Willi was the barber for the command group at HQ USEUCOM (Headquarters, United States European Command) near Stuttgart, Germany. The shop in the basement of the J-2 building was his normal place of business but when summoned by the boss, Willi would make a housecall to the little barbershop in the basement of the command building. I can't count the number of haircuts I received from Willi, nor can I recall all the conversations that we had. But one conversation sticks in my mind because it clearly illustrates one of the problems between Americans and Europeans. I will explain.
Willi had a brother who lived in the Dallas area and for many years he begged Willi to come and visit him. Willi finally gave in and prepared to make the big trip. We talked about it at some length; he wanted to know about weather, clothes, and all manner of things he thought would be important. His English skills were great so that wouldn't be a problem and he would have family there to help him along...but I think he was still a little concerned about it. Crime was large in his mind, too.
Willi was what I would call a typical German; he was very young when the war was going on and although he had to endure some of the hardships of post-war life, he wasn't all that affected by it. He grew up on cheesy western movies: first the "B"s that Hollywood produced in the forties and fifties, and then later on the even cheesier westerns produced in Germany. Germans all love the cowboy culture. They love bigger-than-life heroes; foremost was Stewart Granger as "Old Surehand" (that's what happened to his career). But movies were one thing; the reality of the real west came as a bit of a shock to Willi. You see, Germany is about the size of a middle-sized state like Oregon or Kansas. You can drive from one end to the other in a day and have change left over. Plus, it is a very heavily populated chunk of Europe and you can't drive five minutes without seeing at least one little village or town. On one hill near Kaiserslautern where the autobahn comes out of the treeline for a little bit, you can see at least a dozen little towns all around.
After Willi spent a few days in Dallas, the suggestion was made that they should go out to Los Angeles and visit a cousin who lived there. They decided to drive...Willi thought a road trip would be great fun. I will never forget the expressions on his face as he recounted his journey across West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the desert country of California. He began his travelogue by exclaiming that he didn't want to ever hear anyone tell him about the dangers of over-populating the globe again! He claimed that they had traveled for hours without seeing another car...not even a town. He was overwhelmed by the vastness and emptiness of it all. Willi talked about that trip for years. He just couldn't get over the wide open spaces.
The last two weeks I have thought about Willi several times as MC and I motored across the great southwest desert. So many times we would top a gentle hill to look ahead at twin ribbons of asphalt stretching out to the horizon...or at least to the next rise. Many miles later we would come to the top of that rise and see ahead of us the same thing we had seen, parallel lines to the horizon. It seemed we would never get where we were headed. To add insult to injury (or more accurately, to add hours to the trip), I stayed pretty close to the speed limit all the way. Most of the time we could sail along at 75 mph, but in the old days we would have bumped that pretty hard. In 1973 we drove out to San Diego from Phoenix in the old Yellow GTO and kept it at about 85 the whole way...ran the air most of the way...averaged 21 miles-per-gallon, too. I don't know how I did it back then or why I have so much more respect for the law now.
Another gentle reminder from the fates was that XM 60s channel found the old Who song, "I Can See for Miles" and played it a half-dozen times or more on our trip. We could, too...see for miles, that is.
Driving at night doesn't make it any better; you can't see all the empty that is out there, but you still have to drive and drive and drive...even when your eyes want to close and close and close. After a bit the fog markers start to look like that old video game where you had to keep between the parallel lines of lights and soon they start to have curves; then they would become more and more curvy and it was harder and harder to stay inside the lines. After seven or eight hours in the saddle, the night moves can become pretty interesting. The stretch of road from Tucson to Sierra Vista still has the same old hallucinations it had back in the day (recently chronicled in another article).
It seems empty; it is a desert after all. But it is really teeming with all kinds of life. Just on the drive from Sierra Vista to Tucson we listed several different types of cacti: saguaro, barrel, cholla, nopales, ocotillo, teddy bears (a type of fuzzy looking cholla that seems to be so cuddly...but isn't). There were Palo Verde trees, Century plants, Joshua trees, mesquite bushes, and lots of other stuff we don't know the name of. If you walk out in it you will discover snakes, lizards, mice, rats, birds of all ilks, bobcats, coyotes, pigs, Gila Monsters, scorpions, spiders, centipedes and other nightmarish critters that go bump in the night. If you sleep out there you will discover how many of those critters love to share your warmth.
I've heard it said, "Very big - China." And so it is. But if you are in West Texas in the middle of the night, what's the difference? Once not too long ago, our daughter called us from the road. She was driving home to Texas. She said to MC, "Mom, I see a tree!...oh no, it's only a bush..." Very funny, LH.
Several times during our travels across the western states, MC and I have marveled at the pioneers and the hardships of their trips, often over the same routes we were on. A wagon train could make ten to twenty miles on a really good day, some days not near so much. Can you imagine the frustration of looking forward to the other side of a river or gulley less than a mile away and know that when the sun goes down, that is about as far as you will get today. Or looking back at the end of the day and seeing your last campsite a few miles behind. Some of the distances we covered in one day would have taken the wagon trains months to travel. And at the end of a rough day of travel, instead of falling into a freshly made Comfort Inn bed, they would have to chop wood, start a fire, cook dinner, and clean up. Yep, we can see for miles...and fortunately we can cover those miles pretty durn quickly nowdays. Yep.