we began to realize that Pittsburgh, at that date, was a coal city. The gritty dust seeped into everything. We were glad to pack up and roll westward on Monday. And it should be recorded, although perhaps at Dad’s chagrin, that from here on, for most of our overnights, the camping gear stayed packed up while we used tourist cabins.
An intermediate destination was Orchard, in northeastern Nebraska. This was to visit Dad’s family, which was easy, because his three brothers and families all lived in Orchard, and his one sister and her husband lived in Clearwater, not many miles away. When both of Dad’s parents died, and the children, now grown, decided to sell the family farm in Ontario, Canada, each took his share and went his way. Tom, the eldest, moved to Nebraska, where he settled and prospered in business in Orchard. Dad, Gordon, and Dave all chose to study medicine, and the latter two set up a joint practice in Orchard, which they continued for the rest of their lives. To complete the picture, the only sister, Olive, married a doctor and settled in Clearwater.
In Orchard I was happy to find that Gordon’s youngest child, Bruce, was a boy almost my age. For the few days of our visit Bruce became Archie’s and my companion, showing us many things about the half-rural life of the small town. Bruce had a Daisy air rifle, a “BB” gun that used compressed air to fire the little lead pellets. This seemed to me an intriguing, grown-up-style toy.
When we were ready to leave, Bruce and his parents insisted that I should have the Daisy. They could easily get another, and they knew that, with the strict Japanese custom officials and the import duty charged, there was no way that I could order one and have it sent to Korea. I had that air rifle in Taegu for years. Archie and I used it to shoot at tin cans and such. We took some shots at birds, but, while abundant, they proved to be very small and quick-moving targets. Once we did score a hit on a crow, but the bird just flapped its wing, knocking the pellet from its feathers, and flew away.
Our next westward stopover was Yellowstone National Park. There were wonderful sights—cascades of the Yellowstone River, brilliant hues in steaming pools of the Geyser Basin, and, of course, an eruption of Old Faithful. But to me, the most memorable experience was sitting in an arc of benches at Old Faithful Inn near dusk and watching, at a safe distance, while bears came from the woods to explore a garbage heap, and a park ranger regaled us with anecdotes, his comrade astride a horse nearby, cradling a rifle for security.
I enjoyed the jokes and anecdotes so much that I retained them and would retell them with gusto to any adult audience that might be assembled with Mother and Dad. In spite of my shy nature, I always, even from an early age, took pleasure in that kind of “public” speaking.
A final experience, from our family return to Korea that year, came with the ship’s brief layover in Hawaii. We went to the famed beach at Waikiki, and Dad shared a rare outing with Archie and me, renting surfboards. Naturally, we couldn’t ride the surf, so we lay on the boards and paddled, kicking also with our feet. It was fun, and the water was sparklingly beautiful. We stayed out in the sun much longer than we should have, Dad included.
The result—a burn by that Hawaiian sun, the most severe sunburn any of us three had ever experienced. We could only lie face down on our bunks afterward, writhing as Mother went from one to another, anointing us with cold cream as gently as she could. We had no other emollient available. She did observe that Dad, as a physician, should have considered the risk of exposure to that unforgiving, subtropical sun.
About the return to Taegu I have little recollection. It was a blurring blend—familiar sights renewed, but in a different light, while our home bustled with preparations for a new chapter in the lives of Elsie, Archie, and me. We would be off, within a crowded pair of weeks, for Pyongyang, some four hundred miles to the north, to the mission-supported, English-language Pyongyang Foreign School. The quiet life of the small, home-schooled world in Taegu was gone. Ahead was a whole new scene: boarding school with other children ranging all the way from upper-elementary age to high school seniors.
The prospect—all unknown—was exciting, bewildering, unnerving. Elsie and Archie seemed to regard it as something wonderful, so I tried to feel the same. When the time came that Mother and Dad took us to the station and we got on a train, leaving them there, I tried to enter into the excitement; but inside I was already torn by the loss of what I was leaving behind, wrestling with what this drastic change would bring.
4
Needing to Be Brave in a New World
From the landing there were four more steps to upstairs, four more of these padded steps. As I climbed them, I looked up. There was a hallway, and at the end of it an open door.
There she was! That had to be right! I knew that skirt! The rest of her was hidden by the doorway, the way she was sitting. I could just see the ankle-length skirt and her feet; but I knew the skirt.
It looked far away, infinitely far. Could I reach it? Could I get to it? I took quick steps. She heard me, and I could see her face, smiling at me. The skirt—I was close to it—and seeing her now, as she was, above it. That, just that, was what mattered. The whole scene is still vivid to me: how I felt on Mother’s first visit.
“Why, Don, dear!” she was saying. “I didn’t expect you to come over from the dormitory.”
I wasn’t saying anything. I wasn’t crying, either. I was just pressing close to her, close to that skirt that had been so impossibly far away. Mother had come up to see us after our first couple of months at Pyongyang Foreign School. Perhaps Elsie had written her that I was homesick, although I tried not to let it show. Now her visit gave me a tremulous happiness; but the visit was short. When she left, a wave of homesickness washed over me again.
It was a wave, though, and waves pass. Although Elsie and Archie were making their own friends, I had them with me in the dormitory. The dorm, at that time, was just one building, two-and-a-half stories, housing forty or fifty of us in rooms on the second floor and in large open areas on the third, up under the sweep of the heavy, clay-tiled roof. Secure doors on each of the upper floors separated them in two halves, girls on one side and boys on the other. The ground floor was for the kitchen, dining room, living room, and the matron’s small bedroom and bath; the laundry was in the basement.
I lacked the outgoing nature of my siblings, I nonetheless experienced pleasurable times. I’m remembering one spring evening of that first year. I was behind the dorm, on a steep bank where flowering weeds grew among some trees. I had found a slender, pliable stick, which was my sword. I was wielding it in knightly combat, beheading weeds of my enemies, when Ben, one of the high school boys, came up where I was—a unique event for me.
Ben joined in, had me describe my combat and shared in my make-believe world. After a while, he said, “Yonder, there is a damsel who is waiting for me. You will excuse me, Sir Knight, as I go to meet her!”
I have never forgotten Ben’s kindness to a younger, solitary boy on that spring evening. Possibly Elsie put him up to it. If so, I never knew.
A new thing for me in dorm life was that there were many girls—older as well as of my age group. Of course, I didn’t speak to them; but there were two whom I selected as the most beautiful and bewitching. The older and taller one, whose blonde hair hung in waves, I privately called the “Queen,” while the other one, was “Princess.” Only later did I learn that these two, whose real names were Marilyn and Rachel, were sisters.
One day in late spring, after dinner, our housemother called us together in the living room. She told us that Marilyn was sick, very sick, and had been taken to the hospital. She led us in a fervent prayer for Marilyn’s recovery and told us also to pray in our rooms.
The
