Fault Lines - John Knoop

August 2
Time to begin packing up. I have a cheap ticket on an Italian liner so I can take all the
overweight, while Judy flies with Tanya and Michelle to New York and on to Cincinnati.
“Seize the moment between ripe and rotten” …Yeats
Amelia, Ohio March 5, ’63
“What’d you do over there?”
“Nothing much. Traveled around. Learned some Spanish. Wrote some stories.”
“Did you sell ‘em? Make any money?”
“No. That’s why I’m back. I need to make some money.’
We have moved into a vacant tenant house next to the place we lived before, above the
apple storage warehouse. I go to work picking apples for our neighbor, Jim Nobis, and filling out
applications for factory jobs all over southern Ohio. The V.W. dealers are not interested in hiring
me, since they only want factory-trained mechanics in their dealer network. The independent
shops need someone who knows Jaguars and MGs. Makes me feel once again like an upper class
misfit. Knowing how to work hard doesn’t count.
Jim’s apple crop has been in the barn for weeks and there are no job offers from the
dozen applications I’ve filled out, so I’m selling the Encyclopedia Britannica for a while, without
much luck, and also a tacky sheet metal siding product that allows the buyer to turn his place into
a brick home without ever mixing any mortar. Just scraping by, and hating it. Missing what I
remember now as our idyllic life in Spain and my independence as an unpublished writer. Oh
well…
August 4
The '53 VW I bought when we came back is worn out from all the driving I’m doing as
a salesman and it’s not worth fixing. It already had 250,000 miles on it when I bought it. I am
sick of trying to make a living this way and so finally, with some misgivings, I accept the offer of a
temporary job doing research for the publishing company where my father works. Their
magazine, the Farm Quarterly, needs someone to travel around the Midwest and South
interviewing farmers about what books they'd be ready to buy on agricultural topics. I find Judy
an old $75 Mercury coupe and buy a used BMW R-69 to ride around the Midwest and South
talking to Farm Quarterly subscribers, mostly big farmers. Great ride through the Smokies last
week. Miles of beautiful mountain curves, coming back from talking to a bunch of farmers in
Georgia. Country southerners: natural, humorous, safe in their pagan strength; sure of their way
76