Congenial-speak #11

Norse ledge ends

Back in the day, when recycled newspaper was worth something, our scout troop filled many endless semi trailers. We called the parcels of paper, the finds, the booty, the jackpots, “lucys or “baglys” in reference to how they were received. The fathers, the leaders, the masters of tender-feet too young to drive, learned routes. We taught them. We smelled on instinct where the loosest and most bagged papers were. There was a house inhabited by a hermit, a creature of habit, an OCD'd accumulator of news. We went there in a pick-up, a flat bed, sitting, flouting laws, to a house on the corner. It was the kind kids might TP because they thought no on cared. White ribbons trickled down, around branches barren, defiant of seasons reasons for changing, for living. It was the house of Boo that got TP'd because kids knew it was a easy job, festooning the trees until the rain washed it away. Around wood stairs to descend into musty dampness, prizes revealed in a single light blub's shy intensity. Wound and cornered by stone work, lime and sanded liths of monosyllabic resonance we saw our quarry. Yellow edge entail of yester-years news, stories of Tet or Nixon's resignation, led us to more—much more—and then some.

Across from the Lyndale house—my second neighbor/childhood—was a Lutheran church that sponsored Viking Counsel's troop 262. It at least allowed the semi truck to wait in its lot. It was there for weeks before and after the sale, the paper drive, the Norway exchange fundraiser. The drives, themselves, usually occupied the best parts of a Saturday. I was often on the assembly line, a pair of arms in the chain that went 20' back. Older, stronger scouts sometimes accepted my slower, slimmer, less dexterous hands begrudgingly. I was still using crutches and often fell back into a wall of newspaper, slipping to stand, on the glossy magazines and catalogs, the copious ads from Sunday volumes people discarded religiously.

Sometimes they left me, the older scouts, to hold the wall. I waited in the truck while they went on routes. I accepted paper donations from individual old men and women. They drove up to the mouth of the semi, all day, in minty Buicks and Oldsmobiles whose odometers read 20, 000 in May. Often, curmudgeonly, they quickly as their eighty-year-old bodies move made their deposit right on the loose gravel of the church lot. Most had taken time out of their sedentary life to put the paper in grocery bags. Occasionally, though, a car pulled into the lot with a trunk full of the dreaded “lucys.” My depends were out hunting, and I cringed, I blithely chagrined, falling back on the solace that I was only a second-class scout. The donators saw me shuffle, barely walk without my resting crutches, and they lifted out armfuls of loose paper and put them up on the truck for me. I thought when the older guys returned they'd get mad, so I worked fast bringing lucys back before they returned. When I succeeded there was a pride I had I kept humble, just between me and the semi.

It was fun. Nicknames were born. Lucys were thrown as bagglys were quickly passed down. The truck was packed to the roof, to the steel bars that structured the semi. Row by row, wall changed wall, through the best hours, the most productive, of a Saturday. Jackpot fresh pick-ups returned two to four times, younger scouts near buried in the bed with newspaper surrounding their head. Some stashed away Playboy magazines they unearthed. Or the less shamed older scouts returned sitting in the flat-bed atop a sea of paper looking at center-folds for all to see.

The drives, raffles and Christmas wreath sales paved the way. A decade plenished our coffers and, in 1983, most of our troop flew to Norway. We arrived in Oslo on SAS (Scandinavian Airline System) via Iceland and Greenland for fuel. Our efforts bought us two weeks at $400.00 per capita, meals and lodging included. Transportation, except for a few ferries and taxis, was limited to our feet.

That's how we got to a land of the midnight sun, of glaciers, fjords, and the sublime passionate beauty of females with viking ancestry.