary stay to the crew of the first submarine to traverse the North Pole. My mom was at the viewing window as one of the sub sailors sliced cleanly through the water below the high-board, his Navy trunks sliding to his ankles. She’s sad to see pictures of the pool, now…dry…grass growing between the floor tiles…its chandeliers broken and askew. Well, at least she has her memories.

This was the Borscht Belt. The founders of Stand Up comedy from Milton Berle and Buddy Hackett and Sid Cesar to Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield played here. Jerry Lewis’s parents owned Brown’s Hotel, just down the road from Grossinger’s. Every comedy club and late night TV show in America has its roots in these rocky hillsides, but it’s possible a bowl-shaped hayfield facing a pond in which my mother swam as a girl has had an even greater influence on American culture.

Here is the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. When Canned Heat sing Goin’ Up The Country, or when Crosby Stills Nash and Young need to get themselves back to the garden, they are referring to my childhood stomping grounds.

Max Yasgur was one of just a handful of Jewish farmers in Sullivan County. When driving by his fields we were always aghast at the risk of spontaneous combustion he took by baling and putting his hay in green. But he was a savvy businessman whose farm actually processed and bottled its own milk and distributed it to the local markets, and he was savvy enough to provide the venue, at the last minute, for the Woodstock gathering.

Had the local politburo had time they would have stopped it, in fact, in hindsight, with what they know today, they would still stop it. Though the county is still basking in its fifteen minutes of fame all these years later, to the planning department Woodstock Wannabees are persona non grata, at least in large unauthorized groups.

Residing on the original festival site is a mega-million dollar venue, Bethel Center for the Arts, and a Woodstock museum. It’s okay to be part of a big audience attending one of the weekly summer concerts featuring Santana, Keith Urban or other top-name entertainment, but, for the plop-down-in-a-field crowd in need of a permit, the old Hippies versus The Establishment still goes on. A restrictive ordinance is passed only to be bypassed by the creation of a political party (the Wanna Party…because we wanna party) whose assembling cannot be legally restricted. Back and forth to this day.

Why here?

…Cool babbling brooks; quietness; orange newts that only come out when it rains; the Milky Way at night; pine and hemlock trees murmuring in the gentle breeze by day…

Move over, R. V. Winkle, there’s a spot that’s mine…a place to which I will return when heart-rending tragedy comes, or I just need to rest…to sit…just down from the family farm, not a hundred yards from the knoll on which we bury our own next to civil war soldiers and others, long gone and forgotten, who spent their lives nearby. I’ll sit under evergreen trees beside a pool only ten-foot wide and two-foot deep, in which we swam as little kids…and our kids did…and their kids will. Dead quiet, except for the sound of cool, clear water falling over blackened stones…dependably constant…unchanging through centuries…babbling still, even right now…at the place I had in mind when I wrote this, years ago:

Rain is falling in the Green Room, hemlock filtered, sweet,

Calling out the orange salamander and freshening deep beds of moss.

Its wetness--cold to the skin, its sound a blanket of warmth

Filling the forest,

Making it home to those that don’t run to escape the rain.

I’m alone…apart from my kind…no longer bound by the ties that bind.

Unburdened.

Heart-naked before Him who sees the heart.

Soul-mate of this orange salamander…

Ruler of his diminutive domain.

Princess Pine his pine trees…the ferns his towering pines.

Standing firm on his moss carpet.

Unmoving.

Head up.

Exulting in the crystalline spray of life.

So, were we poor…or were we rich? You tell me.

3

Enter, Stage Left

It was May 12, 1949, and news organizations around the world were proclaiming the easing of East/West tensions. That day the Soviet Union lifted the overland blockade of the city of West Berlin. The constant and dramatic re-supply of food and provisions to its isolated populace by airlift would finally end. At least one woman in upstate New York could not have cared less; I reckon being in labor with her first child took her mind off current events, no matter how significant. Edna Edge delivered a baby boy that day. To her and her husband Art, that was all that really mattered.

The next two or three years are a blur, at least to me. I’ve been told I tried to take a long walk off a short pier in St. Petersburg, Florida, and would have done it, too, had it not been for an interfering early-morning fisherman who grabbed me by the diaper as I was leaning over the end of the pier to see the fishies. He then sought out and found my father’s mother, who’d been sleeping soundly in a house across the street. Close call number one.

Not long after that, my parents decided to make the next of our many moves, this time to my mom’s girlhood home in the hill country of New York. Until we got our own place in town, a couple of miles away from Grandpa’s little farm, we stayed with him and my grandmother.

My mother and her two sisters had husbands, therefore their kids had paternal relatives, but in each family we kids considered our lineage, for the most part, to be Danish, and the central figure in the family to be the women’s father, Grandpa Moller.

Vigo Moller made the voyage to the open arms of Lady Liberty at the turn of the twentieth century, disembarking at Ellis Island with twelve American dollars in his pocket and facing the probability he would never return to his native Denmark.

The Land of Opportunity gave my mother’s father a job as a longshoreman, loading and unloading ships on the rough-and-tumble docks of New York City. As I hear it, He got in a fight every day and lost every one of them.

My grandmother was much younger than him and wouldn’t have gotten with him at all had her sister, whom he was dating, been home when he showed up one day to take her out. The girls had raised themselves when their midwife mother abandoned her three daughters and went into hiding, getting a job as a live-in domestic and pretending she couldn’t speak English, because the law was after her for performing an abortion that resulted in the death of a young woman. So he married the younger sister, twenty years his junior, and at age 42 began a life that would eventually place him as the patriarch of a healthy and thriving branch of the Moller family tree.

With the American Dream open to him, and with determination and hard work, the common laborer eventually owned his own place in the dairy farming country of the Catskill Mountain foothills. His son, my Uncle Arkie, still lives on the five acre property.

It was a great place to begin my youth. I had a mother who loved the outdoors…picnics in the nearby woods…fishing in a farm pond a mile away at her sister Tassie’s place…wild blueberries by the quart…gooseberries, currents, raspberries or blackberries for jam, or just served with milk and sugar. There was a naked, featherless pet crow named Jimmy John who could nearly speak, and a vehicle that was no more than a frame, bench seat, and motor that we called a doodlebug. Best of all, I had free run of my little world. I had one issue, though.

I realized that three-year-olds remember very little of their short lives. I saw that as a major difference between myself and older people, so I devised a way to exercise my memory by placing a Raggedy Andy doll inside an unoccupied chicken coup at Grandfather’s and remembering to crawl through the tiny chicken door to see it whenever we were visiting him. Each time I lay in feathers and dry manure and forced my body through that chicken-sized opening to see that doll, I had the distinct impression my mind was improving.

I wish I could say that is my earliest remembrance, but it’s not. My earliest memory is of running toward a large door opening in a building, from the inside, just before the lights went out.

We were living in Jeffersonville without my father, because he had reentered the Navy during the Korean War and gone off, leaving us in an apartment in what was called The Mansion House. Nearby was a barn-type building with a large front door that hung from a track and ran on rollers. The door had been removed and left standing inside, leaning against the far wall.

My little friend Kay and I were looking for treasure, namely the fancy tops that screw onto liquor bottles being stored by the bar next door. I remember her pulling on the door to see what was behind it, and I remember her yelling, Run! The opening was getting closer…and that’s it.

She ran for help…it was midday and there were no men around, except for one. Fortunately for me, Tom Devaney was home. He was recuperating from a construction accident that caused him to lose an eye and the use of one arm.

He managed to use his good arm to lift one side of the three hundred pound door crushing the little boy, while Kay dragged my limp form out from under. I awoke in bed after eight hours of unconsciousness, having escaped with a concussion, a broken nose, a cracked neck…and my life. Once again, Edna Edge had averted the loss of her first child.

Life went on. I was learning all kinds of useful things; things like you can’t carry fresh eggs in your pants pockets from the chicken coop to the house. It doesn’t work, no matter how careful you are or how many times you try. You can’t grab snakes behind the head, like the experts do, because they can still twist around and bite you in the webbing between your thumb and index finger.

Speaking of (non-poisonous) snakes, I liked ‘em for some reason and caught bunches of them.

Once, my mom was visiting her friend Doris while I poked around, shirtless, outside in her yard. The interminable confab going on in the mobile home gave me time to catch and train an unfortunate garter snake. When Doris finally came out on her porch, I held the exhausted critter up by the tail and declared, I have a trick snake!, whereupon the beast reached out and latched onto my navel. I dropped the tail and let the snake hang from my belly as I tried to pry its jaws open. The resulting high pitched screaming is an indication Doris has probably suffered from a type of PTSD from that day to this, at least in the area of snake training.

My father didn’t go to church, but he was Roman Catholic and had attended St. Leo’s Catholic high school in central Florida. (A classmate was Lee Marvin, the actor, whom he called Dog Face) My Lutheran mother had agreed, as a prerequisite to marriage, that she would raise her kids in the Catholic Church, and so enrolled us in the local parochial school named Our Lady of the Angels (sometimes sarcastically called Our Lady of the Little Angels, which we were not).

Mom had taught me to read, so at five years old, I was put on a bus and sent off, trembling, to attend First Grade with kids a year older than myself.

My teacher was the kindly Sister Joanita. She reminded me of a character in The Wizard of Oz…the one who could pedal a bicycle through the sky.

She had information she needed to get into the heads of her tiny charges, and she could really drill it home. For a minor information absorption problem she would poke you repeatedly with her boney index finger on the top of your head or in the temple until you had properly learned. Now, if you were at the blackboard, tongue out, scratching some erroneous nonsense on her personal teaching aid, you could expect a thick Dick and Jane reading book to come repeatedly against the back of your skull as it rebounded off the blackboard.

When the end of the school year came and you, sadly, had to leave Sister Joanita, you needn’t fret. She taught Second Grade also. There were two grades to a classroom at Our Lady of the Angels.

I learned more about human nature during recess at that school than I could have ever learned in a classroom setting. In the eight years I went there, no adult supervision ever occurred on the playgrounds. We were entirely on our own, even in Second Grade, and I had learned the extra fun game of dog pile on (somebody’s name here).

I had a pal named Henry Terlick, whose last name (i.e. Terlick Bowl) I was grateful for, since it relieved some of the pressure I was getting from having the last name of Edge.

One recess I joined in by shouting, Dog pile on Henry, which caused a bunch of kids to knock Henry down and joyously pile on top of him. What fun, and I caused it!

In the following days, I called out a couple more names and was strutting due to my newfound power, so I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard Dog pile on Larry. I didn’t see any joyous faces as I struggled to breathe at the bottom of that pile of snarling, snapping, uniformed little darlings. One cute little girl reached in and tore my shirt. I was humbled. The lofty had been brought low; human nature had been revealed. Try and teach that in a classroom.

The consensus may be that 6-year-old kids have no sexual inclination at all, but I can tell you that’s not true. I was mesmerized by Janet Keeler’s golden blond hair. Absolutely smitten. I was enthralled with any girl sporting buck teeth. There could be no more beautiful feature on any female human being.

I fell in love with a high born sixth grade girl…the local insurance broker’s daughter, Mary Margaret Tegeler. Neither a five year age difference nor her two foot height advantage could deter my ardor. Of course, she didn’t know I existed. Throwing caution to the wind, I remedied that one day on the school bus by hitting her on the head with my lunch box. She noticed me! I had made contact with the girl of my dreams! She kept a close eye on me after that. I went home and told my mother I had a relationship.

Sister Joanita must have taken note of my heterosexual tendencies when she devised a method of discipline meant to embarrass me into compliance. She had one of the other students bring a girls dress to school, which she put on me and had me stand all day in front of the class. That didn’t sit well with my mother, who accompanied me to school the next day and let the staff have a piece of her mind.

She made it up to me by telling them that day was a fishing day, pulled me out of class and took me to the mill-pond to give some sunfish sore lips.

4

Sisters

Before I reached my fourth birthday I had decided I’d turned the corner and would never again allow swear words to proceed from my lips. I was proud of that, so, when I saw two nuns seated in the waiting area of a train station, I stood in front of them and announced, I don’t say ‘s**t’ anymore! I was sure those righteous beings would be happy to know that. They smiled and nodded angelically.

I knew nuns were women. I knew that; but to me they weren’t really people like the rest of us. They were holy. They had taken something called vows that put them on the other side of some divide between themselves and regular humans. They got up and prayed every morning at five o’clock. They never married and they owned very little. All you