Randy White - Hunter's moon

I could feel the running tide beneath us now, the canoe beginning to hobbyhorse among black waves. I adjusted our course, got my paddle rhythm set, before I said, “Give me twenty, twenty-five minutes and we’ll find out.”

I concentrated on paddling while Wilson sat with his forehead in his hands, resting I hoped. He had such a powerful personality it was easy to forget he was sick.

Leukemia contributed to the illusion. I’d lost a friend to the disease recently so I had a layman’s knowledge. It’s a progressive cancer in which the abnormal production of white blood cells destroys red blood cells. In the final stages, a person can appear healthy even while a microscopic war is being waged within. Anemia and bruising are the first symptoms. Death can be the next.

Even the word carries a chill. Like many cancers, leukemia seems inexplicably random and is therefore more frightening. Without clear cause and effect, the disease hints that life itself is random and without design. My friend Roberta Petish had a bright spirit, a huge heart, and she lived big up until a few days before her internal war was lost. I understood Wilson better because of her.

I liked the man’s aggressiveness. Instead of lying back waiting for death, he was determined to race the bastard to the finish line. I was glad to be with him. For now…

Paddling rough water kept my hands busy and allowed my mind to drift. Wilson’s silhouette at rest was an amorphous gray. He sat as silently as the battle raging inside his circulatory system. The man had survived his share of battles and prevailed in many. The research I’d done reminded me that my traveling partner was an unusual example of the species, sapiens.

Kal Wilson was a man of contradictions and one of those rare people who was stronger for them. His legal name, Kal, was actually an acronym comprised of his first name and two middle names. He’d been born and spent the early part of his life in the village of Hamlet, North Carolina, but his family had moved to Janesville, Minnesota, when he was an adolescent. Having roots in the Deep South and Bedrock North was an unusual political asset.

Wilson was a decorated combat pilot who, as a midwestern congressman, became known as his party’s steadiest antiwar voice. He was a conservative on some issues, liberal on others, but refused to be typecast as either.

Criticized by his party for refusing to join the rank and file, he ran as an Independent and won three more terms in the House and then a seat in the U.S. Senate. Wilson switched parties yet again when he ran for the presidency. Even his campaign platform bucked Democratic and Republican stereotypes with unorthodox positions on gun control, abortion, the death penalty, and drugs.

Wedge issues that defined lesser politicians set Wilson apart as a freethinking maverick. He was passionate about stem cell research but pushed hard for returning the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer to public schools. He was an environmental hawk who railed against the hypocrisy of not relying on our own oil preserves. He was an antiwar dove, although he warned of a “global fascist awakening.”

Voters have an affection for maverick outsiders that’s almost as strong as the contempt felt for mavericks by Washington insiders. Things did not go smoothly for Kal Wilson when he and his renegade administration arrived inside the Beltway.

By the fourth year of his term, the man’s star was flickering. “Unorthodox” had been redefined as “inept.” His administration had brokered a cease-fire in the Middle East but been blamed for Central America’s instability, particularly the countries bordering the Panama Canal.

Wilson’s main adversary had been Juan Rivera, a man I came to know well during my years in the region. Rivera was a Fidel Castro-style revolutionary who publicly, and repeatedly, outmaneuvered the American president, contributing to the perception that Wilson was weak.

When Wilson changed the phrase “global fascist awakening” to “global fascist fundamentalism,” it was perceived as a ploy to boost his approval rating. When he stopped referring to terrorists as “Muslim extremists,” insisting that “Islamicist killers” was more accurate, he drew fire from both parties in our politically correct Congress.

It got worse when a reporter from Al Jazeera television asked him to explain the difference between “Islamicist killers” and “Zionist killers”-an impossible question because of the way it was couched-but Wilson answered, anyway.

Zionists, he said, believe a Jewish state should exist in the world. Islamicists, he continued, believe that the world should exist as an Islamic state.

“Are they both killers?” the reporter pressed.

Wilson bulled ahead. “An interesting distinction. Killing women and children at a bus stop or in a Nazi concentration camp-or at the federal building in Oklahoma City, for that matter-should be referred to as ‘murder.’ They aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of cowardice.

“So ‘fascist fundamentalism’ would be a more accurate term when used generally. ‘Islamicists’ would be the specific that describes murderers who use religion as a shield.”

Kal Wilson, the “freethinking dove,” was vilified as a bigot and a warmonger, and he effectively alienated fundamentalists of all faiths.

It had something to do with a bounty being offered for his head.

The silhouette dozing in the front of the canoe was the president of the United States…

As my mind lingered on the complex personality that was Kal Wilson, I sometimes paused to remind myself what the man had achieved, trying to counterbalance his unpresidential snoring.

Why wouldn’t he snore? He was human… one of six billion members of our species who, at that very instant, were inhaling or exhaling, making respiratory noises, as the earth orbited through the silent universe that blazed above our canoe.

He was flesh and finite; an ordinary man. As a man, though, he had lived an extraordinary life.

Wilson was among the youngest men ever elected to the presidency. He’d upset an incumbent, served one turbulent term, then shocked the country by not running for a second.

“Our reasons,” he said, “are personal”-the plural “our” referring to his wife, who, he often said, was the smarter half of their two-person presidency.

At a news conference, a famous anchorman referenced Wilson’s fifty-seven percent approval rating, before pressing, “Is it because you and the First Lady fear that you’ve polarized the American people?”

Wilson’s reply was measured and presidential-he never lost his poise in public.

Offstage, though, an unseen microphone caught what he whispered to his wife: “What I fear is polarizing the American press by smacking one of those pompous assholes in the face. Most of them are spoiled brats born with silver spoons up their asses. That’s why feeding people a line of crap comes so natural.”

Like most presidents, Wilson had run-ins with the media. But his “spoiled brat” line so endeared him to the public that the media retaliated by attacking as a pack. “Personal reasons” wasn’t explanation enough for not running, so the press speculated. Theories made headlines based on shock value, not fact, and they ranged from the offensive to the grotesque.

Wilson never fired back, though. A distant descendant of Woodrow Wilson, he’d become an expert on the office long before he held it, and he was fond of stiff-arming reporters by quoting his predecessors instead of allowing his own words to be twisted. He remained in the background, refusing comment on world affairs, and taking pains not to second-guess the current administration.

An example: Wilson, a track star and boxer at the Naval Academy, made headlines by winning his over-fifty age group in a Chicago triathlon, but then quit the sport. Characteristically, he offered no explanation, but friends said it was because he felt it wasn’t in the nation’s best interest to divert the spotlight from a sitting president.