Matthew

My flight was supposed to leave the Evansville airport at 11:20, however, as usual things did not go exactly as planned. As soon as I passed through security I noticed that my flight was delayed until 12:10. No big deal, or so I thought, until they changed it yet again to 1:10. This would have made my 1:45 connection pretty hard considering it’s an hour flight to Memphis. At this point I decided to call Northwest. They put me on a different flight to Detroit, and although that meant that I would not get back to my dorm until 10 PM, it would at least mean that I would get back that night.

All problems with today’s air travel aside, I had some very interesting conversations with the guy – Burke Gerth… or Gerth Burke, can’t really remember which – who was sitting next to me on the first leg of my flight. He was on his was to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This is a trip that he and his childhood friend – they both grew up and live in Evansville – have been planning for three years. They are attempting the ascent in six days hoping that this is the ideal amount of time to avoid both altitude sickness and climber’s fatigue. After their climb, they were also going on a safari, pointing out that if you are going to Africa, you might as well see the animals.

I can’t remember how we got on the subject, but we got into when he used to parasail. He said that it was a ton of fun and thought that it was relatively safe. He thought this until his sail broke off and he went head first into a tree, and then head first into the ground. He broke his neck in the fall. Although he did not injure his spinal cord, which he is thankful for, he was stuck in a neck brace for a month and a half and it was not certain that he would be able to return to the job which he loves. He said that although he really enjoyed parasailing, hitting that tree kind of took all the fun out of it. I told him that I doubt anyone thinks any less of him for giving it up.

His story about breaking his neck, and being a firefighter, reminded me of a story Jeffery told us a day or so earlier. I told Burke a friend of my dad’s knew a firefighter who fell off a picnic bench, broke his neck and died.

At this point Burke looked at me and seemed a little upset – strange because he was a very upbeat guy. It turns out that Burke was actually that firefighter’s friend, and he was there at the time of the accident. He said that he saw his friend fall, and that he and his buddies thought he was kidding when his friend said he could not get up. But soon Burke felt sick to his stomach as he learned the truth.

However, this is not what killed his friend. After the accident, and in the hospital, his friend lost his will to live. He had been through a few years of a terrible divorce, and his job was all he really had to live for. He was a fairly poor guy and did not want to have to be taken care of all his life so he stopped eating and refused to let anyone visit. Took three weeks before he finally died.

We also talked of Burke’s time in the army, how he was stationed in Germany during the cold war. He said that it was an okay time and he really had a lot of respect for the German people. He also said he enjoyed his leaves, and loved the fact that he was able to see all the places he really wanted to.

After the war he worked in a state park as a fire-something-or-other, and said it was the best job he ever had, and that’s where he met his first wife. It was a good job for someone who was single, but once he got married they moved to Evansville. He said that his wife was homesick every day that they were married, and eventually she moved back to Colorado. He said that the other problem was the fact that they had very different upbringings, his being that of a conservative German, and she a freethinking liberal who grew up with Indians. I thought that was a nice touch. He was married to her for 11 years, and has now been married to his second wife for ten and is sure that she will be the last.