Richard Haffey - Under Vesuvius: A Reflective Travelogue in Verse and Prose

Under
Vesuvius

A Reflective Travelogue in Verse and Prose

Richard Haffey

Copyright 2021 by Richard Haffey.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery Getty Images.

Cover photo: Reproduced with permission of DepositPhotos.

Map credits:

Map captioned Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, with Monte Nuovve, Arso and La Solfatara reproduced courtesy of Dunedin Academic Press from Volcanoes of Europe , Second Edition.

Map of Tyrrhanean Sea reproduced courtesy of Reunion Technology Inc. for World Atlas .

Rev. date: 09/13/2021

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CONTENTS

6
The Mainland

To John and Mary

without whom this journey

and this book would not have happened

To Kathy

without whom my journey

would not be happening

and would not have its meaning

The Bay of Naples and surrounding points of interest featured in Under Vesuvius .

The Tyrrhenian Sea fills the volcanic basin from Sicily to Sardinia
and to the west coast Italy, with Mount Vesuvius
centrally located on the mainland shore.

I went to Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast with a seething cauldron roiling beneath my emotionally-neutral outer landscape. My adult lifetime adversarial relationship with abusive and intrusive authority flared in the months before and would have produced a thoracic thermal image if the TSA used such screening tools when I boarded the plane for Italy. Naively, I thought I was leaving all that unpleasantness behind in favor of a vacation in a land of lemons, art, and precipitous seacoasts. All this was so. Except for Vesuvius.

What remains of Vesuvius today is less than what it was before the eruption in 79. Nature can not expend so much energy and not wear part of itself out. Apparently, neither could I. In 2016, who knew?

I teach industrial safety and health classes. Several of them are about exposure to lead in the workplace and the home. While lead in paint is the most prevalent topic, there are other sources. Regardless of the source, there never was anything in human biological development that required lead as a nutrient or necessity for bodily function. Iron, zinc, and magnesium, yes. You see them in the ingredients on your daily multivitamin container. But not lead. In their oversight of human health and in the interest of advocating for protection of human health, federal and state governments exercise their regulatory authority to limit a persons exposure to the harmful effects of lead. The lead in my blood was not from the most commonly medically proven routes of entry ingestion and inhalation. The lead in my blood resulted from my unfettered passion as a teacher. One recent hour-long module, inserted into my lead classes for professional consultants and contractors, invoked Vesuvius and the eruptions in 79 AD. It was entitled A Tale of Two Cities: Herculaneum, Italy and Herculaneum, Missouri. In it, Vesuviuss heat and smoke and pyroclastic rock rained down death on the frightened citizens of a bayside resort town. Similarly, the infamous Doe Run primary smelter, and the mining of lead to feed it and its predecessors, rained down death and illness on the unsuspecting citizens of a riverside industrial enclave. I made no apologies to Dickens. Nor to a remiss EPA.

I taught about this and other more recent findings that demonstrated how several governmental regulations, limiting levels of exposure to lead, were inadequate and not as health-protective as once thought, and as codified in law. These were not in the stipulated curricula proscribed by state laws dating back to the mid 1990s. I was told to stop teaching current facts and accepted truths. I was told to teach information that was two decades out-of-date and sorely misleading. I refused. I was de-accredited. I thought I left it all behind on the gangway at JFK. Apparently not. The data indicate that the half-life of lead, deposited in a humans long bones by leaded blood circulating there, is forty years. My passion runs bone deep.

I chose to write in open lines

the cadence of my voice and mind

some truths that you might find

and others you may leave behind

(Ridgewood, Queens , NY)

Not easy finding street parking in Ridgewood,

but only one circuit of the block got us in,

across and down from Paolas travel agency.

For all the decals and stickers on the glass door:

cruise and air lines, credit cards, associations, banks,

its hard to see inside from the bustling sidewalk.

The shared storefront also allots window space:

home improvement, taxes, accounting, and travel,

with signs, stenciled and in neon, lettered and ship-shaped.

Entering the shops a trip, even before you travel.

Street noise and sidewalk voices thick-glassed away,

travel posters convey you to continents portrayed.

Asbestos floor and ceiling tiles, likely, size and all.

Leaded paint alligatored on ceilings and walls.

A narrow wending from street to Paolas desk, midway

deep within the landscape, the store trek displays:

Grey metal desks calendar blotter-topped and paper-piled,

manilla-filed, thick ring-binders bolster cubicled aisles.

Cabinet-stuck post-notes seem disarrayed, thumb-tacked

bulletins, on cork and plaster splayed; pink-squared call backs.

Phone after phone, lit buttons, solid and blinking; receivers

lie on their sides, holding music on low, with overstretched

wires dangling off the desk edge, wanting for some carabiners

from climbing posters of Half Dome, K-2, and the Matterhorn.

Paola focuses her way right to our folder, as unflustered

as she is leading twenty gawking tourists amid huge crowds

at St Peters, the Coliseum, or walking half-leaning at Pisa.

The only thing that shakes her is our hands, before sitting.

Alitalia, there and back. Twelve days. One hotel, Sorrento.

Vouchered day trips, land and sea, coast and inland,

concierged for four; bonded drivers, guided tours.

Amalfi steps to Naples streets. Paolas vetted all before.

Before environmental work and safety training,

I worked a decade in publishing religious publishing.

There was a person then name of Peter Li Chinese.

But big over six foot big over two hundred pounds big.

Built a business in Dayton, out by the Wright brothers.

Most always I saw him in a jacket, shirt, and tie;

lookin the business of being a success was Peter.

Told me once through a wrinkle-eyed smirk set under

his broad flat forehead and wide round nose a guy

tried to sell him antiques in New Hampshire once.

Pete stops, leans in, asks me Know how old the thing