Ruth & Dave Crocker, in Wildflecken, Germany 1968
When our plane touched down at Rhine-Main Air Base near the city of Frankfurt, Germany, the first thing I noticed outside my window seat was a multitude of vertical cranes, moving in every direction, lifting and swinging massive steel beams and lumber. It was November, 1966 and Germany was still rebuilding its heavily bombed cities after WWII. My husband, Army 2nd Lieutenant David R. Crocker, Jr., and I were headed for his first duty station in the mountain village of Wildflecken, “the little wild place.” The next four hours of travel by car would take us through thick pine forests over roads packed with snow to a remote training area within three miles of the 5K zone – the border of what was then East Germany. The cranes had not arrived in Wildflecken, yet. It had been a German Army Post in WWII and a stopping place for trains transporting displaced people from Poland during the war.
This long-ago adventure in Germany came to mind as I did a mental inventory of the uncertain times in my life and how I lived them relative to how I am experiencing the uncertainties of the pandemic today. Back then in 1966, at age nineteen, and newly married, the longest I had ever been away from my family of origin was a week at Camp Aldersgate for Methodist youth in nearby Rhode Island when I was fourteen.
When I departed for Germany, I didn’t realize, or perhaps I couldn’t comprehend, that the extent of my communication with my family would be limited to snail mail and a yearly phone call – unless there was a dire emergency. As with this pandemic, the reality of isolation and distance from loved ones was revealed to me over time.
Back in that 1966 November, the excitement of arriving in a foreign country obliterated any nostalgia about missing Thanksgiving – and soon Christmas – with my family back in Old Mystic, CT. And, because of uncertainty about what direction the war in Vietnam would take, and when my husband would receive his orders to go, our future seemed like a road with unreadable signposts.
When we finally arrived in Wildflecken in the evening of our first day, I didn’t know that there was not yet a place for us to live because the military post was bursting at the seams with soldiers training in mountain snow for the jungle in SE Asia. We lived temporarily in a room in the ancient BOQ (Bachelor Officer’s Quarters), a building that had housed Nazi officers during WWII, while we waited for our household goods and car to arrive sometime in the next two months. Within a week, I became an official bachelor at the BOQ when my husband was sent off to an even more remote training area for two weeks. But there was no pleasure associated with the role – just the incentive to get out and see what was outside the walls of the gloomy building.
Like many people who have started walking during our uncertain time today, I wandered the snowy roads of Wildflecken in cold, diesel fuel scented air without understanding where, and if, I should go to find other people. And, finally, after five years of studying the lyrical sounds of French and Spanish in school, I was immersed in a language with gruff sharp consonants and interesting – but long – convoluted words whose translation needed at least a sentence. My Weltanschauung, the world from my viewpoint, had been transformed.
Author, Arundhati Roy, writes that the pandemic we are experiencing today is a portal and historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. “This one is no different,” she suggests. “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice, our data banks and dead ideas… Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world.”
My German winter would become two winters before we returned to the U.S. in 1968. The original uncertainties would dissolve into new and even more challenging uncertainties until I accepted, with certainty, that this is life – one portal after another.
Ruth,
This reminds me of our two year stay in Aschaffenburg and one year in Darmstadt, 1962 – 1965. When I arrived there I was eight months pregnant and our son was born six weeks after I arrived at the Army Hospital in Frankfort . My husband Eddie Starr was in the field (as it was called) for training where you first lived.
When I first arrived I had to find my way on the train from Aschaffenburg to Frankfort to meet with a gyn Dr. I had no idea where I was going, but managed to find my way there and back.
This was quite an experience to be alone when our child was born and then for Eddie only to come home for three days to take us home from the hospital and spend some time with us before he returned to the field for three more weeks.
Fortunately, Ed’s commanding officer’s wife, Marcia, spent six weeks with me during all of this. Three weeks before Glenn was born and three weeks afterwards.
We didn’t have a phone to call our families back in the states. They received the news via telegram.
Talk about being alone, but you know what, we just did what we had to do an moved on. We developed our military family and I am still in contact with some of these people after all of this time.
Your article has brought back wonderful memories.
Thank you,
Jane Starr Cronin
Ruth, it’s wonderful to read what you’re thinking about. I see strong parallels between your situation at Wildflecken in ’66 and our situation in the pandemic. Bless Arundhati Roy for her challenge to approach the portal carrying little–and to recognize the opportunity for envisioning life in a new way.
Your post is timely, Ruth, coming when it seems that the social fabric around me has been cotinuing to unravel. I’ve been carrying deep angst about this. Perhaps Roy’s invitation–and yours–is fir ne to let go of the angst and encourage a new vision to clarify itself in my mind, in my heart. I would like that very much.
I send love to you across the miles and the years!
Jennifer
Thank you, Jennifer. Blessings to you. I appreciate your response. Carry on!