The Lonely Goatherd

     I finally saw The Sound of Music -- in sixth grade and ten years after its initial 1965 release. My mother took me on a hot August day to the Crest Theater, the last remaining movie palace in downtown Fresno. We sat in the empty art-deco auditorium with a few misguided Chicano drunks and witnessed Julie Andrews on the big screen singing her heart out to the Alps. It only took the opening credits and I was smitten: my Austro-Hungarian Empire phase had begun. I decided to take German in the seventh grade that September. I collected European model trains and had a layout complete with paper Mache Alps, A-frame pensiones and gilded cafes. I devoured books: The autobiography of Maria Von Trapp, the life story of the waltz king, Johann Strauss, Heidi and Mein Kampf.

     In Mr. Adair's geography class we were to give a presentation on a country of our choosing. I seized the dramatic opportunity and came to school in lederhosen and a felt Tyrolean hat. In character, I presented the glory of Austria -- once the center of the Great Hapsburg Empire -- when people built real palaces and really knew how to live it up. I spoke in a broken German accent that prompted the slovenly Annette Messina to shout from her back row seat,

“Why are you talking like that? Are you retarded?”

After digressing about German dialects, I elaborated on Austria, home of the most cosmopolitan of European cities, Vienna. Home of the Sacher Torte, the perfect cup of coffee, the Strausses and their music, and opulence for days. Die Fledermaus played on the phonograph for background ambience. Lori Silver, the sole Jew in our school, shot up her hand:

“Didn't the Austrians exterminate my people?”

I had anticipated this from overly whiny Lori and rebutted that Austrians were a peaceful people who were bullied by the Nazis. “Didn't you see The Sound of Music?” I asked her with exasperation. The Austrians were personified in the character of Baron Von Trapp, beautifully and wryly played by the handsome Christopher Plummer. The Austrians were a poor, once-great people forced into occupation or else their beautiful churches would be burned down and their musical festivals cancelled, I explained. They were victims; they would have rather stayed home with their flocks of sheep and compose music and enter
amateur singing contests. I ended the presentation with a class sing-a-long of "Edelweiss". Appallingly, no
one knew the lyrics. Mr. Adair interrupted my solo because of time constraints. Billy Drucker then got up and did his "country" report on Oklahoma. No costume, no music, no audio/visual. Because he was the hyperactive class clown and imitated his father's "Okie" accent, they all laughed and ate it up. While I faced a barrage of historical challenges and sneers over my choice, my costume, my gift bags, no one even flinched when Billy tried to pass off the nation of Oklahoma.

     My middle-European obsession led to a pen pal for three glorious months. Gerhardt Ladstatter was a tall, Aryan boy who looked older than his 13 years. I had found my Rolf. Best of all, he was from Vienna. I never went into detail about my Fresno home in the middle of farmlands and devoid of western civilization. I played up the California card and sent postcards of rocky cliffs, massive redwoods and Hearst Castle with the note, "I live near here". His correspondence at first was frequent and full of photos: Gerhardt fishing, Gerhardt riding his bike in what I imagined were the Vienna Woods, Gerhardt hunting in the Alps -- could that be a nun singing in the distance? One picture had Gerhardt with his arm casually draped over a friend's shoulder after what appeared to be a dirty and grueling futbal game. There was master-race victory on their faces mixed with something intimate I couldn't grasp. A real pal shot: Something nowadays Abercrombie and Fitch would blow up to the size of a wall. In his letters, Gerhardt was warm, affectionate and so European -- not like those cold American boys here who only liked you if you played that stupid American invention, baseball. I was determined to learn German fluently and take up some sport to impress Gerhardt. The 1976 winter Olympics from Innsbruck had just finished. My most recent Austrian hero was Franz Klammer, winner of the gold medal. I decided to follow in his footsteps and become a championship skier. I started by stealing my sister's sun lamp and stared at it while wearing sunglasses. Arriving to school on Monday with a face looking like a raccoon with radiation was the height of Fresno status. I spent two months looking at ski equipment to rent and would only choose it if were German or had some hard-to-pronounce guttural name attached to it.

     I wrote Gerhardt that I was training using my Kneisal skis and had bought my florescent yellow and orange plastic ski parka and could he take me to the Alps soon? The Sierra Nevadas in California were puny and the lodges hadn't the Tyrolean atmosphere I was looking for. I finally went to the Yosemite ski resort for my first time with my friend, Brian O'Connor. He was a good skier and abandoned me pretty quickly for the intermediate run. I took a beginner's class where I learned how to stop by bringing my knees together, letting the skis angle towards one another and braking into the snow. I didn't like it. It wasn't a Franz Klammer power slide and it looked slightly handicapped. I went to the lodge and sat for three hours drinking cocoa in front of the fire. There was a nice, old woman from Modesto sitting next to me who was chatty and dim. I told her I was a foreign exchange student from Salzburg. My name was Gerhardt. She had seen The Sound of Music so I had a lot to tell her. When Brian came in to get me -- interrupting and almost blowing my story of how I was a runner-up in that year's music festival with my accordian solo -- I excused myself and said I needed to return to my host family.

     Brian tutored me on the "bunny slope" and how to get on and off the t-bar until I thought I got it. It was fun for about 15 minutes. I was disappointed since the sun had gone away and now I couldn't even return to school looking like a burn victim. Finally I had to attempt the last run of the day; feeling pretty cocky and in homage to Franz, I crouched down to gain speed like I saw them do on the Olympics. I must have sped up to at least 10 miles per hour. As I approached a large Ponderosa Pine in my way, I tried to stop beginner-style but my skis crossed and I tumbled over, hearing and feeling a snap in my right leg. I broke two bones and was in a cast for what seemed most of my puberty.

     Gerhardt was empathetic to my slightly revised story and was amazed I could slalom on the pro's hill as a beginner. With nothing to do in my cast, I started writing him more. I told him how I didn't much like the American way. We didn't have electric trains -- we had Amtrak. We didn't have coffee houses -- we had tins of General Foods instant coffee and palm oil and called it Cafe Vienna. We didn't have downtowns to shop in with streetcars -- we had a mall with a parking lot and a JC Penney's as an anchor, for Chris sakes. Gerhardt wrote back with innocent questions like, How is McDonald's hamburger? Do you own a gun? He dreamed of all things American: eating Big Macs in the Grand Canyon and wearing cowboy boots. The poor, deluded lad, I mused. During my convalescence, I relayed my dreams of flying to him in Vienna and riding the old Ferris wheel with him, attending the Vienna opera with him, and eating strudel in the Schonbrunn palace with him. I wanted to take a picture with him in front of the Rathaus, his arm casually draped over my shoulder. As my letters became more Rococo of our future together, his became more spare and infrequent. I couldn't help but think my failure as a downhill skier turned the pen-pal into pen-pity. It seemed that Gerhardt, like his people, couldn't tolerate weakness. Perhaps owning a hunting rifle would've helped matters.

     His last correspondence was a postcard of the Danube. On the back he scribbled something about great fishing with his Dad. No best wishes, no fond words -- just a p.s. about his moving and the new address would be forthcoming. I read in-between the newly cool, Teutonic efficiency of his words: It's Over, Kaput -- Achtung. I looked at the picture of what looked like a castle overlooking the river. Why is the water brown? I thought. The Danube is supposed to be blue. And what's he fishing in it for? Doesn't he know? You're supposed to waltz on it.