AUGUST 16, TUESDAY

MORE ABOUT RAY SMITH

Today I‘ll continue with some stories about my friend Ray Smith whose memorial service is going to be on August 27th in Pasadena, with a zoom link.

One memory was of Ray‘s dog. He always had a large dog. Pet dogs were very rare in India, pets of any kind were. There were stray dogs everywhere in India with a hangdog look as they were chased from place to place, hairless scroungers belonging to no one. Ray would go down to the kitchen of the school to get discarded bones with a little meat left on them for the dog to gnaw on. There was no such thing as dog food.

One winter in Allahabad Ray made a boat of his own design out of tin that the two of us paddled down to the Sangam, the joining of the Ganges and Jumna rivers where there were millions of bathers coming to bathe in the sacred waters during annual Magh Mela. The river had hundreds of boats which would take people out to the holy spot to bathe and to collect water to take home for puja ceremonies. We had a great time paddling among them.

But at the same time as we were doing this on land a disaster was unfolding. The flat sandy land below the large Red Fort, built by the great Moghul king Akbar was covered with tents like a great medieval city. Each tent had a sadhu from some distant part of India who would welcome pilgrims from his area. They would find him by the large flag on a tall bamboo pole that was his sign. There were hundreds of these tents and between the tents were walkways for pilgrims to get down to the river. The new Indian government was responsible for the safety of these millions of uncoordinated pilgrims but it was an impossible task, either to keep them from getting too deep in the river since almost no one knew how to swim, or elsewhere. There was a parade of sadhus, holy men, with matted locks and this case not a stitch on carrying and swinging ceremonial swords. The pilgrims lining the walkway became frightened of these wild looking men and retreated from the parade of sword swinging naked sadhus smeared with mud and ashes. Farther back were pilgrims who were eager to see the parade who were pushing forward. The two groups collided in a very shallow muddy low spot and began to slip and slide and in the panic the two groups trampled over each other and over 1000 people lost their lives. We were in Ray‘s tin boat paddling around on the river and then back home and knew nothing of this while his father, Caldwell, had brought a car he had access to to try and transport hurt people to a hospital, but in the chaos of the day this took hours to do.

Ray in his teens was a hunter. Hindus are not hunters, but the villagers living in small villages perched on the steep, steep slopes of the lower Himalayas where our Woodstock School, a boarding school for missionary children was located, were hunters. Ray‘s father was the head of the Landour Language School, the school where my father learned Hindi when he first came to the mission field. It was operated out of Kellogg Church at the very top of the mountain with a view back to the high Himalayas and Ray‘s family lived far below in Redwood Cottage indicating their California roots beside Woodstock School.

In those days India was much farther away from the United States than it is now. It was so far away and the journey by boat, and sometimes overland, was so long that missionaries were expected to remain in India for six year with a year‘s furlough in the United States to visit relatives and raise money for their mission from churches on the seventh. My parent‘s turn was in summer 1941. We came back to the United States over the Pacific by way of Japan on a Japanese steamship, the Nittu Maru. But once back the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor on December 6th kept us here for the duration of the war. I was four years old at the time and had been taken care of daily by an ayah and spoke Hindi with her. But during the war years the Hindi slipped away. The last word I remembered was „hati“ or elephant.

But Ray‘s family was unable to go on furlough because of the war and I don‘t believe they ever did go on furlough. As a result Ray, who also had an ayah, grew up speaking fluent Hindi.

Ray, as a teenager, had a US Army surplus carbine with army surplus ammunition that he would hunt, often with a villager friend as a guide with whom he spoke Hindi. He would hunt deer and other animals and his family would eat the meat. Good meat was hard to come by in the Mussoorie bazaar where there was no refrigeration.

One time the goats of one of the villages were being killed and eaten by a panther and they asked for Ray‘s help in eliminating the panther. On his visit to the village he spotted the panther and was tracking it when he came around the curve of the mountain and there in front of him was, not a panther, but a rare, in the mountains, Indian tiger. The tiger turned and charged him and Ray cooly fired and by great good luck instead of bouncing the bullet off the tiger‘s thick skull hit it in the eye and killed it. Ray had to pay a fine for killing a tiger without permission but ended up with the processed tiger skin and in the process became a local legend.

Another time as a teenager Ray built himself a motor cycle using a well pump for a motor and rode from Allahabad several hundred miles to Mussoorie, stopping to visit missionary friends of his parents along the way. His account of his trip is very matter of fact as if there was nothing odd about a boy riding an strange looking self built motorcycle across the Indian plains at a time when there were almost no cars or even motorcycles in India and almost no places to fill up with gas, while making any repairs he needed to, himself, along the way.

There are also stories of his trying to construct with friends a glider in the Himalayas where the hillsides were so steep that only a hundred feet from launch you would be enormously high in the air. Luckily, this project never got off the ground.

Another story was about a ten hour run Ray made, just to see how long it would take, from Landour at 7000 feet altitude down to the Aglar river at 2000 feet and up to Nag Tibba mountain at 10,000 feet and back again in ten hours, another legendary feat.

I was not along on most of these adventures, I was not a doer or a maker. But I do remember swimming across the hundred yard wide icy Ganges river with Ray in some kind of makeshift swimming suit at the place where the Ganges comes, quite swiftly, from its Gaumukh source high in the Himalayas onto the Indian plains at Haridwar in the Siwalik hills. This was on a school sociology field trip. Later on that trip I was in the jungle by the river with Ray and heard a cough that he said quietly was made by a tiger.

We all returned to the United States after graduating from Woodstock School in 1954. While in college Ray married Elaine. They came east on their honeymoon and stayed in our family house in Ithaca, New York. And then later when I graduated from college in 1959 I hitch hiked out to California and stayed with Ray and Elaine for a month helping Ray with another of his projects, building a house, with no previous housebuilding experience, from a readymade kit provided by Sears Roebuck. He was well on the way to putting it together before I arrived and the only part of building the house that I remember was assembling the plumbing that came in the kit. Neither of us had any plumbing experience but followed the written instructions, we first put in a little caulking and then sealed up each joint between the pipes with melted lead. The caulking would hold the lead which would seal the pipe. But we got it wrong. It was the lead that would hold the caulking that would swell up and seal the pipe and we put in much too little caulking and much too much lead. When done we tested the sealing of the joints by blocking the bottom and pouring water in the vents to the roof. Every single joint began to drip. I think we solved this, temporarily, by pounding in the lead and coating the joints with some sort of compound. Whether this passed inspection or not I don‘t know because I was on my way hitchhiking up the west coast and then back home to Ithaca, New York.

Neither Ray or I were letter writers at the time and there was no email. But we met from time to time at Woodstock School reunions. My month long Amtrak circle of the country this last summer would have put visiting Ray again at the center. But my wife Kathe and Ray died unexpectedly within a week of each other the year before, so when I finally was able to make the trip Ray wasn‘t there to visit. But I made the trip and got to visit with Elaine and hear stories about Ray and to catch up on his later life. I miss Ray.