London Bridge: A Fictional Memoir

By Steven Dhondt

Tom Pierson’s freshman obsessions—with American literature and with the pert assistant to the dean of Abbott College—dominate his first term. When his idealism, inspired by Jack London’s portrayal of working-class struggles, collides with establishment forces, he learns to rue a lesson from London: that fate is often capriciously twisted.

Steven Dhondt brings passion and literary sophistication to this coming-of-age novel. The telltale themes—idolization of inspiring role models, youthful bravado undermined by self doubt, first love, and betrayal—are outlined in graceful prose with signature empathy. Dhondt deftly pays homage to Jack London by emulating the master’s satire and keen understanding of human nature in a story that builds to a tumultuous conclusion.

“I need to find my way. And I think it’s through London. Show me how to travel. Maybe if I follow your path, I can learn how to keep traveling.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665718387

Steven Dhondt

Steven Dhondt became fascinated with the works of Jack London at an early age. After completing his graduate thesis on London’s use of satire, he published several scholarly articles on London’s writings. His interest in London and other writers led him to pursue his own literary dreams, resulting in the publication of many of his poems and inclusion in the International Who’s Who in Poetry. London Bridge is his first novel. He lives in a quaint village in western New York State.

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Copyright © 2022 Steven Dhondt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by

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without the written permission of the author except in the case of

brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

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models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-1839-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1837-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-1838-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022901806

Archway Publishing rev. date: 05/09/2022

CONTENTS

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

In memory of

Augustus Bernard Dhondt,

my grandfather who, after I drove his

tractor into a ditch, implored me,

Don’t tell your grandmother.

If you suppress truth, if you hide truth, if you do not rise up and speak out in meeting, if you speak out in meeting without speaking the whole truth, then you are less true than truth.

Let me glimpse the face of truth. Tell me what the face of truth looks like.

—Jack London

Stepping Out

A single score less two has passed

With every year just like the last.

Instead of being here at home,

Now

I’m stepping out—out on my own.

The world’s so big, and I’m so small,

I hope someday I’ll see it all.

I’ll have the chance now that I’m grown;

Finally,

I’m stepping out—out on my own.

Though what’s around has been just great,

I’ve had an urge to roam of late.

A restless seed in me was sown;

Thank God

I’m stepping out—out on my own.

I want to see, before settling down,

The world afar, the world around.

And as the seed from pod is blown,

Oh, yes!

I’m stepping out—out on my own.

Sherrill, New York

1962

PROLOGUE

June 12, 1967

Spring arrives late in northern Utah. By then, people happily exchange their heavy winter coats and scarves for the light jackets and cotton sweaters they packed away seven long months ago. By then, the numbing wind that since October drove needles of sleet and snow through Logan Canyon gradually becomes a tranquil breeze, spilling sweet fragrances of rhododendrons, azaleas, and rare pink and white fairy slipper orchids into the flowing expanse that is Cache Valley.

Defining the Cache and defying the welcome transition sweeping across the lower elevations, the soaring Wasatch Range—the only east-to-west-running mountains in North America—retains its mottled white crown in striking contrast to the vivid colors below. Renewal at the summit takes longer.

I sit alone taking it all in as I sip what will be my last cup of coffee in this place at a table on the broad flagstone terrace in front of the Utah State University student center in Logan. The university is situated at the mouth of Logan Canyon on a shelf-like area of rock with steep slopes above and below—what the locals call the valley’s benches. The view is spectacular.

But today, none of it seems real. It is more like an Ansel Adams photograph or an Albert Bierstadt oil. And not many people ever actually get the chance to be a participant in one of those. I should feel privileged to be here, a witness to this picture-perfect magnificence. Yet now, on a glorious late spring morning as I survey this one-of-a-kind valley’s grandeur, I want to get on with it. No lingering. As good as it has been here, I am eager to move on.

I didn’t always feel this way.

I saw the valley for the first time the previous August, having driven west from upstate New York, first on Interstate 90 and then on Interstate 80 for what seemed like weeks in my cramped Volkswagen Beetle packed just short of the bursting point with everything I owned. I was, like Dorothy, blowing through Kansas, following the yellow bricks in search of the Wizard.

Only in my case, I was on my way to meet a King.

Anyone who has made the trip knows that, just after you pass through Rock Springs, a blot on the state of Wyoming, and as you turn off Route 80 a few miles past the tacky Little America rest stop and head northwest on 30, and just before you enter Logan Canyon from the north, you come to the top of a ridge and bam! In an instant you feel like Dorothy must have at her first sight of Oz. You must slam on the brakes. I mean, stop the car right now on the side of the road so you can get out, rub your eyes, shake your highway-hypnotized head, and stare at what is spread out below to be sure you are not hallucinating.

If Dorothy’s was the Emerald City, this was a jewel even brighter. From the shoulder of the road on the ridge, I looked down in wonderment on an expanse of water the color of a gemstone unlike any ever mined. Just imagine a mix of vibrant green and radiant sapphire that glows as if millions of mirrors reflecting the bright, Rocky Mountain sun were suspended an inch or so below the surface. I sure as hell wasn’t in New York anymore.

I knew I should get back in my car and keep moving, but I was paralyzed by a depth and brilliance of color that would be hard to find even in the Caribbean or South Pacific. In fact, I learned later that it was called the Caribbean of the Rockies. The map said it was Bear Lake. And it probably contained water that was still frozen when I escaped Rock Springs a short time earlier. But now I was in Utah. I never guessed it would be this beautiful.

This must be the way to the King.

From this striking glacial tarn created ten thousand years ago, the only way to Cache Valley is through the canyon. And Logan Canyon, it turns out, is big—as deep in some spots as the Grand Canyon.

The two-lane road that bisects the canyon took my little Bug and me twisting below rugged limestone cliffs, through dense canopies of umbrella-like quaking aspens, lodgepole pines, and junipers and meandering around waist-high purple lupines and massive boulders kissing the edge of the frothing river, the home of brown and cutthroat trout, for the last forty miles to the university. I passed cautiously over Burnt and Lower Twin bridges in the narrow middle section of the canyon and peeked apprehensively over the edge of Rocky Point, the tight hairpin turn with a sheer drop-off on one side. So primeval was this place that if it were not for the pavement and overhead utility lines as evidence of modernity, I could have been an explorer like Donald Mackenzie or Jim Bridger coming through the canyon for the first time. In stark contrast to cruising past the gray moss-hung oaks, tupelos, and magnolias of Louisiana or the rolling cornfields of central New York, I embraced the sensation of flowing downstream like a shadow of the river, noticing the shimmery russet bark of red osier dogwoods and slowing to a crawl on curves crowded by ominous granite walls as if I were a fetus pressing through my mother’s birth canal.

I tuned my radio to a Logan station and began humming along with Bob Dylan as he sang The Times They Are A-Changing. Knowing I was almost at the end of my long passage, I was impatient for it to be over. But, as it is with birthing, the canyon does not give you any shortcuts. Some two hours after skirting the shore of that mesmerizing jewel of a lake, I finally emerged at what would be my place for the next year.

The place of the King.

He was not actually a king. That is, not in the royal sense. His real name, his given name, was King. Uncommon name. I first heard it from a Duke. Uncommon man.

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1

W eltanschauung.

With no hint of the southern accent that inflected most of his speech, Professor E. Duke Becker enunciated the German term. His eyes fixed on the class, his head tilted slightly back, and his hands rested on the edges of the lectern.

He relaxed his arms and stepped to one side. What do we mean when we refer to Twain’s weltanschauung? His hands slid into the pockets of his crisply pressed twill trousers.

Worldview, I said quickly, forgetting to raise my hand. It just fell out of my mouth. Dr. Becker used the term during a class early in the semester, and I made it my business from the beginning to retain such things because he placed special emphasis on them. It was as though I had an instinct for remembering the words and phrases that I suspected were underscored in his lecture notes.

They were not hard to anticipate. He almost always sent an ever-so-subtle signal. Sometimes he paused. A master of his subject does not pause for no reason. God knows he couldn’t be tongue-tied. Other times it was the look on his face or maybe just a tiny gesture of his hand. I remember once he gripped the lectern and drummed his fingers, as if searching for the word before he spoke it, dragging out the syllables one after the other. You would have to be brain-dead not to realize it was time to take notes. The few perceptive students could pick up the signals. He knew who we were. The rest just wallowed in their apathy. He knew who they were, too.

It seemed that he tried to pepper his lectures with foreign scholarly terms. Yet he was also fond of myth and allegory, the epic and the heroic. For example, I recall Becker’s eyes absolutely glowing when he discussed the notion of the American Adam as myth. He explained that it was first described by R. W. B. Lewis in his 1953 book, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.¹ Given that Becker was a professor of American literature and that the mythic Adam is a recurring central figure in American writing, it was unquestionably his favorite and most frequently referred-to myth. If you couldn’t grasp the concept of Adam, you might as well pack it in as a student in his classes.

But apart from Adam and a few others in English, Professor Becker seemed particularly drawn to the melodic words like weltschmerz and leitmotiv, two of his favorites from German. Or French portmanteau. I thought at first that he was being affected using a foreign word when its English translation would do just as well. Why not say just worldview? This is Abbott, Michigan, after all, not Munich or Paris.

Worldview, I repeated. It’s the way he sees things. His personal perspective. Huck is just a fourteen-year-old kid. But because he’s the narrator, the reader sees the events of the novel through his eyes and his sensibilities. It’s Twain’s worldview. But we hear it from Huck.

This was fun. This was studying literature in the big leagues. Now it was more than just plot and who does what to whom, the way we did it in high school. This was real analysis. I became more confident. Not only had I read the assignment when most of my classmates did not, but I had turned in my research paper on Mark Twain’s Concept of Childhood to Dr. Becker the week before. Of course, I had covered the novel under discussion, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as Twain’s earlier The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. All the research I did gave me an advantage over the others taking Survey of American Literature.

For example, I went on, fully enjoying center stage, everything in the book takes place along the Mississippi and in some way relates to the river and its influences on the characters. The river is water, an archetype of life, and like life, it’s complex, constantly moving, and changing. It’s Twain’s weltanschauung that man makes his way through life much the same as the river makes its way to the sea from its source, washing up against the people whose lives are influenced by it, then it dies at the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the cycle repeats itself again and again. The ocean water evaporates, gets tossed by the wind, and moves back across land, only to fall again as rain and become reborn as a stream or river that will eventually flow back to the sea.

Thank you, Mr. Pierson. Professor Becker’s eyes glowed with approval and scanned the other students’ faces as if to say, If you worked as hard as Pierson does, you would know this, too. He was about to follow up with another question when he was cut short by the bell signaling the end of the class. Immediately, shuffling sounds broke out as the students shifted in their chairs and began gathering their notebooks and texts, their attention now broken.

Hold on, please. The shuffling stopped and order returned. Nobody ever defied Professor Becker. Please pick up your research papers as you leave. Friday we will discuss the next ten chapters. And I expect all of you to be prepared. He put emphasis on all before he turned away.

I remained seated, basking in the superior feelings I had from my recitation. My classmates gradually moved toward him in single file, took their papers, then trailed out the door to check the grades he had assigned them before beginning conversations and rushing to their next class. As I approached him from my place at the end of the line, he stopped me.

Mr. Pierson, may I have a moment?

Uh, yes, sir. Suddenly, my stomach burned. Oh, shit, I thought. Did I blow it? I felt my chest tighten. It was always this way when I was with him—not that he was particularly intimidating, at least physically. I guessed that he was thirty-five, give or take a year or two. His height and weight were average, and he wore his thinning, light-brown hair short, neatly parted on the left, and combed back across a balding spot on the crown of his head. His well-cut tweed and houndstooth sport coats were in warm, muted earth tones, and he always paired them with pleated gabardine or twill slacks. Without the jacket, though, if you met with him in his office when he was in shirtsleeves, you could see the tightness of his abdominal muscles, defining a narrow waist that supported the chest and shoulders of a weight lifter. He looked like a man who cared about his appearance but was not so vain that he checked the knot of his tie as he passed his reflection in a mirror or window or snatched down his shirt cuffs to assure that the proper quarter inch showed below his jacket sleeves. He was intimidating to me only because he was the chairman of the English Department, my major, and was, in my eighteen-year-old mind, the paradigm of a college literature professor. Nobody did it better than Dr. E. Duke Becker. And demonstrating to him that I was an exceptional student worthy of taking my place in his profession was what I lived for.

Mr. Pierson, he said almost imperiously after the others had filed out, his body erect like a soldier’s. I could see that he was holding my research paper in his hand and braced myself. I’d like you to think about something. He held my paper against his chest the way a preacher holds his Bible.

Here it comes, I thought. He’s going to tell me I should think about changing my major. He hated what I just said about weltanschauung. Why else would he want to see me privately? He kept me motionless with his penetrating look. All I could do was stand before him, supplicant that I was, and await his next words.

His manner reminded me of my grandfather on Dad’s side. Grampa Pierson was a muck farmer and worked about as hard at it as I have ever seen anyone work. Of course, he was nowhere as well educated as Dr. Becker. He started working in the fields when he was fourteen and never looked back. And, sure, Grampa had a lot of rough edges. But like Becker, he was a gentleman. And he didn’t take any guff from anyone. Except, of course, my grandmother. As long as I knew him, he was not particularly demonstrative with his emotions—to Gram or anyone else. It was his eyes. Everything came out through his eyes. They were kind of a mixture of gray and green set deeply below fluffy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows behind wire-frame bifocals. And they never failed to tell you where you stood.

I will never forget the way they glimmered after I hit my first home run in Little League baseball, when I was about nine or ten. It surprised the hell out of me that it went over the fence. But as it sailed out, and I rounded the bases, I have no doubt that Grampa got more of a kick out of the whole thing than I did. At the time, I was his only grandson. And he absolutely beamed. For him at that moment, he was watching the next Babe Ruth.

Grampa loved the sport and the New York Yankees almost as much as he loved his farm and his family. He had a bunch of old silver dollars stashed in a dresser drawer, some of them from the 1800s. From the day of that first four-bagger, he gave me one of the silver dollars for every homer I hit. And when I proudly told him from time to time that he owed me another, I was rewarded not only with the coin but also with that same sparkle in his eyes.

Those incredibly expressive eyes could go the other way, too. We used to drive the hour and a half or so to visit Gram and Grampa about one Sunday a month. We piled into the car—Mom, Dad, my younger sister, and me—and played My father runs a grocery store, and he sells p, or he sells m, and everybody had to guess what he sells—potatoes, peas, meatballs, whatever—until someone got it right. Our car had no radio, so the game helped pass the time and keep my sister and me from whining, How much farther, Daddy?

After running through a good share of the inventory of a grocery store, we arrived just before noon, and Gram greeted us at the back door with her welcoming smile and kiss. As we entered through the kitchen, we gloried in the seductive aromas of that Sunday’s roast and pie that filled the house and then chatted for a while with Grampa in the living room until Gram announced with a flourish, about an hour later, that it was time for dinner.

At home, the midday meal was lunch. And since lunch was every-man-for-himself and I was not particularly imaginative, it usually consisted of a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with a splash of mustard, a handful of chips and, on the good days, a dill pickle and a glass of cola. By contrast, in Gram’s house, the midday meal was dinner. And, by God, you better learn to use the right fork and speak the right words, or else. My grandmother had an extraordinarily low tolerance threshold for anyone who did not toe the Emily Post line to the letter.

Grampa Pierson’s limits of tolerance, on the other hand, seemed to be singularly confined to the length of my hair. As I entered the living room one of those Sunday mornings to give him a hug and maybe talk a little Yankee baseball, his eyes narrowed, and he reached his hand toward my head, his thick fingers tugging at my ears. For crying out loud. Did all the barbers in Sherrill die? he grumbled, as though more than one barber could make a living in our one-horse burg, those Grampa eyes telling me I would be well-advised never to darken his doorstep again without a fresh haircut.

It is impossible to explain how much I miss Grampa. Even now I think of him every day. Like Dr. Becker, when you were around him, there was simply no question who was in control. Not that he was pompous or full of himself. Never. His was a kind of control that just flowed naturally. You simply knew from the way he held himself and formed his words and moved his hands and, most of all, the look in his eyes, that he was making a difference in your life.

He used to tell