Folly of Youth

 

Sometimes, it’s hard to explain my choices.  Especially some of the bad ones I made when I was young.  I suppose that I can write them off as the folly of youth but I have to wonder why it was important to me to commit such folly in the first place. 

For instance, once when I was in junior high school, I chose to walk through the Battery Street Tunnel.  The same tunnel, relatively new at the time, that was constructed to serve all of the north-south highway traffic through Seattle and it offered no provision for foot traffic.  For some reason it seemed like a good thing to do. 

At the time I sat third-chair French Horn for the semi-talented All City Orchestra which was mostly composed of young nerds who were accepting of their social limitations and resulting societal roles.  Homey didn’t play that, though, and I struggled to ignore my own limitations and chafed against the norms assigned by my relationship with that Horn in F.  I wanted to be cool and be identified as such so I rationalize that some of my poor choices were the result of trying to set myself apart from reality in the eyes of my very critical peers.

Whatever, on that particular day I had been at a rehearsal in the Opera House on the Seattle Center grounds and was on my way to the bus stop when I heard the clacking of Blakey's heel plates and turned to see my friend, Marc, approaching.  We had been friends since the third grade and I knew him to be kind and generous with a wicked sense of humor.  He had always marched to his own drum and often showed up when and where least expected.  A natty dresser, he assumed the fashion style of a young gangster.  On this day he was wearing his usual outfit consisting of shiny, Blakey's-clad, black Italian low lace boots with tiny square toes, perfectly creased tight black sharkskin pants that flashed with an iridescent purple sheen, a starched white shirt, skinny tie and a gold collar tie bar, a black collarless sports coat and a black London Fog trench coat.  His perfectly combed black hair shown with a liberal application of Vitalis.  He offered me a smoke (Pall Malls) and as we stood there smoking he asked if he could borrow bus fare.  I only had a quarter on me and fare was $.15 so we were a nickel short.  He said that he had spent all of his money on the pack of smokes from a machine in the Food Circus and would walk home.  Forgetting that I had a french horn to carry I offered to walk with my friend.  Then, as an aside, he casually asked if I wanted to walk through the Battery Street Tunnel. 

Marc

The Battery Street Tunnel was a little shy of ½ mile long and walking through it was something that had occurred to me in the past but not something that I was dying to do carrying a damn horn yet here was the opportunity to really do something that had been done by few (if any) before.  Was that a clue or an opportunity?  It sounded like an adventure so I was in. 

The south tunnel entrance was about a mile away and getting there would prove to be a task.  I wasn’t much over 5 feet tall and I was carrying that wide and heavy load which weighed 6 pounds in a wooden case that weighed another 10 pounds or so. About the weight of a bowling ball combined but the case was nearly 2 feet wide.  That 16 pounds got heavy after about 2 minutes so my arm was stretched out straight and that meant that the case drug on the ground.  I had been wearing away at the bottom of the wooden case for a few years and that walk to the end of the tunnel really took its toll.  Was that another clue or another challenge?  So many stupid decisions so far but I wasn’t done yet and who knew if I would ever be in the position to make this bad decision again?  I had to do it.  

South Tunnel Entrance

The tunnel entrance from the Alaskan Way Viaduct made clear that foot traffic had not been a design consideration.  There was a discouragingly narrow curb, sans guardrail, that might have been two feet wide.  My shoulders were 16” to 18” wide and carrying a French Horn case that was about 2 feet wide gave me a profile of about 3 ½ feet.  Doing the math, I was a minimum of 1 ½ feet into the traffic.  Since I didn’t want to rub against the tunnel wall I fudged a few inches more into harm’s way.  Marc lit up a fresh cigarette and led the way as if he hadn’t a care in the world.  His steel taps clacked over the roar of passing cars and alarmed motorists honked their horns at us announcing that it was time for me to rub harder against the tunnel wall.  Marc never looked over his shoulder but flipped off every honker while shouting Yiddish insults.  It was frightening and each time we came to one of those “escape doors” we, again, chose badly and kept on walking.  We were determined to complete that task. 

Towards the north portal the tunnel turned to the left to connect with Aurora Ave. and we were relieved that daylight could be seen trickling in.  After ten minutes of terror we reached the north end of the tunnel and imagine our surprise when the curb we had danced along gave way to a wall that we couldn’t scale.  Atop the wall was the busy northbound onramp that added more sound to the chaos.  At that point I felt that we no longer had any control of our survival and that we were doomed to die in daylight rather than the darkness of the tunnel.  

North Tunnel Portal

Finally we stood beneath a large sign that read “No Pedestrians or Bicycles Allowed in Tunnel” where the traffic merged and racing motorists honked at us from all sides.  I was transfixed by the sight of sharply dressed, thirteen year old Marc standing defiantly facing the oncoming traffic, his black trench coat flying about in the vortex of each passing car, both middle fingers now in play, shouting curses in the ancient language of the jews with a half-smoked Pall Mall dangling from his lips.   He looked magnificent, biblical maybe, as he appeared to be meeting his death without fear. 

Waking from my trance and sensing an ever-so-slight break in the traffic I dashed across the onramp and attempted to leap over the concrete barrier that separated the traffic from the safety of a sidewalk.  In my haste I miscalculated the deleterious effects that a 2’ wide wooden case would have on my aerodynamics as well as the how the weight of a bowling ball would conspire against my desire to break free of gravity.  My intended trajectory failed to materialize and I crashed into the top third of the barrier where I was pitched forward to land awkwardly and face-first on the sidewalk.  My case landed on top of me but during the impact with the wall it had sprung open and jettisoned its precious brass cargo along with all my sheet music. 

I wasn’t sure which was more shocking, the fact that I was still alive or the sight of that velvet lined case laying wide open holding only my mouthpiece and smelly spit rag.  Then, Marc peered over the wall with a smile and said:

“You dropped something”. 

With that he handed me my scraped and dented horn along with the sheet music he had time to pick up.  More cars honked and he spun towards them with dual single-digit salutes and shouted something unintelligible. 

As he climbed over the wall I couldn’t help but contrast his appearance to mine.  I had a scrape over my right eye that was oozing blood and tunnel grime was smeared on the right side of my olive green Army jacket and baby blue cords.  The knees of the cords were torn and blood stained while my wingtips were scuffed so badly that they would never recover.  Marc casually picked the spit rag out of the case, said "Do you mind?" and buffed a tiny dirt spot from one of his Italian leather boots, straightened his tie, looked down at me and said: “Jesus, Wichita.  You look like hell.  You are clearly a man in need of a smoke”.  Bending down to hand me a freshly lit Pall Mall I noticed that his hair was still perfect.  

From there it was a 3.5 mile walk home, that began with a risky transit of the Cascade Neighborhood where the young toughs took unkindly to outsiders who entered their gritty territory.  Marc, however, looked dangerous and I suppose that I had the appearance of someone with nothing to live for so they let us pass with only jeers and threats.  By the time I got home I had worn off the back end of the wooden horn case.

My parents wanted to know what had happened to me.  They asked if I had been in another fight as I exhibited all the signs of having had my ass kicked but I just told them that I didn’t want to talk about it.  It was better to let them assume that I had gotten beat up rather than tell them that I had been a total dumb-ass again.  Fighting, while frowned upon, was understood to sometimes be unavoidable.  Dumb-assery,  though, was a choice that my Dad simply didn't tolerate and would have come at a price.  

Overall, it was just another example of a childhood adventure spawned by a bad idea that I didn’t have the intellect to stop.  I dare say that there have been an embarrassing number of them and if all of my stupid acts were revealed my reputation and any shred of respectability that I might yet possess would be stripped away forever.

Baltasar Gracian

Baltasar Gracian was a 17^th century Jesuit and philosopher.  In his time dumb-assery was referred to as folly.  He never had the opportunity to make the choice to walk through the Battery Street Tunnel carrying a french horn, but he had studied enough acts of folly/dumb-assery to recognize it when he saw it.  Regarding which he opined:

“Folly consists not in committing Folly, but in being incapable of concealing it. All men make mistakes, but the wise conceal the blunders they have made, while fools make them public. Reputation depends more on what is hidden than on what is seen. If you can’t be good, be careful.”

 

Too late for that.