Oh My Brother

By Tom Allen

About the Book
Oh My Brother is a series of true stories that have now become chapters in what is a fragment of Tom Allen’s memoirs. This is the story of twenty months of Tom’s life when he was nineteen years old in September of 1971 through April of 1973.

About the Author
Tom Allen is a storyteller. He began exchanging stories with a friend from Bundanoon, New South Wales, Australia. His friend encouraged Tom to collect these particular stories, put them in chronological order, and expand the storyline. Oh My Brother is the culmination of Tom’s storytelling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoseDog Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889259275

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Title.eps

The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Tom Allen

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Introduction

This is a true story, or more accurately a series of stories that have now become chapters in what is a fragment of my memoirs, but indeed a significant fragment combined with a few other short stories to introduce the plot. It is the story of twenty months of my life when I was nineteen years old in September of 1971 through April of 1973, but most importantly the extraordinary three months of ‘73.

I’m a storyteller not a writer. I have well over a hundred stories. They are not ancient memories, the facts were written down decades ago and many of them shortly after the events took place, however not always in story form. Over time, the number of my listeners faded, and I had to learn to write in order to reach out to the readers. The reason this story comes out now is because I never knew what to do with them.

I began exchanging stories with Graham Anderson, a friend of mine from Bundanoon, New South Wales, Australia. I gave him stories in no particular order. He told me to collect these particular stories, put them in chronological order, and expand the story line so that I have a short novel. I read a suggestion from a book on writing years ago that sometimes if one writes in third person they can express their feelings to a higher degree, and that is what I have done here.

I expressed my reluctance to share everything to my friend for fear of reprisals from the law and the government, fear of defamation litigation because I named names of real people and because although I accepted the many bad decisions that I made and their consequences, I was not very proud that I had made those decisions whether on my own volition or as the result of the manipulation by others. I was told that I must include all my foibles and misgivings, that only in doing so would make the story authentic, that Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye did so, and it made that story one of the greatest of all time.

I have no such aspirations with this story of course, simply a yearn to share it with anyone. I have but one regret, not knowing the exact location of the Chinese village where the curse originated. Not knowing this does not in any way detract from the rest of the story. When Gail and Eric mentioned where this took place, they were very specific about the name of the place, but I did not pay enough attention at the time and did not know the Baja from Brazil then. I have always wanted somebody to hypnotize me and take me back to that moment, I just wish I knew where that was.

April

A cold and bitter wind bit into his frail and withered frame as he emerged from the pedestrian tunnel beneath the railroad tracks. It was April and his first sojourn back in his hometown, trying to find some direction, perhaps to pick up some lost pieces of his life of twenty-one years, searching out old friends if there were any, looking to make a fresh start to the rest of his life. His fair weather borrowed clothes, now his only worldly possessions, were no match for the prevailing thirty-mile-an-hour gusts that swept the streets clean and the skies clear. It was 1973.

Tom passed the street corner where years before as a lad he had watched young people standing and soliciting a ride with their thumbs as they passed through the town. That had been in the late 1960s, and some would react with another appendage if they were not given a ride as if they were entitled.

But on this day, our young man knew only four things: the clothes he was given in the subtropics were inadequate for that time of year; that he was free, and he knew what freedom really was; he had lost his and was not sure if he was ever going to get it back; that he was safe; back with his family in his hometown where no one was going to harm him; and he knew it was sometime in April… and that’s all he knew.

Seeds of Yearning

He was born in Red Oak, Iowa late on the evening of December 20th, 1951, on the eve of the winter solstice when the entire northern hemisphere would be cloaked in the longest night of the year and the night of the hospital Christmas party. The attending physician in the maternity ward had a bit too much punch that evening so the head nurse was asked to make the delivery, then she promptly returned to the party, all this being revealed when some ten years later while on vacation visiting extended family. Being asked to come down from the tree he was climbing, Tom declined help from his aunts, catching his foot in a notch he fell directly onto his nose which he clutched with his left hand. He was taken to the same hospital he was born in and was greeted in the x-ray room by the same non-delivering physician who asked him to remove his hand from his nose in order to take a picture. His nose, as it was, was perfectly intact. It was his left wrist that was broken, a green twig break, it was announced, and he endured those moments as the doctor and his mother regaled over the old story. In life there are immaculate births and ignoble ones and his was not the former.

As he learned to walk, his curiosity began to pique, and he was always wandering off. To counter this, his mother employed a harness and leash which he detested and fought constantly to have it removed. When he was three his father decided to follow his older brother to Rawlins, Wyoming and raise the family there. At midnight on the eve of their departure from the Midwest, on his first escalator ride, Tom entered the below ground caverns of the Union Pacific Railroad station in Omaha, wondering how all the many trains were going to get out of the house. He would never know, for he emerged from his slumber somewhere west of Laramie the following morning heading to the high Red Desert and the glorious Rocky Mountains smack dab on the continental divide of North America.

The family eventually settled into an old house on the south side of the tracks on the edge of town. By edge it was meant if you walked across the street, you were in the country. He would have two paper routes for six years beginning at nine years old. One of his customers was an old man who lived in a makeshift hut in an impoverished area next to the railroad tracks. On his monthly sojourn to collect the money owed him roughly half of his clients would have Tom return the following day, but the old man always had his money waiting for him and he was always happy to see him come by. A monthly subscription cost about two dollars and if he were lucky and they had a few extra pennies, he would be rewarded. A few pennies at least could get you some penny candy. A nickel was more a common tip, but the old man always had a dime for his route carrier, a mighty sum in those days. It was quite obvious that this old man was extremely poor, so the dime tip always seemed more than generous. In fact, even if he wanted to give him more it was most likely all the money he had to his name.

I’d like to give you more, he said one time, but that’s all I have.

The old man had been sickly for some time and one day Tom found the house dark and empty. It was not long after that that the shack he had been living in was completely demolished. Tom assumed that his friend had died, but he never forgot the old man’s smile and generosity.

He played organized baseball for nine years, but for the majority of his non-school life, season permitting, he was exploring the arid alkali and sagebrush flats south of town. This was the very eastern edge of the Red Desert which stretched a hundred miles to the west. The hills to the north and west formed the eastern wall of the Great Divide Basin along the continental divide. Twenty miles to the south, the desert met the foothills of the Snowy Range Mountains. This would be his playground. The incessant wind evaporated what little moisture was present in the air and on the earth. He would grow up in a climate that was so dry it wasn’t too hot at 90 degrees and not too cold when it was below freezing, and he thought this was normal. He would come to know the North American pronghorn antelope as a most glorious beast, and gophers and horned toads as prizes to catch.

Sometimes the soil was so dry that his footsteps would kick up the alkali dust and it would waft into his nostrils and onto his palate and he learned to smell and taste the earth, and when he was in the mountains, the tastes and odors were different because there was moister, and he learned that from the differing fauna and flora that water was life. It compelled him to search further and further out each trip with his friends and many times he went too far out for the provisions he carried and he would run short of nutrition and water in a roadless wilderness and the only thing that he could survive on were the illusions of his mother cooking Thanksgiving dinner with roast turkey and all the trimmings, for there was no opportunity for a lift from a stranger and on occasions he would come stumbling home. From those beginnings, later in life as he walked around the planet, he not only considered the people he met, their culture, and the local scenery, but the smell and taste of the earth would also be his measure.

As Tom grew older and began to sing in choirs, he learned a song from the turn of the last century called Sand in My Shoes and it helped create a wonder lust that would take him far beyond the farmlands, feedlots, and prairies of the Midwest, and the deserts and mountains of the West. Paul McCartney’s I’ll Follow the Sun stirred his yearnings even more so and he was determined to see the whole world.

The Epiphany

On a cold, bleak wintry day in February 1969, Tom found himself looking south towards the railroad tracks from the second floor of his high school. What patches of snow that had not melted were grey and sooty, much like the color of the sky. It was the second to last class of the day. He was getting a drink of water from the fountain before entering English literature class.

He had to work hard and study diligently to maintain his B to B+ average. He would need an A on occasion to counter his math grades, a subject he loathed, to now and then make the honor roll and make his parents happy. His mother recognized years before that he was capable of learning most anything, but he could not do it at the pace of the top tier A students and thus had to apply himself constantly. He excelled at the fine arts, philosophy, history but could not fathom how mathematics (and he took every math class that was offered) could benefit his life in any significant way.

He was fortunate in his K through twelve education in that Wyoming was considered yearly one of the top two states for primary education in the country based primarily on the low teacher to student ratio. Of all the schools in the state, the Rawlins school district was deemed the highest achieving academically. This was due in part to the fact that any teacher coming into the Wyoming system of schools for the first time had to teach in the Rawlins District first before moving on to other schools in the state. The result was that this system brought fresh new ideas to the classroom. Most new teachers moved on to other parts of the state because Rawlins was not a desirable place to live for most. Sitting on the edge of the Red Desert atop the continental divide was not exactly Edenic. Tom, on the other hand, looked at having grown up in such a place as a blessed fortune. It was safe, rural and the great outdoors began at his doorstep. It was not lost on him even at an early age the desert environment afforded him the finest sunrises and sunsets one could ever expect anywhere.

He was imbued by his family with moral values of respect for others; a total lack of racism; respect for the law and those in authority; and devotion to the church. His family was raised as Presbyterians. The children were forced to go to Sunday School every week. His parents never went to church, although their work precluded such activity much of the time. But that irony was never lost on him and his siblings. He would rather take a beating to get out of going to Sunday School, especially in his latter teen years. He had great misgivings about what he was being taught there.

And so, it was on that dreary day in February, looking out at the patches of blown dirty snowdrifts due to the prevailing thirty mile an hour winds of southern Wyoming he found himself hurrying for a sip of water before entering the classroom. He didn’t want to be late because he needed the teacher’s instructions for an important reading assignment. It was at that precise moment, one that he would never forget in his lifetime, that he began to reflect on his life.

He had been told by his parents, family and friends, authorities, the church, the news media, and books that one grows up, gets an education and then a job. That he will raise a family and buy a house and, if he was fortunate, live to an old age and then die. If he was good, he would go to heaven and see Jesus. If he was not, he would burn in hell eternally with Satan. He was told that the world turns at such a pace and in such a direction, but he had been observing life unwittingly from the beginning and knew without a doubt that life did not rotate at that speed and in that manner. There was a major disconnect between what he was being told and what he was witnessing. He was never anti-Christian nor anti any religion and always accepted anyone’s belief in their religion regardless of which one someone adhered to. But from that very moment on he would question everything, from that moment he set out to find answers, and from that moment he never looked back.

It seemed ironic that Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse was required reading that year. Later that summer he would be turned onto Siddhartha by the same author. From there, he would go on to read anything not recommended by church, state, school, or family. Siddhartha stimulated him to explore theology, theosophy, eastern religions, yoga, and subsequently psychology and mysticism. He found Madame Blavatsky, the Bardo Thodol, known in the west as Tibetan Book of the Dead and J. Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom to name merely a fraction. He also realized he had to get out of town and discover a whole other world out there. He did not find the answers to life he was seeking through his schooling, his home life, and certainly not Christianity.

Lost Escape

Tom had taken every college and college-prep class offered in his high school curriculum and had known for some time that the prospects of him continuing his education at the next level were slim to none. His family had sent his older sister to the University of Wyoming, and they were decimated financially as a result. When the truth hit home and he knew for certain that he would be unable to attend the next semester he was devastated and terribly embarrassed, all his friends would be going on to college and he would not. After high school he began looking for jobs and worked construction as a laborer and drilled core samples on a rig in the desert. His only goal now was to get out of town.

He figured that the only way he was going to get anywhere was by hitchhiking, but he was put off by the people standing and waiting for rides and some being upset if they were not offered one. He decided from the very beginning to walk with his back to the traffic, no matter how far that might be, sticking his thumb in the air when he heard a car coming but never turning to face it. If it was his fate to be picked up, so be it. Over the many trips he would thus walk many a mile. Passing through Missouri once he had a very dangerous encounter, but that was the risk he would take.

He left on many excursions, but they were short in duration, and he always ended up back at home. Then one day he learned that a good friend of his was moving to Moline, Illinois and he decided to follow him there. He landed a job as a shipping clerk for an electro-coating plant on the Mississippi River, but a factory job was not his cup of tea and he found himself back in Rawlins, Wyoming after only four months in December of 1970.

Being back where he started, he began looking for a way out again. It was now in the dead of winter. Greg Nelson, another close friend, had bought an old Corvair van, one with the motor in the rear. It was in a mechanic’s garage and needed a lot of work, in fact it was not road worthy at all then. It no longer had any seats in it. They went to the landfill, found a suitable bench seat, and wired it into place. Greg and Tom, along with Greg’s cousin Len and a fellow from Casa Grande, Arizona had conspired to drive the van to Arizona to pick oranges. Tom knew the mechanic working on the van and begged him to speed his work along. The mechanic assured him he was going as quickly as he could, but he was constantly waiting for spare parts to arrive. One day he approached the mechanic and asked him if the van was drivable.

He shrugged and said, Possibly, but it needs a lot more work yet.

Days went by, then weeks, but the van was still being worked on. No longer able to contain his insatiable lust for getting on the road, Tom began to rally Greg to retrieve the van and leave town immediately. Initially, Greg scoffed at the idea, but the constant pressure would convince him otherwise. When they told the mechanic they were taking the van as-is, he mumbled something to the effect that you will be sorry. They dismissed his concerns and drove off.

By now, winter was beginning to lose its grip on the weather and the days were somewhat milder. Greg and Tom collected their belongings and were to meet Len and the Arizona fellow in the parking lot of the local supermarket, but something was going whacky with the transmission. They did not know what the actual problem was, they were unable to put the van in neutral. Since they could not stop, they opened the side door and the two would be passengers tossed their