Photo:
Grant Gunderson

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See also Contest 03: Squalor

The Thin Bred Line
By ANDY ENRIGHT

The wind breathes an aluminium tang as gluey snowfall filters through the shrouding canopy of pines. The locals who will speak to us in their broken English claim that this autumn is particularly hard, and although the landscape seems pretty similar to the Poconos back home, the trees in this plantation are ordered in neat, regimental rows, each one nine feet from its neighbor.

A firebreak runs parallel to our camp, the stumps starting to display a hard-edged frosting of snow. It looks a respectable slope, one that promises a challenging ski. The ground falls away in a series of terraced drops that need a good two feet of snow to cover the brush. I imagine my teenage brother leaping from terrace to terrace, his skis punching through the snowpack pitching him face first into the bushes, laughing hysterically. That familiar thought makes waiting through these interminable weeks of fall bearable. That and the ride out of here when we're finished, when we'll get drunk as hell on cheap sour mash in the back of the truck. I'd trade anything to be in the back of that truck right now.

We've been in the forest a week, awaiting a change in the weather, but the feeble snowfall borne on that emphysema breeze keeps going. It's just enough to turn your blood to glycol. It's dark down here on the pine matting, and difficult to make out shape and form, even on the brighter October mornings. Sleep is hard to come by, the trees forever dripping water, beating a depressing tattoo that dulls the senses. Mould consumes our maps and renders our canvas tents foul. A grim determination has infected the collective psyche that we are going to prevail. It is just a matter of waiting.

On the second Wednesday I go to the edge of the firebreak to collect sticks. The snow muffles all sound and now lays a foot deep, making negotiating the stunted balsams tricky. Nearly time. The waiting has anaesthetized us all, and when I see the boot protruding from the snow it takes me a moment to snap to my senses. Pennsylvania National Guard, high school class of 1943, Private Alan McKenzie. Must have been a victim of German artillery bombardment a few weeks earlier.

There is no smell, no sign of decomposition. We're trained to hug trees in the face of the recent German development of proximity fuses on their shells—shells that detonate as soon as they hit the forest canopy sending down a rain of molten metal and splintered wood. Caught out at the edge of the clear cut, McKenzie had been shredded. He probably never heard the sharp crack overhead. The Poconos suddenly seem a long way distant.

McKenzie. Alan, stationed here? We'd lost track of each other a few months earlier. I look into his clouded eyes, watching the filaments of blowing snow settling in the upturned palms of his teenaged hands, as smooth and white as marble. I sit with my brother for some time. Mom will be devastated when I tell her, but I can only watch as the autumn wind picks up a veil of spindrift falling like a wreath from the Huertgen pines. This time I allow it to settle on my brother, attention momentarily diverted from the omnipresent threat of artillery barrage or sniper fire.


Sixty years later I return to Germany and locate the spot in the Huertgen Forest. Much has changed. There is a housing development at the foot of the hill. The gentle slope I once imagined a ski run and walked back up twenty times a day is now a stern test for my withered legs. The leaden sky is still the same and so is that metallic taste on the wind, signaling the onset of winter.

I stand where Alan fell, looking at the prints my labored footsteps and stick made in the snow. I fancy I may find some trace of his existence, a badge maybe, decorated with the patina of every subsequent season. I find nothing but sadness and desolation and futility. Raising my collar against the wind, I start the long journey back toward our home, back across the grey-blue ocean to Scranton.

                                                                    Back to "Fall" beginning


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