Everything To Declare

By John Michael Flynn

A young adult novel with a coming of age theme, Everything To Declare is a story of travel seen through the eyes of an aspiring artist, Whit Blanchard. Whit hails from the tiny cattle town of McPherson, Kansas and at the age of nineteen, yet to see the ocean, he learns of the death of his best friend Richard due to suicide. Whit is stunned by this news and decides to pause his studies a while at Kansas State, where he's yet to declare a major, and using what little money he's saved he travels alone overseas, specifically to Spain. While there, sketch book in hand, he meets Hernan from Venezuela and together they travel to Lisbon, and Tangier, Whit all the while drawing pictures of what he sees, honing his skills in Spanish, viewing masterpieces of art, and coming to terms with the passing of his beloved friend. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Get Covers design. Photo by author.
• Release date: Sep 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223281573

John Michael Flynn

John Michael Flynn also writes novels as Basil Rosa. He's published three collections of short stories, one with Publerati, and another with Fomite, and a book of essays with New Meridian Arts. He's taught at schools, colleges and university in the United States, Moldova, Turkey and Russia. To quote the poet Forrest Gander, "his poems are not absurdly modern but take the risk of articulating a serious moral gaze." 

Book preview

JOHN MICHAEL FLYNN

for Michael Bossick,

wherever you are

––––––––

They were not true those dreams

those story books of youth

I left them all at home

went out to find the truth....

Siegfried Sassoon

PART ONE

Many admirers of my work don’t know that though I’m a sculptor in various metals, I was also an ex-pat employed as a petroleum engineer in the Middle East. I lived two lives, so to speak, engaged in engineering work for two decades before retiring to devote myself full-time to my art.

During those decades, I returned often to the States with my Cairo-born wife to visit family plots, siblings, friends, in-laws, my daughter and, in later years, my grandchildren. I often visited at least one art museum and a gallery during each trip. I’d also fall into conversations with someone at a party or family gathering and the topics would vary, of course, but the one I remember best and kept returning to centered on the question of when an artist’s apprenticeship begins or whether it begins at all, since some believe that artists are born not made.

It brought to mind lines from the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, who my wife, a professor of literature, is rather fond of. These have stuck with me for years:

As you walk, you make your own road,

and when you look back

you see the path

you will never travel again.

***

On one occasion, I met for the first time a woman from Alexandria, a professor in art history who’d been a classmate of my wife’s. During several visits and over many excellent meals and glasses of wine, she regaled my wife and me with chapters from a yarn about an artist whose company she’d enjoyed during a more promiscuous period in her life. This artist had traveled in Islamic countries. He spoke Spanish, French and some Arabic. Though she no longer knew his whereabouts or whether he was still painting, they’d remained friends long enough so that she knew well the genesis of his journey as an artist, and how it had led to her theories and insights into the scope of what it means to serve a lifelong apprenticeship.

His first name was Whitson, after his father who was a cattleman raised in Sedan, Kansas, and who specialized in cow inseminations. Whit’s mother, raised in rural Winfield, grew up working with cattle too, but she’d wanted children, had married young and moved to McPherson to start a small farm together and rear Whit and his two sisters.

My wife’s friend owned one of Whit’s earlier paintings, an oil reminiscent of a Delacroix he’d completed during a sojourn to North Africa. It was a modern rendition of a Rabat street. I looked Whit up online. There had been gallery showings of his work in Santa Barbara, Barcelona, and Istanbul, but in spite of my searching, I couldn’t discern his whereabouts, where he’d been trained, or whether he was still alive.

In my opinion, his story wasn’t a dull one. My wife’s friend continued to share more chapters from it each time we paid her a visit.

***

The month, January, the year 1981. Whit was fighting against impulses to worry over money as he rode on a passenger ferry, backpack at his side, crossing the Straits of Gibraltar. Whit’s new Venezuelan acquaintance hadn’t liked the wind at the stern rail, so he’d gone below deck to have a smoke. According to his business card, which he’d given to Whit, the Venezuelan was a lawyer, his full name Alejandro Hernan Javier Escalona, though he insisted on Hernan.

With what he thought an overdramatic intensity, Whit stared at what looked like a horizontal feather of light that marked the rim of another universe. This rim, the distant shoreline of Morocco, seemed to glimmer. What was he looking for? He had to know. He couldn’t just travel for the sake of it. There needed to be a purpose.

Whit began mining the French he’d learned. He felt like a poulaine, a foal, traveling outre-mer, overseas, into the crags of an uncertain avenir. He looked over the rail at spray that peeled away from the ferry’s white hull. By going to Morocco he would continue to re-forge his identity. Well, here was a purpose and one he should appreciate. Why else travel? Why else live? 

The splashy bubbling in the ferry’s wake, along with her engine rumbling under the deck, coalesced into a conversation that soothed Whit into a hypnotic trance. Closing his eyes, glad to forget about money, he imagined emerald waves that collided against jigs and arabesques of prismatic light. As a boy raised in The Sunflower State, he hadn’t seen oceans and seas other than a few torpid summer trips by car to visit Lake Michigan and his Aunt Hazeline, his mother’s only sister, a brittle-boned widow who lived with cats and her knitting projects in a ranch house in Traverse City.

Whit opened his eyes. Water held him captivated, a willing prisoner. There’d been some crossings for him, including the deaths of two grandparents, neither of whom he’d been old enough to know well, and of his classmate, Richard Favors, who’d been run over by a freight train. Word in McPherson had been it was an accident, that Richard had been drunk. Whit knew better. Richard had committed suicide. They’d been close since their third year of elementary school. An only child raised by a single mother, Richard had always been anti-social and prone to brooding. He was the sole black friend Whit had made. Did this matter? Yes, thought Whit. It mattered. All friendships mattered.

He couldn’t think about Richard. This crossing was, after all, his first trip on the sea. It could be seen as a form of death, but he preferred to think of it as a movement toward re-birth and new challenges such as adapting to a Muslim country. This was another first. Just the words Morocco, Islam and Tangier sent little quakes through his body.

Memories of his family and of Richard sifted through him. Whit saw himself as living an adventure. Any 19-year-old was prone to such thoughts, even he knew this, though he’d never considered himself different or remarkable in any way. If anything, with his blue Royals baseball cap on backwards, wasn’t he something of a cliché as an American? Maybe a bit too secure, as well, within the confines of his chummy aw-shucks attitude.

Yet Whit believed all people donned masks in order to feel safer, because underneath any form of provincialism there lived dark mysteries and secrets. He was a terrified little boy, wasn’t he? Still shocked that his closest friend had died on the rails of what had once been known as the Rock Island Line.

Staring at the water around him, Whit marveled at the gulls in flight. How easily they just glided and let the wind lift them along.

***

Smaller and shaped more like a mound than what he’d imagined it to be, the Island of Gibraltar loomed out of the currents, greener and stonier than he’d expected. As the ferry continued to rumble along, Gibraltar began receding to become a burr on the horizon.

If only for a moment to feel tranquil. Are you with me Richard, do you hear what I’m thinking? Richard was with him. He’d always been.

Whit ventured back to Eisenhower Elementary School, and then to graduation with Richard, both of them Bullpups at McPherson High. Whit had labored on weekends for a local feed store, he and Richard sharing a sullen eagerness, though Whit, not Richard, had maintained a belief in out-sized possibilities. They had often defined his ambitions.

He remembered Richard had said, You do it, go on and see the world. I’m good here. I ain’t going nowhere. You come back and tell me all about it.

Like many from small towns (not all, of course), it was anyplace but here once Whit had his diploma in hand. Knowing he had Richard’s approval had helped him and he’d trekked to Manhattan – the Kansas version – where he enrolled at Kansas State. A proud Wildcat, he decided against choosing a major while he took classes in art, and Spanish.

At 19, he didn’t need much to feel transported back to his adolescent Sundays dressed as his mother liked to say, the way a young man should at the First United Methodist Church. He went to church suppers and vacation bible school. He thought himself blessed as the son of wheat lands and wind-dusted arid counties with names like Wabaunsee and Saline, where old folk could be heard recollecting what they’d witnessed of the Dust Bowl as children, as well as more than one devastating flood or tornado.

He’d never meant any harm toward his native Kansas, but he’d hungered and burned for more. With Richard dying it was like he’d been given permission. Now, other than his parents, there wouldn’t be anyone to tell all about it. Why Richard, why?

Whit had no talent or interest in animal husbandry, engineering or agribusiness. Having graduated two years after the Vietnam War had been declared over, he had no interest in toting a rifle on foreign soil. He knew he wasn’t soldiering material. Not like his sisters, both of whom had enlisted in the Army.

His older sister Charlotte, though never deployed, eventually made a career of serving Uncle Sam. His younger sister, Maylene, enlisted later. She served only four years and was also never deployed.

Though Whit’s parents never spoke to him about this, he believed they were proud of his sisters. He was the one they worried about, with his flighty talk about art, foreign travel, equality and horror movies.

A hint of tar and exhaust from the ferry’s engine licked the windless air, startling Whit as it dragged its dry tongue across his cheek. He was bearded and the chip on his shoulder – there existed one, he supposed, though small – didn’t match the chip in one of his front teeth. In the middle of his face, it was the first thing one saw when Whit smiled. That chip along with his fair complexion made him look more naïve and boyish than his years.

The beard was his statement. He was no hick. He was going places. I’ve been places too, I’ve lost my best friend, should I feel sorry for myself? Besides, the majority of boys sported facial hair, even at conservative McPherson High. They also tended to sport long hair to complement a mustache or sideburns. Whit’s splotchy beard was strawberry blond and he thought it matured his mousy lips and watery blue eyes. Even though he’d grown up toting feed bags, shoveling grain and manure, and baling hay, he had pipe-cleaners for arms and legs. He’d been a cross-country runner in school, his only participation in school sports, though he was a passionate baseball fan. On first glance he didn’t inspire assumptions that, as Richard used to say, he might be a specimen intent on chowing down from life’s feed bag.  

It seemed he brooded too much for his own good, but he wouldn’t take a page out of Richard’s playbook. Richard had been gloomily obsessed, ceaselessly asking himself the same stubborn question: What was the purpose of living?

No, Whit wanted life. He still had big dreams. There was a purpose to find, there had to be.  

Chilled sweat coated his arms. A spasm churned in his stomach. He hadn’t eaten for a day. He took his mind off food by watching seagulls circle and veer above the foaming V of the ferry’s wake. He’d never seen so many birds in one place at one time.

The coastline of Spain, behind him now, had flattened and spread into a yellowish haze. He turned toward the bow and Morocco, telling himself he had to learn how to let courage flood his veins.

Maybe he was born in that moment. It’s one he’s never been able to forget.

***

Carthage, known today as North Africa, was home to the ancient port of Ceuta, which is now a Spanish city on the Moroccan border. Phoenicians mined silver there, and in Spain, and as far north as what is now Britain. Ceuta was once their western outpost.

The Greeks came along. Then the Romans, who destroyed Carthage. Ceuta became their military camp.

So much history lay at Whit’s fingertips not far from the fringes of The Mediterranean Sea. To the Romans it was Mare Nostrum, Our Sea. He knew this. Just as he knew the word itself meant middle of the Earth.

He didn’t know that the Seven Peaks are strip of land linked to Africa’s northern shores that end with Monte Hacho, Beacon Hill. From there, one can see Gibraltar, the Northern Pillar for Hercules who’d been sent to steal Geryon, a monster with three heads and six legs. This wasn’t on Whit’s mind as he removed his passport from his shirt pocket and read the new tattoo that had been stamped there when he’d departed from Spain: Fronteras Salida Algeceras.

What was the most commonly used language in Morocco? Was the city called Tangier or Tangiers with an S? Whit felt uncomfortable not knowing. As much as he wanted to, he wasn’t certain he knew how to find out.

Just ask, he thought. That was Richard inside of him talking. Things would be okay. Was he nervous? He was. None of this visit had been part of his plan. All Hernan’s idea.

Hernan. One of a kind. The Venezuelan exuded a gravity and warmth that Whit had found easy to trust. He had a soft cocoa-butter face that spoke of gentleness and painfully earned wisdom. His small dark eyes tended to focus inward as if he was constantly doubting himself.

Whit believed he was ill-equipped to understand whatever Hernan might be thinking at any time. If he possessed any self-awareness, it was that he knew he couldn’t see the effect he had on others. He was feeling, always feeling, seldom generating enough clear rational thought to guide his actions. Hernan was his opposite. Calm, simple, seldom had much to say. Hernan was the perfect traveling partner and Whit knew he was lucky to have met him.

Whit’s plan had been to visit Madrid to view a lot of art there on his limited budget. If back at K-State he skipped a week of classes, he would still have six weeks free between semesters. Enough to clear his head and maybe get over losing Richard.

He had to laugh. Bitterly so. Nobody just gets over losing a best friend.

Spain made sense because he was considering a major in Spanish. He would test himself. He’d learn by speaking and absorbing the language. His father had surprised him when he’d remarked that given what had happened to Richard that Whit’s idea to take a trip wasn’t a bad one as long as Whit paid for it himself.

So, off he’d gone, unable to answer his father when the man had asked, But just what exactly are you hoping to find there?

***

Whit had met Hernan during a long morning wait for his Spanish train to be raised and lowered on to Portuguese rails. These were not the same width apart. As they’d chatted, the Venezuelan had suggested not only traveling to Portugal together but to Morocco too. Whit had been shocked that anyone would show any interest in him. He’d been lonely, as well, which made it easy to say yes to Hernan’s offer.

It had sounded so exotic, with Portugal first, Hernan insisting on it. Then, off they’d toot to Morocco, since Hernan appeared lonely too. Nor did he speak English and so would act as a willing and proper tutor for Whit in Spanish.

Whit’s head wasn’t teeming with history or knowledge from books. That would come decades later. Unlike Richard, he wanted to accept life, no matter how painful it could be. He wanted anything exotic, a vision of life away from what he considered stultifying overly traditional Kansas. Banal thoughts, he supposed, but ennobling and honest ones.

Crossings, he believed, helped anyone to define the essence of what it meant to exist. Nothing was static. All remained in motion. He must use this crossing to understand this better. He should distill insights from his quiet time, not waste it. Unlike his father, Whit didn’t have to be working all the livelong day, with church on Sundays without fail, football or baseball as a seasonal distraction, but always back to work, even when sick. To his father, living meant working. Doing God’s work. There was no other.

Yet his father had agreed with Whit’s mother, in his stoical sometimes grumpy way, when she had dished up a lame, They say, Whit, that travel broadens the mind.

He chuckled thinking of his Mom. She’d backed him fully and she’d consoled and listened to him when he broke down into tears day after day during his time back home to McPherson for Richard’s funeral. There wasn’t a cruel bone in his mother’s body. Nor in his father’s, for that matter.

***

Whit began to create a mental itinerary of what he imagined he might need, and what he should avoid upon arrival. One is perpetually arriving, he thought. He understood this, didn’t he? He wasn’t hopeless, but he knew nothing of the history of Morocco and Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph, son-in-law of Mohammed, his cousin and closest friend, who was stabbed with a poison sword on the steps of a mosque because he was willing to negotiate with other Muslims. Ali’s followers believed he should be Mohammed’s successor because he was a blood relation. They became Shi’atu Ali, the partisans of Ali. Known as Shiite Muslims today. So much bloodshed would have been avoided if only Mohammed had left instructions before he’d died. Successors to Mohammed were chosen. They were killed by the Quraysh, who later moved from Arabia to Damascus and eventually became the Umayyads. Northern Africa came into play when the Berbers attacked the Umayyads. During the 8th Century, Arab Muslims had formed a crescent around the Mediterranean that looked directly on to Europe. The Berbers didn’t like that. One of them, Tariq ibn Ziyad, was the namesake for Gibraltar. The island was called Jebel al-Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq, a dollop of rock strategically positioned that Tariq had conquered.

Whit didn’t know this history. A young provincial far from home for the first time, he viewed Gibraltar one final time. Like a thumbprint smeared into haze, it punctuated the bubbling trail that was the ferry’s wake. Not imposing, it was almost ghostly. Whit thought of it as shaped like a lozenge. Was it British or Spanish? He wasn’t sure. Maybe both. It was so tiny, so sheer in places. Why couldn’t Spain and England agree on who should have sovereignty? It was about control of access to the Mediterranean, wasn’t it? Neither country was about to give it up and why should they? This Whit understood vaguely. It was really all he knew about the island. Never had he dreamed he’d actually see it with his own eyes.

***

As a Berber, Tariq ibn Ziyad converted to become an Arab Muslim. He amassed an army at Ceuta. In the year 711 at the Battle of Guadalete, he led them to attack the Christian Visigoths that ruled the Iberian Peninsula, modern-day Spain, including what is now Portugal. After three years of fighting, Tariq ibn Ziyad drove the Visigoths north to the French Pyrenees. Inspired by his success, he planned to sack Constantinople and take all lands abandoned by Rome that had once formed a semi-circle around The Mediterranean. Tariq’s conquests would form a complete circle, a noose, allowing Muslims, not Romans, to claim The Mediterranean.

The Franks, however, entered the picture. In 732, they fought the Muslims head-on, led by Charles Martel, known as Martellus, or The Hammer. The Muslims were led by Emir Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi, Governor General of Al-Andalus. When his army was driven back, he ordered them to return to the Iberian Peninsula and regroup. A turning point came in 732 with the Battle of Tours. This is also known as the Battle of Poitiers. In Arabic, it’s known as The Court of Martyrs because this was the fight in which Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi was killed.

When it comes to this period of wars between Muslim and Christians, historians differ on many points. They don’t agree on where the battles occurred, or on the size of the conflicting armies. None of this was on Whit’s mind. After finding a place to sit on deck, he shut his eyes and let his face drink in the sunshine. Eventually, the grinding ceased in his stomach, cold sweats passed and he drifted into a nap.

Charles Martel, The Hammer, was the grandfather of Charlemagne, who became Augustus, Emperor of Rome. Another Augustus from this time was Saint Augustine, who Whit never once during his Sundays in church learned was a Berber from Algeria.

Europe, as it continued to form slowly, became a quilt of