Jeff stuck his head in the kitchen door and called, “Eunice! Look who I brought home.” A few seconds later there was a serious hug going on in the kitchen. Both Jeff and Eunice had missed their friend for nearly two and a half years, and it was good to see him again.

Eunice was just about as thrilled as Jeff had been to have Eric show up out of nowhere. They’d known he was heading back to the states sooner or later, but there had been no guarantee that he would even be coming through the area. Both of them knew he really had no other place to go, except maybe to his brother’s in Swartz Creek, and they both remembered that Eric and his brother didn’t get along very well, and that was being nice about it. The chances seemed about even that he’d be coming by Wychbold or not showing up at all.

Although Eunice already had dinner well under way, it didn’t take her long to fill things out so there would be enough for the three of them. They didn’t make it to the living room; Jeff mixed drinks for the three of them and they stood around the kitchen enjoying them while they got caught up on what had been happening with Eric. “Well, hey, it’s good to have you home,” Jeff smiled. I take it you got some serious climbing in.”

“Oh, hell yes. Chip and I had a great time. We were all over the Swiss and French Alps. It was a lot different from climbing in Bavaria and Austria like we’d done while we were still at Bad Würslingen, There are a lot of stories to tell.”

“Good, We’ll want to hear some of them.”

“Fine with me. So what’s been happening with you two?”

“We’ve been at this house for over a year now, so we’re starting to get settled in,” Jeff told him. “I don’t recall if I wrote and told you that Eunice is pregnant.”

“Hey, that’s great! I mean, you wanted kids, didn’t you? I remember hearing you talking as if you did.”

“Couldn’t be happier,” Eunice replied. “We wanted to wait until we’d been in the house for a while, just so we’d be used to it. I’m due in March, so we’ve still got a ways to go.”

“So what do you hear about Donna?” Eric asked. “I haven’t heard from her directly since I left. The only things I know I got through you.”

“That’s not a happy subject,” Jeff sighed. “The guy she married proved to be a real jerk, and the last time they were here he made a real ass of himself. As much as Eunice and I like Donna, we don’t see any need to go up and visit her, and we’re not inviting them to visit us.”

“Damn,” Eric shook his head. “I was hoping Donna could find someone better than that. She’s a good woman and I hated to have to treat her the way I did. I thought it was for the best, though.”

“It didn’t work out that way,” Jeff sighed. “I guess she figured the pickings were slim and she had to take what she could get. Now she’s having to live with it, and the last time we saw her I got the impression she wasn’t real happy about it either.”

“Actually, I think that’s an understatement,” Eunice added. “We don’t know what’s happening but I can’t help but be worried about her. But there’s not much we can do besides worry.”

“You said your trip home was slow,” Jeff said, rather pointedly changing the subject. “But we never got into the details since I wanted to be sure Eunice could hear them, too. So what was that all about?”

“I’d hoped they’d fly Chip and me back, but no such luck,” Eric shrugged. “I had to come back on a troop ship, the General Maurice Rose. But that wasn’t all bad. Fortunately I had a few books with me. I just rode along minding my own business. It wasn’t anything like the bullshit on the way over. The North Atlantic can be bad this time of year and it was a very rough crossing. A lot of people were seasick most of the trip, but luckily not me. Since I was a civilian I got to travel with the families, not the unaccompanied troops, so I didn’t have to put up with all the Army bullshit, like details and KP.”

“What was that all about?” Eunice asked.

“Back then I was assigned to a hold in the ship that supplied KPs, and we’d be stuck with the same job for the entire trip,” Eric related. “I went into the mess area at the assigned time on the first morning and just took a seat near the back on the left side. The mess people started at the front on the right side assigning jobs, reached the back on that side then restarted at the front on my side. They ran out of assignments about seven people before me, so I had a much easier crossing than most of the people I was berthed with. It was the same tub I came back on, and both times I was damn glad to get off of it.”

All of Eric’s stories didn’t come out at the first telling, but there were plenty to keep Jeff and Eunice enthralled that night and for several more nights after that.

Eric didn’t talk much about his basic training at Ft. Knox, or his advanced infantry training at Ft. Benning. “They worked the hell out of me, but the courses are geared to the dumbest troops they have, so it was really pretty boring since some of the guys there are pretty damn dumb. It was the same damn thing over and over in the most infantile possible way. There was lots of physical training, lots of grunt work, and I figured that when I got to a field unit it would be more of the same. I really wasn’t looking forward to it and knew I was just going to have to pass the time.”

Things began to look up for Eric when he got assigned to Europe; at least he would be able to see someplace new and get to see a little of the world, however limited it might be. His orders were just to a replacement unit, not to any specific station. Through a series of events he didn’t totally understand his college degree and his skill with a typewriter got him assigned to be a mail clerk at Bad Würslingen. He was happy to not have to be carrying a rifle and doing all the infantry training; working as a mail clerk seemed like a soft life by comparison.

He was still getting used to his job and to the post when he happened to see a copy of Summit, an American mountaineering magazine as it went past him, addressed to someone there at Bad Würslingen. “I’ll admit I wasn’t on the ball enough to think about it right then,” he admitted, “but after it was too late I thought about it a lot.”

Bad Würslingen was located in the extreme southern part of Germany, not far from the Alps, which could be seen from the post. Even from a distance, he thought it would be great to get out and climb some of those mountains, but now that it was getting into winter he knew it wasn’t a great idea to just head out there alone. But, asking around the post, he found no one who knew anything much about the climbing possibilities there; it seemed like most of the guys on the post were mostly interested in women and beer, more the latter than the former. But at least Eric knew of the possibility of doing some climbing was there, and the next time a copy of Summit showed up in the mail, he was quick to copy down the addressee. That evening he was able to track down Chip Jeffords.

“Finding Chip changed everything for me,” Eric related. “That turned what could have been a real dull time into an adventure.”

Chip was, as his subscription indicated, a serious climber. He was from southern California, and had spent quite a bit of time at Tahquitz Rock. Tahquitz was the center of rock climbing in the area, a training ground for a lot of serious climbers, especially the hardcores who hung around Yosemite Valley. Chip had been a good climber there, if not one of the absolute top ones, and had done some serious routes on the huge rock, both leading and belaying. Chip perked right up to discover that Eric had spent most of a summer doing various routes in the Shawangunks; he’d only heard stories about the place, like Eric had only heard stories about Tahquitz. Over a couple beers at the enlisted man’s club that evening, the two agreed that while neither of them had much alpine experience, there was no time like the present and no place like right here to get it, and now that they were climbing buddies, they could do it.

The weather was fairly nice for November the following weekend, so Chip and Eric were off to the mountains in Chip’s ancient Citroën 2CV, a real GI car that had passed through a dozen owners or more. “I swear,” Eric reported. “It was one of the ugliest cars ever made, and that’s saying something. It was also one of the most gutless. The only way you could get it over about forty miles an hour was going down a mountain with the clutch out, and usually the roads were too crooked to want to try that very often. But the thing was damn near bulletproof, and it never let us down. We just had to be patient with it is all.”

It was getting pretty late in the year, they didn’t have much time, and good rock climbers though they were, they had little actual alpine style experience and had nothing but Army winter gear for climbing clothes. That meant they didn’t try anything very difficult the first day out, just an easy-looking and well-marked trail to the top of a relatively small mountain. Chip had gone up it solo in the past, never having found a climbing buddy at the post before.

It went very well, even though it wasn’t much of a test of their climbing skills, and they decided to keep climbing for the rest of the winter whenever the weather wasn’t too bad. “That first winter we were out, oh, three or four days a month,” Eric reported. “We just about always were looking for harder climbs, things that would increase our alpine skills.”

“I thought you were a pretty good climber from that summer you spent in that place in New York,” Eunice commented at one point.

“I was and I am,” he replied. “At that point, Chip was probably a little ahead of me in rock climbing skills, and our approaches to it were a little different. It seems they do things a little different at Tahquitz than they do in the ’Gunks. But rock climbing and alpine climbing are two very different things. Each of them demands their own sets of skills and sometimes they don’t match up very well. Plus, neither of us had the gear we had at home, at least at the time. Later on we got to be friends with a group of local climbers, and we learned a lot from them. Climbing on snow and ice and loose rock is a lot different than solid vertical rock. In the beginning they’d run rings around us in alpine conditions, but when we hit a vertical wall that involved some technical climbing, we’d beat them silly. They’d go a long way out of their way to go around one of those, while Chip and I went straight up and usually beat them to the top. We all learned from it.”

When spring came Chip and Eric got out even more, sometimes with their German friends and sometimes without. There are a lot of mountains in that part of the world, and by no means did they climb all of them – it could take a lifetime to do that – but their local friends could point out some of the more challenging and more rewarding ones. Twice they took leaves of several days so they could drive the Citroën to farther-away places to go climbing. By the end of the summer Eric and Chip felt they were pretty close in skills to their German friends, and in some respects ahead of them.

They’d also taken advantage of the local economy to stock up on better gear than they had – better clothing, good rope, ice axes and crampons, things of that nature. While in general the European gear was better quality than was available in the states at that time, the American technical climbing gear, especially things like the pitons and carabiners needed for extreme rock climbing was far superior. “Chip managed to get a buddy to mail us some hardware from California,” Eric explained. “But we mostly had to use the European stuff, so we didn’t push the rock climbing as hard as we would have liked to.”

Eric went on to explain that they hardly ever did an extended climb. “We always planned to be up and back the same day,” he explained. “We weren’t really equipped to bivouac on a climb, although we got caught out a couple times and just had to sit it out until it was light enough to see. Usually we set up a camp near the Citroën and used our Army-issue shelter halves and sleeping bags. Sometimes we’d find places where other climbers were camping, and we usually had a pretty good time with them. Neither of us spoke anything much but English, but there were usually enough English speakers around that we didn’t have much of a problem.”

It was during those informal campfire sessions that the two guys first started to look a little beyond what would happen after their tour of duty in the Army ended. Chip was a three-year enlistee, but would be getting out within days of when Eric was scheduled to be released; both would be getting out in the spring of 1961. “The people we were meeting kept telling us about some of the neat climbing that could be done elsewhere, places that were a little beyond our reach for a weekend,” he explained. “Especially the Swiss and French Alps. We got to thinking about it, and realized that it would be silly to let the opportunity for a summer there go to waste after we’d spent a year getting ready for just that kind of climbing.”

The idea quickly evolved to take European discharges, and just spend the summer climbing and exploring the countryside. Then a problem arose. “Without getting into the details,” Eric told them, “it was fairly simple for Chip to have the Citroën registered as a GI-owned car, but it was a hell of a lot more complicated to have it owned by a civilian. We weren’t sure we could make the arrangements at all and thought it probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Besides, we knew that when we were done climbing for the summer it would be harder to sell. After talking it over, we decided the best thing to do would be for him to sell it before he was discharged. We figured we could get along with trains and buses, just taking backpacks and Chip’s copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day. We could stay in youth hostels and maybe camp a little if we had to, so we started getting the gear we’d need like a lightweight tent, lightweight sleeping bags, and packs.”

Everything went pretty much according to plan. They continued doing local climbs right through the winter, but during their last days in the Army, Chip sold the car. In the middle of May they got their discharges, left duffel bags loaded with gear with a friendly sergeant at Bad Würslingen, then slung their rucksacks on their back and walked out of the gate on their way to a nearby train station, and ultimately Switzerland.

“We thought we were pretty good at alpine climbing,” Eric told them, “and we were, but this was a different league. We had an English guidebook to the climbing in Switzerland and mostly worked our way through that. Usually we were by ourselves, but once in a while we’d find a local guide who was willing to come with us for not much money. It was always good to have their local knowledge of the routes and stuff, but on the whole we were better climbers than they were. Still, we learned an awful lot and did some great climbs.”

“Are any of them anything we might have heard about?” Jeff asked.

“You might have heard of the Matterhorn,” Eric smiled. “It’s a really awesome-looking peak and it’s pretty difficult by Alpine standards. We did have a local guide with us for that one. At least he knew the way, but there were places we just about had to drag him up the hill. Later in the summer, we did Mont Blanc, that’s the tallest peak in Europe, and at that we were pushing weather and conditions a little. That was one of the few times we intentionally planned to stay out overnight on the mountain. We did have a few climbs that were more challenging, but they’d just be names that wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“So that was how you spent your summer?” Eunice wanted to know.

“Pretty much,” Eric nodded. “The major hassle came when the Berlin crisis brewed up back in the middle of the summer. We weren’t hearing much about it in Switzerland. I mean, the news was full of it, but we didn’t hear much in English. Besides, we were more interested in climbing, seeing the sights, and messing around with some friends, including a couple of Belgian girls who were with us for a while. That was interesting. They didn’t speak very much English and Chip and I spoke even less French, but somehow we managed to get along, and they were even pretty good climbers. But to get back to the story, when all the stuff came up in Berlin, Chip and I got a little worried that the Army would call us back. I mean, we are both still in the inactive reserve, and we were already in Europe, so we thought it would have been an easy call for the Army to make. On the other hand, neither the Army nor anyone else had had an address for us for months.”

“We haven’t written to you since May,” Jeff said. “And that was the reason why; we didn’t have an address. We wondered about you a little when we watched Douglas Edwards on the news talking about the stuff in Berlin.”

“No one having my address was a blessing in disguise. If the Army had wanted to call us back, they’d have had to write to me at my home of record, which is my brother’s house in Swartz Creek. My brother didn’t have my address either. In fact, I haven’t heard from him since the spring of 1959. I probably ought to take a swing up there and see if there’s any important mail there for me, but even though the worst of the Berlin thing has blown through I don’t think I’m in a hurry to check it out.”

“That includes having to see your brother, of course.”

“Well yeah, there’s that, too. Anyway, that was about the time that I had to write to you to send me the money from the Triumph. Our funds really were getting a little low, but if the Berlin thing blew up Chip and I had agreed that there could be worse places to be than Switzerland, if you know what I mean, so we figured we’d better have a few extra bucks, just in case. But, like I said, that wound down. We were getting pretty close to broke and decided it was time to head back to the states. So several days ago we hitchhiked our way back to Bad Würslingen to get the gear we’d left there and to see about getting a ride back to the states. I was actually a little surprised when they gave us a port call for the Rose rather than calling us back to duty. We were even able to get a free train ride up to Bremerhaven to get to the ship. As far as I can tell, and I really can’t tell very much, the worst of the Berlin stuff is over with, but for now I think I’d just as soon be in the states for a while.”

“You sure seemed to have had fun there in Europe,” Jeff commented. “I take it there was more than what you talked about.”

“Oh, yeah, lots,” Eric grinned. “I only touched the high spots. There were plenty of other stories. Like for instance, Chip and I messed around with several girls who liked hanging around with climbers, so we had a little fun here and there. Especially when we were climbing with our local friends, a day’s climbing would often wind up in some local gasthaus with plenty of good strong German beer going around. I don’t want to say that things ever got out of hand, but there were some times it got interesting.”

“Although I realize this is a stupid question,” Eunice asked, “have you ever had any desire to settle down?”

“Not really,” Eric laughed, then sobered up quickly. “I suppose my father is part of the reason for that. I don’t remember him very well, but I know he worked his ass off all his life and in the end got the shitty end of the stick as a reward. He never had the time to get out and have much fun. I guess I learned something from that. If getting some fun out of life means I have to give up things like a wife and a family, that’s a fair trade to me, at least at this point in my life. I may think differently about it in a few years, or I may not.”

“I guess that’s understandable,” Jeff replied. “It’s not how I’d care to live my life. In fact, I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are now, but to each his own, I guess.”

“So long as you can understand it, that’s fine with me,” Eric nodded. “These two Belgian girls Chip and I were messing around with, Margot and Femke, didn’t seem very anxious to settle down, either. The European climbing bums are really a different culture.”

By this time dinner was over with, the dishes had been put away, the drinks had been refilled again, and they’d clustered in the living room. “That’s quite a story,” Jeff said. “And it sure sounds like you had fun. So what are you going to do now?”

“That’s a little up in the air,” Eric admitted. “I won’t say I’m totally broke since I have a few bucks stashed back for emergencies, but few enough of them that I figured it was better to hitchhike my way back here rather than ride a bus or something. It worked out pretty well, it only took me about two days to get from outside of New York to here. Chip is still hitchhiking, he’s planning on making it back to California. We split up near Pittsburgh. I hope you don’t mind, but I gave him your address in case he needs to get hold of me. I plan on keeping the two of you fairly current about where I am now that I’m back.”

“So what’s the plan now?” Eunice replied, noticing that Eric had more or less ducked Jeff’s question.

“Like I said, that’s a little up in the air. I wanted to see you guys, of course, and maybe get a little of the stuff I left in Jeff’s folks’ attic. Plus, I suppose I ought to go up and see my brother, whether I want to or not. Chip is about in the same boat as me money-wise, so what we’re both planning on doing is getting jobs for the winter, then getting together in LA in the spring. We want to head out to Tahquitz, brush up on our rock climbing as opposed to alpine stuff, then go check out the climbing in Yosemite Valley. That’s supposed to be the toughest climbing in the world, huge walls, mostly vertical or past vertical, and not a lot of places for handholds. It’ll give us both a chance to see how we stack up against the real hotshots. After that, I don’t know. It’s probably hard to say. Something will probably come up.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.