The only major ascent on the trail today was the
climb up the west ridge of Blowout Mountain, but once at the top, it was a
relatively easy descent to Tacoma Pass and camp for the night.
Just before reaching Tacoma Pass, I came across
a hand-carved wooden sign propped up against a tree that said water, with an
arrow pointing in the direction to walk. I needed water, so I dropped my
pack at the spur trail, grabbed my water containers and walked the short
distance to the flowing stream, but I neglected to heed my own advice about
observing landmarks when leaving the trail.
With water bottles full, I turned around to head
back up the trail, and in a frightening moment of déjà vu, I realized that the
forest all looked the same, and I was not a hundred percent sure of the way
back, even though the faint trail lay before me. With real trepidation, I
moved up the trail, paying close attention to the placement of each foot, to
make sure I didn’t step off the spur trail and head in a different direction.
I wish I wasn’t so paranoid about getting lost in the woods, but it’s easy
to do and it truly does frighten me.
Within a short distance, I arrived at Tacoma
Pass and found a heavily used dirt road, labeled on the maps as Road 52.
A hundred feet from the road was a small sign that said trail magic
ahead, and upon reaching the road, I found trail angel Richard Lee who went by
the trail name of "Not Phil’s Dad," set up to dispense trail magic.
He had canopies and tarps erected to protect his camp from the rain,
which included camp stoves, camp chairs, and food tables; he was serving hot
dogs, hot chocolate, fruit, and other snacks.
I greeted Richard and he invited me to sit down
and enjoy the services he had to offer. He was the one who had carved the
wooden sign and placed it on the trail that pointed the way to water.
Lounging in camp chairs under the tarps was Biers and Ranch, who had arrived a
few hours earlier. Biers said he was still not feeling well, and might
stay another day in camp with Richard Lee.
While I waited for the hot dogs to cook, I
visited with Biers, who was from Berlin, and told him about my service as a
Mormon missionary in Bavaria, Germany, home to the Munich Oktoberfest from 1962
to 1965. I couldn’t help but ask him about the grammatical correctness of
the famous statement President Kennedy made on his visit to West Berlin in June
1963, when he spoke before a crowd of four hundred and fifty thousand and
declared to the populace, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” which translated literally
means, "I am a jelly-filled donut."
In Berlin, the citizens don’t refer to
themselves as Berliners, as that term is reserved for a confectionary called
Berliner - a jelly-filled donut. I asked Biers if Kennedy was correct in
using the term the way he did, or if it would have been more correct to say,
“Ich bin Berliner,” – interpreted to mean, “I am a citizen of Berlin.”
Biers said that even though the crowd had a good chuckle about the
expression, they understood the intent and were very appreciative of the
support the American people were displaying to the beleaguered citizens of West
Berlin, who, at the time, were surrounded by the Soviet-backed East German
government, a government who just months before had erected the Berlin Wall.
In the thirty months I lived in Bavaria as a
missionary, I served in three different cities – Munich, Schweinfurt - which
interpreted means Pigs Crossing, and Coburg, on the East German border.
Schweinfurt was the location for several ball-bearing factories, which
were vital to the Nazi war effort; subsequently, the city was repeatedly bombed
during the war, and even eighteen years after the conflict, when I was there,
there was still massive war damage to be seen around the city.
Coburg was renowned for its world-famous Hummel
figurines which were produced in factories in the city, and although the city
was the first to fly the Nazi flag on an official building in 1931, the city
had no heavy industry or strategic value for the war effort, and thus escaped
relatively unscathed from aerial bombardment or fierce tank battles.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the
allies divided Germany into four sections – the British in the north, the
Americans in the south, and the Russians in the east. Eventually, France
acquired a section in the far west from territory ceded by the British and the
Americans.
East Germany, under Russian control, was named
the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, while the British, French, and American
sectors unified and became known as the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG.
Up until 1952, the border between the two opposing ideological
governments was quite porous, but in that year, it all changed. The GDR,
under the pretext of keeping out spies and foreign undesirables, began to
fortify their border from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Czechoslovakian
border in the southeast.
The border was defined by minefields,
watchtowers, automatic booby traps, anti-vehicle ditches, alarms, high-metal
fences and walls and barbed wire, plus fifty thousand troops. In reality,
the East German government was trying to stem the heavy exodus of East German
intelligentsia to the west.
Living in Coburg in 1964, and so close to the border, I and several other American missionaries decided to ride our bicycles to the border, to see what it actually looked like. We saw the usual border signs that said,
“Halt, Grenze, nicht weiter gehen.” (Stop,
border, do not proceed farther.)
Streets that formally had continued north were
blocked by concrete barriers or earthen berms; the railroad lines had been cut;
three barbed wire fences stretched forever, in both directions; a no-man’s
land, studded with mines, lay between the second and third fences, and guard
towers had been erected every six hundred feet. In the distance beyond the
guard towers, we could see farmers working in their fields. Undoubtedly,
those people had many friends, family, and relatives living in Coburg who they
hadn’t seen in years. It was quite impressive, and for a
nineteen-year-old kid still wet behind the ears and just a year out of high school,
it was an unprecedented eye-opener to the realities of world politics.
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