There is nothing more cliché than Disney’s song “It’s a Small World” *
The parlor game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, probably made the actor more famous than fighting sand worms or getting his shoelace caught on a tractor.
But isn’t coincidence amazing? It’s like an affirmation that the impossible is actually…possible.
1989. I am stationed in Zweibrucken, Germany flying the mighty C-23A twin-engine Sherpa, a plane also known during its brief seven-year Air Force tenure as “the slowest, ugliest plane in our fleet.” I’ve just graduated from flight school and moved from a shared apartment with a twin mattress on the floor and a giant Orca pool toy hanging from my ceiling. I’m confident I’ll decorate my new abode in Germany differently, now that I’m an Air Force officer and a qualified pilot.
But single occupancy apartments are scarce in the villages surrounding our base near the French border. I end up living on the second floor of an old farmhouse in the 500-person village of Rosenkopf, about five miles east of the base. The first floor has been modified—the foundation split into a series of stalls for the pigs my landlord raises. The smell of dank hay and the livestock reminds me of the couple years we lived on a farm in Oregon along the Columbia Gorge. Good memories.
I bring a couple of my squadron mates over to check out my new digs the day after I move in. I ask if they smell the hay. I see them look at each other before one of them, a blond-haired Captain who’s been in the squadron for two years already, speaks up. “It smells like shit.”
But I love it. The house. The village. There’s only one other American family in the town and only a handful of German families with any English skills. A great opportunity to learn the language.
Six months later and I’m best friends with the elderly German couple two houses up the hill. The husband, a bed-ridden World War II vet who spent most of the war as a POW in America, and his gregarious non-English speaking wife who makes it her personal mission to feed me. Two of their three daughters also live in the old farmhouse and before long, I’m spending holidays with them—an amateur Thanksgiving effort on my part, and them folding me into a memorable Christmas picnic in the woods with sleds, schnapps, and sausage. We become good friends.
That spring, I’m sitting next to the husband’s bed and he’s helping me through a conversation in German while we both drink beer. With each gulp of Parkbrau, I feel my German language skills improving. He’s describing his third daughter—the one who lives in the US—and her family. She had married a GI some twenty years before and she and her husband and grown boys live in northern Idaho. I switch to English.
“I used to live close to there—a little town west of there in Washington called Kettle Falls.” I have no idea why I’m telling him this. I was in 7th grade when I lived there, and the population was less than 1,500. I don’t remember a stoplight.
My friend’s eyes flash. “That’s where they lived before. In Kettle Falls!”
I shake my head. “Are you sure? It’s a very small town.”
“Yes, Kettle Falls. When did you live there?”
I do some mental math. “Around 1976.”
“That’s when my daughter and her family were there. They lived there for about five years.” He calls for his wife and rattles off our discovery in German. I understand enough to recognize he’s asked her to go get a picture.
She comes back and thrusts the picture in front of me. Her husband is staring at my face over the back of the photograph to see if I recognize his daughter.
I’ve never seen their daughter or her husband in my life. They’re posed for a family picture with their two boys sitting in front of them. I stare closer.
“That’s Chase and Del…Sanborn,” I stab at the photo with my finger. “From Boy Scouts!”
I hear a “Mein Gott” behind me from my friend’s wife and he utters something—also in German—I don’t understand. I explain to them that their
grandsons and I went on camp-outs together, built snow caves, and cooked with Dutch ovens. I leave out the stories of lighting farts, a stolen Playboy, and a wedgie gone bad. Because I’m a mature Air Force officer now…and I don’t know how to say “wedgie” in German.
They insist I call their grandkids on the phone right away until we calculate the time difference and realize it’s midnight in Idaho. The next morning, I’m back at their house and they are holding the phone to my ear. Del, the younger of the brothers, is on the line and we both marvel at the odds that I’m standing in his grandparents’ house. We catch up on each other’s lives. After ten minutes, we run out of things to talk about, and I hand the phone back to his grandmother. We’ve never spoken since.
But it’s a story that I’ve never tired of telling. Ask a hundred random Germans if they’ve heard of the farming village of Rosenkopf and ninety-nine will say “nein.” (did I just do an English-German homonymic alliteration? Is that a thing?) Ask a hundred Americans what state has a town named Kettle Falls and ninety-nine will have no idea. But there I stood, in a German farmer’s kitchen on the phone with his grandchildren, my childhood Boy Scout buddies.
Impossible? Obviously not.
God. Fate. Karma. You believe in what you believe, and I’ll stick with my beliefs. But I think we can agree it’s a small world out there. And all things are possible.
* “It’s a Small World” is also the third most annoying family road trip song behind “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and “This Is the Song That Never Ends…”