Chapter Six

                              Chapter Six - Changes

1977. I packed up the Singer Gazelle and headed north to Washington State. I’d made this trip before but this time I said some goodbyes, not knowing what the future might hold.

The Singer ran like a champ. The Scarab arrived a few days later, towed north on a trailer by a guy I met with a pickup truck who happened to be going the same way.

First stop was the family complex on Stretch Island, two large historic homes overlooking Puget Sound, one occupied by my parents, Harry and Mary and the other occupied by my father’s sister, Aunt Bonnie. Bonnie’s house was big, like a mansion. It was built in 1885. Spreading back behind the houses was a vineyard. I was there to help with the grapes.

Two men, a few years younger than I, were employed by the family to work the vineyard. Frank and Phil were recently back from extended tours in Vietnam. They occasionally talked of their experiences there, laughing about horrible situations they had found themselves in.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that” I said.

“Lucky you.”

“I was a conscientious objector”

“How’d that turn out?”

“I worked for two years in a state mental hospital.”

Frank laughed “That sounds like a shitty deal.”

“Nobody ever took a shot at me.”

Frank and Phil lived at the far end of the island in a small house with another veteran named Mick. Mick had tripped a mine and was covered with scar tissue from the waist down. I spent a lot of time at their place over the following weeks, sharing stories. “Nothin’ like pitching grenades.”

Frank added “The smartest guy on the island is Jim Summers. He went to Canada.”

There were weekly parties at their house. People came from near and far. The only rule was that nothing could be based on anything store bought. We ate salmon and rockfish from the Sound, venison sausage, elk stew, berry pies and drank home brew and smoked locally grown pot.

One day my father handed me the phone. “I understand you might be a sailor”

“Sure.”

“Would you like to go fishing?”

“Sure. What’s the deal?”

“We’ll be fishing for albacore tuna. You’re the only crew. Ideally, I just drive the boat. You do all the work but it’s easy work. No baiting hooks or cleaning fish. You get 20% of the catch. When can you be here?”

“Well, a couple of days?”

“How about tomorrow?”

Saturday, August 27th, 1977. I arrived in Westport. At the end of the dock I found the Coolidge. This was an old boat. Layers of chipped white paint and painted-over rust stains, every inch of her worn and nicked.

She was a graceful massively constructed old bird. Tucked behind her bulwarks a wheelhouse looked minuscule on such a substantial hull. The decks were wood, sealed with black pine tar. Winches and machines were everywhere. Sixty two feet long, the Coolidge had a tall straight bow and sleek lines characteristic of a halibut schooner. A round bottomed boat, she rolled even when in port tied to a dock.

Harold’s cabin consisted of a bunk in the wheelhouse. I had the entire forecastle to myself. Four upper and lower sea bunks lined each side for a total of eight. A long table ran down the center with benches on both sides. Port side aft was the galley, dominated by a large diesel galley stove against the bulkhead. The forecastle of a traditional sailing ship. Five inch square frames were visible in places on eight inch centers, more frame than space between the frame.

As Harold the owner and skipper explained, halibut schooners were built using measurements off a model rather than drawings on a piece of paper. Her design evolved over centuries when folks went to sea without motors and the shape of the hull was paramount. The Coolidge was one of the faster boats in the fleet in spite of her limited power, a single Allis Chalmers truck engine.

Sept 6th. Tuesday. We’d been running through some weather which made everything difficult. We shut down the evening of the fifth. The Coolidge’s riding sail held her bow 45 degrees off the wind and waves. Sometimes she’d sit motionless. Then there’d be a thundering crash against the side of the boat and she’d lurch and shudder. She’d roll slightly one way and farther back the other way and then back again right up on her beam, 90 degrees over on her side, or so it seemed. One doesn’t fall out of one’s bunk because it’s a coffin, a shoulder width box.

In the dimness of night I made my way on deck to use the head. Ten foot breaking waves enveloped the vista far into the distance in all directions, whitecaps aglow with phosphorescence. It was a boiling, day-glow, neon other-world.

Sept 9th: We ran through the night and much of the day south past the latitude of San Francisco. Lots of time to sleep and read. In the past days we’d seen many Dall’s porpoises who have a shorter nose and bottle nosed dolphins who have as the name implies a longer nose. The dolphins typically crossed under the boat and were gone.

We got a good look at a large buff colored sperm whale. It swam along side for about twenty minutes. Enormous, smooth and unimaginably powerful, it moved with slow isometric movements, pushing down on the water with its control surfaces and accelerating. It would blow, the wind carrying spray for some distance, then arch its back applying pressure on its tail and pectoral fins and glide under the surface. Further away we saw what appeared to be sharks and killer whales circling a carcass of some kind.

For a while we were accompanied by three bottle nosed dolphins, playing in front of the boat in a relaxed kind of way, staying close to the bow and making intricate choreographed movements, two dancing in unison, turning, jumping, diving, and the third going the opposite way in counterpoint.

The weather improved and we started catching fish, a few at a time every few hours. We fished with the Arrow, a larger halibut schooner with her wheelhouse aft and the Tryend, a smaller halibut schooner with her wheelhouse forward like the Coolidge’s. The halibut schooners are the only boats this far offshore because they are the only boats that can stand the beating.

The fishing was easy in that you don’t bait hooks and clean fish. It’s hard in that I was the only crew. We’d been catching about 75 fish per day. Then the weather cleared and the catch went up to 120 fish and then as high as 270 fish. On those days work extended around the clock. Then a million boats appeared and it turned into a derby. Harold shook his head and off we went farther out to sea, 150 miles offshore.

According to Harold, the migration of albacore tuna is a bit of a mystery. They disburse into the central Pacific and then in August make their way east toward Washington, Oregon and California where nutrient upwellings from the continental shelf stock the web of life and feed this gathering of species. Albacore pursue small squid on the surface though they’ll also dive deeper in pursuit of other fish.

Being warm blooded, albacore like specific water temperatures. Following temperature gradients is a way to find the fish. They arrive off North America hungry and will bite anything, such as a brightly colored plastic squid. Porpoises never bite at the plastic squid.

When albacore first come out of the water, alive, they’re iridescent, the colors of a rainbow. Large bewildered eyes stare to the side. They flop and attempt to get themselves moving, through water, to breathe. But they slowly suffocate and the color goes out of their once beautiful flanks. They become a gray corpse to be packed away on ice. This fishing business is in spite of all the beauty not an entirely happy place.

Sept. 14th. Whatever lettuce or other greens we brought along were long gone, either consumed or victims of the ravages if nature. Entropy is constantly on the march.

Throughout the night I heard subdued chirping sounds. I ventured on deck. The moonlit sea was calm. No wind. There were no other boats in sight, just groups of porpoises as far as the eye could see in every direction. About 35 were gathered around the Coolidge. New York City in porpoise land. I wondered if they always group up like this at night and fill the water with chirping sounds.

Throughout the day as we motored further offshore the dolphins re-appeared in groups of as many as 20 and swam, diving and flying through the air. They’d drop back far behind off to one side and then accelerate and pass the boat in seconds, even though the Coolidge was going 10 knots.

About 20 dolphins swam for a while close to the bow in a complex dance. The water was crystal clear and their movements underwater clearly visible from above. They dove in tremendous swoops and turns, sometimes sounding straight down to 50 or 60 feet and climbing at 45 degrees straight out of the water, soaring through the air. They would appear on the horizon and come leaping and diving and arrive in no time, often swimming in pairs or trios. The big leaders were first to arrive. The ones with scars on their bodies. The rest of the flock was an even mix. Sometimes a pair would repeatedly brush up against each other in a sensuous display or rub each other around in spirals. I envied their endless exuberance, their absolute freedom, no confines of dwellings roads or paths, no gravity. A three dimensional world in which to play.

I dreamt in full, living color every night. I dreamt about San Francisco’s wooden stairways and old buildings. I dreamt about an acting school in the country. I’m standing with a group in a circle. They all say something and look at me. Someone says that I should sing or something. I try to sing. They all walk away. I dreamt that a friend was studying apostrophology, the study of apostrophes, I dreamt about sneezing rats, which upon awakening turned out to be the old hull squeaking and growling in gentile waves.

Sept 15th. The weather was picking up again. I ate breakfast in the galley, one arm locked under the table for support, chasing food around a plate.

We’d been keeping pace with the Arrow. She showed her real beauty when the weather kicked up, her tall, straight bow slicing into the seas, rising and lowering; her sleek narrow entry, her wide round midsection and low fat stern gracefully rolling along. The image of the old boat in her glory, surrounded by 100s of leaping and dancing dolphins will not be soon forgotten. They filled the half mile distance between the two boats. I watched them for half an hour from the bow, particularly a group of ten that played there. They swam under water deeper and deeper until I could no longer see them, though the water is very clear. They were all gone as suddenly as they appeared.

Sept. 16th. 60 miles from landfall. Lots of cleaning to do. Some rain helped with the decks. The sunrise was a spectacular display of purple, orange, blue and gray pastels, layered in rolling lumps of clouds, streaks and stripes.

The water turned greenish brown. We saw land, then the Davenport smokestack then Santa Cruz off our port side and ultimately Moss Landing dead ahead.

On Sunday we landed in Moss Landing. The dock moved under my feet as I walked. “What an unstable dock” I thought. Then I stepped onto solid ground and it rolled like the Coolidge. I’d grown used to the motion of the boat and was disoriented, almost as if I was seasick but in this case land sick.

Moss Landing was dominated by a large busy restaurant packed with locals out for a Friday night. An Italian operation, it was run by three related families. The old man off the Cribari wine bottle, the senior patron, did some of the cooking. He emerged from the galley about 10 and stood at the end of the bar telling lies about an 1100 pound marlin and yelling at his grandkids who were washing dishes. He and his wife who was working that night as a cocktail waitress, were very funny people. His son Joe, the bartender, was a fast worker, efficient, friendly, to a point. Another son cooked and an assortment of other sons, daughters, nephews and nieces did everything else. I talked to sailers, fishermen, hippies, Italians, Mexicans and Lebanese representing Salinas. I ordered and ate three entire salads.

We motored to Monterey and had dinner with friends of Harold’s named Buzz, a poet and Barbara, a ceramic potter. One of Buzz’s poems was about the actor Richard Boone, his brother. A takeoff on “Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity, of whom Muhammad Ali said t’was greater than he”.

I slept about four hours and was up scrubbing bin boards and helping unload the hold. I had to buy a California Commercial fishing license so I ended up with about a thousand dollars or about $50 per day, not bad pay for the days spent laying around reading. Not as good for those 24 hour days, fishing and packing fish away in the hold.

The word around town was that the weather outside was rotten. We traded an albacore for a bushel of shrimp many of whom had roe attached. That night we visited Buzz and Barbara again who had moved into a house belonging to the Avon Cosmetics family, a waterfront home in Carmel where they would be house sitting for a few weeks. “We might be stuck here a while” Harold said.

“OK by me” I replied. Harold walked the dock talking about the weather. We were tied to the public fishing pier in the center of town, creating quite a disturbance. One of the advantages of being a big old fishing boat is that towns think of you as a tourist draw. “Stay as long as you want””Never leave”. I could have sat on the deck answering questions all day if I’d wanted to. “What kinda fish you catch?”

The afternoon of the Sept 18th we moved back to Moss Landing where we took on ice. Lifting one side of the main hatch, I felt something shift in my lower back and collapsed on the deck in excruciating pain. I made my way to the bunk where I spent the rest of the day. We departed Moss Landing that evening. We spent the following day underway in big waves and winds too strong for fishing. The lines would just have gotten tangled. Every movement of the boat, every booming wave, seemed to go directly to my back.

On Sept 23rd we returned to Moss Landing again. Then took off again. I wrote in the journal “Bad weather. Bad back. Really bad back. I love the ocean. I don’t care if I ever see another dying fish”. The motion of the boat had become painful. I was of no further value.

On Sept 27th we returned again to Moss Landing. There Harold put me on a bus headed for San Francisco where I stayed flat on my back for a few days at Marilyn’s before making the agonizing trip north.

October of 1978 I moved into a duplex belonging to my sister’s family where I managed twelve units in exchange for rent. I was throwing pots at Evergreen State College, thinking that someday I might go to work there.

The Pot Shop, otherwise known as Messy Arts, offered classes and studio time to the general public, through the Leisure Ed Program. I spent evenings there making things out of clay. Steve H, who worked at the pot shop and I became friends and he ultimately moved in with me.

Dan Evans, the College President and prior Governor of the State of Washington, showed up wanting to throw pots. After a quick lesson form Steve, away Dan Evans went. Over the next week he threw small cylinders off a mound, busting them up and recycling the clay. The following week he made a tall museum quality vase.

Almost every night there was a party somewhere among the six duplexes. Sometimes there was a chess game. Sometimes poker. Sometimes just eating and talking.

GB, a young black guy, lived in the end unit. Walking back from a party he started singing. “There goes my baby, movin’ on down the line.” I joined in and we hit some harmonies. “Love those oldies” he said.

“Yeah that song’s a little before your time”.

“My dad loved music”.

We sang a couple more songs. GB had a beautiful voice, reminiscent of David Ruffin. We decided to put together an a cappella singing group. All we needed was one or two more people which would have been easy if we’d had the time. But GB was a journeyman concrete finisher working on the Satsop cooling towers.

The Satsop nuclear power plant was part of a plan that ultimately ended prior to completion. The governor, Dixie Lee Ray became known as Dixie Gamma Ray. “Beats roofing” GB proclaimed.

“I’ve done some painting” I replied. “The work being mindless allows your mind to wander. There’s always a change of setting too”.

GB continued “A couple of years ago I decided to try hot tar roofing in Phoenix. Hundred and sixteen degrees. The Mexicans knew what to do. You dip a towel in a bucket of water and drape it over your head. Keep dipping it every ten minutes or so. I figured I’d tough it out. Then I heard one of the crew tell the foreman ‘Hey Jose. I don’t think the negro’s going to make it.’ I started doing the towel trick but I only lasted a day”.

On another occasion GB suggested “Let’s go down to Stephan’s I’ll show you how to pick up ladies.”

“Really. What’s your secret”.

“No secret. Just the basics. Don’t quit till the band quits. If she tells you her name remember it”.

Stephan’s was a night club at the end of the Port Peninsula. GB was making some headway. I sat at a table listening to the band. The song ended and people headed back toward their tables. As a woman passed she pointed at me and whispered “You’re next.”

I followed her to her seat and asked her for a dance. We danced one song and the singer announced “Last dance everybody, last dance.” It was a slow one. When it ended we introduced ourselves and she said “Some friends and I are having a little get together, would you like to join us?”

“Sure, I’m here with a buddy.”

“Does he need a ride?”

“No he drove.”

“No problem then.”

Nancy and I dated a couple of times. She had an accentuated figure and loved to show it off dancing. Men couldn’t take their eyes off of her.

One evening she and Steve and I were drinking shots of cognac and Nancy began to stagger. She looked blankly in my direction and said “Slap me.”

“What?”

“I said slap me. Three times. Hard.”

I couldn’t do it. Failed the performance review. After that, she was always busy.

There’s a junction where interstate freeway I-5 heads south and state freeway 101 heads west. Everything is four to six lanes wide. Standing in the center of this maze was a young black man. He had no coat. It was the middle of winter. The sun was going down. I slammed on the brakes and yelled “Get in quick.”

He jumped in.

“How in the world did you end up hitchhiking there?”

“I’m trying to get home to California. These guys were giving me a ride. My backpack, coat, everything, was in the trunk. They dropped me off where they headed out 101 and took off with all my stuff.”

“Deliberately?”

“Oh yeah”.

“Bottom feeders. I’ve got an extra coat at my house, I’ll give you a coat.”

“Oh man. I would’a froze.”

At the house Spenser played some blues guitar. He wrote everyone a song. The guy was brilliant. He also had a little problem.

“I’m a heroin addict. I went to Canada to get into a rehab program that would get me clean. But I couldn’t do it.”

“You look OK to me.”

“Methadone. It’ll wear off soon enough.”

“Why don’t you just hang out here a couple of days and see what happens.”

First came the sinusitis, he fidgeted, then came the nausea. By the second day he was sweating. It was like he had the flu. “You know how good it feels to be on heroin?”

“Actually, no.”

“Well, as great as it feels, this giving it up feels equally shitty. It’s the other end of the same curve.”

The third morning Spenser was gone.

Johari had a show on the college radio station, KAOS radio. She played a mix of soulful jazz. I had become a fan of her sultry voice and was ultimately introduced to Johari at a party. She was medium height with black eyes, black wavy hair and smooth dark skin.

“Johari? Do you have a radio show?”

“That’s me” she laughed. A while later she mentioned that her great grandfather four times removed was Kit Carson. She was a mix of Native, African and European descent.

We spent the evening talking and dancing and eventually ended up at her apartment where we spent the night. In the morning one of Johari’s roommates, a thin black man, gave me a bone chilling look. Johari and I just weren’t meant to be.

Les and Lani had been dating for a year and were not getting along. He showed up and transferred to Evergreen State College and slept on the couch. He and Lani carried on long conversations on the phone and after a week the phone company demanded a $200 deposit. Lani eventually showed up and against everybody’s advice they got married.

Steve D dropped by. Steve was tall, dark and exceedingly handsome. “I’ve brought the two Cs” he proclaimed, placing a bag on the table. “Cognac and columbian”. We briefly imbibed and left to hit the clubs.

Is pleasure something that makes our life more meaningful or is it the source of craving, addiction, and dissatisfaction? Some Buddhist theory advocates an ascetic way of life. But then pleasure might be a way to expand our love and compassion for all beings, provided one can apply antidotes when pleasure turns to addiction. I had no answer but it didn’t matter.

The following morning we crewed on a Columbia race boat owned by a physician in town in the Sunday series, as was often the case not well rested.

The beginning of summer Steve sailed the Columbia to the San Juans. Les and I sailed the Scarab. In Gig Harbor we tied up at the Tides Tavern and ventured ashore where we encountered a friend of Steve’s named George. George was well known locally as the singer in a band called The Trendsetters, a James Brown cover band. As one would expect, he was an excellent dancer.

George danced with a tall attractive woman. Then another. He had chartered a 36 foot Nova yacht, complete with two escorts for the weekend. The music business was very good to George. He was also a County Commissioner.

Les and I left The Tides after midnight under sail in light air, sailing toward the upper end of the bay, looking for open space at a dock or a good place to anchor. We passed what appeared to be a dock with open space across from a large tugboat. As we approached though, something wasn’t right. The dock was lit with red and green running lights like a boat. We tied up behind a sailboat that looked very much like the Scarab.

I often pulled into a dock late at night and left before dawn, thus avoiding paying for moorage. In this case, we were startled when a low voice calmly emanated from the tug “Good evening gentlemen.”

He welcomed us aboard the tug for some warm tea. “They told me I couldn’t have a dock. Environmental crap. What problem would it be? So, regulatorily, it’s a boat that’s backed up onto the beach.”

“A long skinny boat looking somewhat like a dock” Les said.

I added “With boats tied to it on both sides. What’s the little sailboat across from you. The Sea Dart. That rings a bell”.

“Tristan Jone’s boat. Tristan Jones, who authored “The Incredible Voyage”. If the story is true, he had sailed Sea Dart down to Peru, trucked it up to Lake Titicaca and sailed down the Paraguay River to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a great yarn and the boat at least was real. Les and I stayed up most of the night talking with our host.

Les and Lani moved back to Marin where he became a software engineer. He made gobs of money but always worked himself out of a job and had to start over often in another country. They remained married long enough to have three beautiful kids. Ultimately things fell apart leaving all wondering again about the duality of marriage. Might some of us do better in a tribe?

When nothing else was happening, I ventured out to Stephen’s. The routine struck me as ridiculous. Ask a woman to dance, dance, sit down. Then do it again. On one expedition a thin woman wearing a stylish leather vest caught my eye. “Dance?” I asked. A fast dance was followed by a slow dance. I put my arm gently around her waist.

“Feel that?” she asked?

“Feel what?” I replied. She twisted slightly emphasizing a firmness above her waist under my hand. “OK. Sure. What’s that?”

“It’s a gun. I always carry a gun.”

“No shit. What are you worried about in here?”

“You never know” she replied turning toward me as if to get a better look. At her house Sherry removed her shirt to reveal a small pistol in a leather holster strapped under her arm. “My dad’s the sheriff” she said. “He gets me exploding bullets.”

We dated a few times but she made it clear that I was not someone she’d ever introduce to her parents. Which was fine with me. She surely knew best. I thought when we met that she might be the one but no..

My sister, Pat, at eleven years my senior, was in some ways more like a second mother than a sister. World War Two and a few other things had come along between our births. When I was still a child she moved out to attend college, then off to another college, then another where her husband Eric pursued graduate degrees and employment, then off to do field research on Ticopia, a remote island in the South Pacific, then to Connecticut and then to Olympia. In Olympia we only connected occasionally because she was gone advocating for women’s rights with her traveling women’s theatre the Co-Respondents and later was off traveling, producing travel videos for PBS.

Much of this was done with her friend Sandie. It all began when the two travelled to Europe in the 1950s, transiting the Atlantic on a small Italian liner. Just out of college, they made the trip when few other Americans did.

(phone rings) “Hello”.

“Hi Harry it’s Sandie”.

“Sandie! What’s up? You guys back in town?”

Sandie laughed. “Yes. And I have an unusual request. An acquaintance who is recently divorced is having a coming out party.”

“A coming out party?”

“Well something like that A celebration of divorce. I’ve been invited and the deal is I’m supposed to bring either a casserole or a bachelor and I’m not wanting to make a casserole”.

I said sure and a couple of days later we arrived at Gretchen’s waterfront home. It was a small gathering. She sang a song, “Come softly to me”. Then she sang “I’m Mister Blue”. Both had been number one hits when I was in Junior High. We used to dance to them at The Wutzit, a catholic dance venue for kids in San Jose.

Later, talking with Gretchen, I was informed that she had written and arranged the groups music and sang harmonies. “We were the Fleetwoods. Remember?”

“I loved The Fleetwoods. One of my favorite groups. Wow, you must have been a kid”.

“We were in High School. Fleetwood is the phone prefix for West Olympia”.

We talked for a while and made an agreement whereby I would replace the roof on her garage in exchange for tying the Scarab to a buoy in front of her house. She insisted on signing a contract. “I’ve never signed a contract” I said.

“I thought you were a contractor in San Francisco”.

“Yeah but I never signed anything. A person’s honor is worth more than their signature.”

I tied the Scarab to the buoy and did the roof. Then I launched a 21 foot Piver Trimaran that I had purchased for a song and tied it behind the Scarab. A few times I visited with Gretchen and the conversation occasionally turned to how rotten the music business was. Lying thieves and scoundrels around every corner. She was bitter and with good cause.

(phone rings) “Hello?”

“Hi Harry it’s Gretchen. I’ve been thinking about this boat deal. You actually have two boats on the buoy.”

“Well yeah but it’s one buoy”.

“And two boats”.

To make a long story short, we ended up in court over $200. I was dressed up and ready to go. GB sat looking at me. I said “It’s a done deal. I can’t lose”.

GB asked “Who is this person?”

“Gretchen. You know. The rock star”.

GB laughed. “You don’t have a chance”.

In court, the judge moved our case to the front of the docket. “We have a case here that I’d like to move up because I don’t want to take up any more of these people’s time than is necessary”.

Gretchen presented her case and sat down. I began and was promptly silenced by the judge. “You need to understand. My mind is made up on this case and if you get argumentative it’s just going to cost you more”. The judge split the difference, giving Gretchen half what she was asking for, which wasn’t much. On one hand it was never about the money. On the other it was all about the money.

In the hallway I wrote her a check. “It’s a cruel world” she said. She had a point. Gretchen was an enormous talent. She hit stardom in her 18th year, the top of the charts. By her 19th year it was over. The managers and bosses took everything.

I was making breakfast. From the kitchen window I noticed a woman walking down the sidewalk toward town. She was slender with thick, curly black hair. The next morning, she passed again. She walked on her toes, almost on pointe. She became an alarm clock, a reason to get up at a certain time.

Then one day she didn’t walk by. Nor the next. And so it went for a week. I wondered: Imagine, if she was the one and I failed to act. A whole life that won’t happen now.

Then, there she was again. I was out the door and caught up with her at the corner. “Pardon me. Pardon me. I have to talk to you. I live over there and I see you walk by every day and I’d just like to introduce myself.”

Her name was Frankie. She walked like a ballet dancer because she was a ballet dancer. We dated for a few weeks but there was no big spark. She was locked into her mother and son and I was an interloper.

Steve D, my pottery artist roommate, liked mushrooms. The lawns and pastures around Olympia contained several varieties. The preferred variety were Liberty Caps which were found in fields.

Steve and I were walking a field on the Nisqually Reservation when a lone individual approached. He was Native American in appearance. “What are you guys doin’ out here?”

Steve replied “Looking for mushrooms”.

“You guys looking for Liberty Caps?”

“Yeah.”

“You should look about a hundred yards over that way, closer to the river. Lots over there”. He continued on his way and sure enough there were lots of mushrooms.

Steve and I took them on weekends when we went out to clubs, Captain Coyotes especially. The house band covered Van Halen, Styx and Rush. They were slick, dressed in suits. The crowd was mostly bikers. Call it spiritual enlightenment.

I found myself in the parking lot talking to a tall blond.

“Brigham Young was my great grandfather four times removed” she said.

“That’s weird” I replied. “I recently met a descendent of Kit Carson. Must be US History month”. She and I dated for several weeks. She’d post sexual exploits on her calendar. No secrets here. She had two beautiful daughters named Jamie and Tristan. Karen initially kept her daughters at some distance. As time passed and she grew to trust me more, we started doing more together. It was a beautiful ready-made family.

Then as fate would have it a couple of young cat-like women showed up to look at the vacant apartment next door, Janice and Teran

“So what’s your name” Teran Asked.

“Harry.”

“Harry?” Teran laughed in a husky way.

“That’s a nice name.” Janice said. Janice exuded tragic beauty, She wore a layer of foundation makeup, like a geisha. “Are you from around here?”

“San Francisco.”

“Oooo, I like San Francisco.” she swooned.

“You’ve never been to San Francisco.” Teran laughed again. They brought a six pack of beer in from the car and we continued the banter. A week later Janice moved in next door. Standing in my kitchen, she folded into my arms, crumbling like a wounded animal.

I, ten years her senior, wanted to heal her. A shower seems like a good place to begin. I had figured that the makeup was hiding some blemish and was surprised to learn that she had perfect skin.

“Why do you wear makeup?” I asked.

Janice laughed “It’s an art form. I want to make it a career”.

At the store I bought her a beer and she bought me a pop and we traded. “Who’s the woman who dropped by the other day? Oh? Lives in Lacey?”

“Yeah. Larch Street”. Well, that was a mistake.

Meanwhile, Karen needed to go out of town and asked me if I’d be willing to stay overnight with the girls.

(knocking sound) “Janice! What are you doing here?”

“Driving by and recognized your car” she stammered, obviously drunk. “Just dropped in to say hi. So, hi. See you later”.

“Whoa. You shouldn’t be driving”. She passed out in Karen’s king sized bed.

When Karen returned the next day she took Jamie, Tristan and me out for pizza. At some point the conversation turned to some name of some person and Jamie piped up “Is that the girl you had in mommy’s bed last night?” Karen packed up the girls and never spoke to me again.

I bought another Norton, a Dunstall cafe racer. Built around an 850cc Dominator, it had a small road racing fairing, clip on handlebars and the foot pegs moved back allowing the rider to recline behind a small windshield for added comfort and aerodynamics. It was not as fast as the Atlas was but much nicer to ride and plenty fast enough, just not crazy fast.

Janice and I rented a house in Tumwater and moved in together. It was a small place, looking directly on to the high school football field. We were happy but it was painfully obvious that this would not end well.

Teran, who worked at The Bon clothing store, invited us to an office party. At the party I met Annette, Teran’s boss.

“I understand you live with Janice” she smiled.

“Uh huh.”

“That’s interesting.” We talked for a while. She was closer to my age. When she said “Why don’t you call me up some time?” I said sure and got her phone number.

Janice was the flower lady. She got up at 5 AM to set up displays in a large supermarket. She as such was often in bed by 9 PM and asleep.

(phone rings) “Hi Annette?”

“Yes”

“This is Harry. We met at the party. What’s up later?”

I slowly rolled from the bed, quietly left the house, pushed the Norton half a block down the street and hopped on and bump-started it. After a block or so I opened up the throttle and rode the thundering beast down Capital to Annette’s. She greeted me at the door in a red tight fitting knit dress that ended on her mid thigh, a fine knit, obviously nothing underneath but skin. We sat on the floor talking and laughing in front of the fireplace for a while. Being from Maine, Anette had an appealing accent. One thing led to another and upon my departing she chuckled “Thanks for the clam bake”.

I sold the Norton and purchased a Datsun pickup. I drove to San Francisco and made a scheduled stop on the return trip in Humboldt County to visit an old friend. Dave had been a professor at the University of Connecticut and was fired for burning an old draft card . He was hired by another university and again fired for opposing the war. Dave and I drank a bottle of wine, I handed him a pile of money and loaded the back of my 1972 Datsun Pickup with paper shopping bags full of green bud. Dave had become a farmer. He also held a seat on the county commission. The odor was so powerful I could almost see it.

“Anyone following me will probably get high on the smell.” I proclaimed and drove off, heading north up highway one.

A storm set in and a powerful wind was blowing from the east. As I drove along, I could see oak trees on the bank above to my right being blown, waving their limbs overhead like giant fingers. Darkness had set in as evening descended. A brief image crossed my mind, a visual premonition. A passenger jet crashed onto the highway in my path. I looked up through the windshield as one of the trees broke and began to fall in my path. I slammed on the brakes and struck the tangled mess of limbs at fifty miles per hour. Everything went dark as the truck spun out of control. Then it stopped and all was silent except for the raging wind.

At first the only thing visible through the windshield was oak tree limbs and leaves. The front end of the truck had crumpled and the hood was bent up in the middle. Cars were stopped on both sides of the highway and people gathered around. The smell of the sin semilla was stronger as if having been stirred to life. “This is it” I thought. “I’m heading to prison for a long time”. Then a thought came to mind. “I wonder”, I turned the key and the engine started. I put the truck in reverse and slowly backed out from under most of the tree. I backed further and large pieces of the tree fell off on both sides. “I wonder” I thought again and shifted to first and began to move forward, dragging pieces of the tree behind. I accelerated.

One of the gathering crowd stepped in front of the truck, waving his arms. “Stop” he yelled. “You’ve had an accident.”

I laid on the horn and yelled “Get out of the way”.

The guy jumped aside continuing to yell and waving his arms. “Stop. You need to stop. You’re in shock. You can’t drive this truck!”.

If I hadn’t had the premonition of the airplane crashing in front of me I wouldn’t have been leaning forward looking up. I wouldn’t have hit the brakes and the tree would have come through the windshield. Call it dumb luck, a guardian angel, who knows.

A few miles down the road I pulled into a gas station. “Holy cow” the young attendant exclaimed. “You need to clean up? Change your pants?” He laughed out loud at the smell of pot coming from the truck and helped clean off the remaining pieces of the tree, including one large limb that had been stuck through the canopy and was being dragged thirty feet behind. I bought some gas, hammered the hood into a flatter configuration, gave the guy a bag of green bud and continued north.

Janice and I moved to Seattle where she enrolled in an esthetician school. We rented a historic home on Mercer Island. I then went on a job hunt.

“Hello Denny Properties. Which property are you calling about?” The woman’s voice was friendly and business like.

The name Denny was everywhere. Denny Way, Denny Creek, Denny Regrade. “I’m not actually calling about a piece of property, I’m calling to offer you my services.”

“Your services?”

“Yes. My name’s Harry. I have ten years experience in building restoration in San Francisco.”

“Humm. Tell me more.” I went to work for Mrs. Denny, remodeling and painting rental property. The Denny family were the original white settlers in Seattle. Mrs. Denny was a school teacher who started dabbling in real estate and made a fortune. Managing her own property had become a full time job.

Mrs Denny’s properties included some beautiful, historic buildings. Her son Dick helped paint what is probably the oldest home in Seattle. Dick was studying aerospace engineering at Iowa State and was home for the summer.

Dick stopped in to visit on Mercer Island a couple of times and Janice asked him “Do yo have a girlfriend?”

He answered “Yes”.

“How come you never bring her over?”

“I don’t know. I just usually don’t take her places.”

“How come?”

“She’s shy. And I’m just not comfortable taking her out.”

“She weird or something? What’s her name?”

“Her name is Thorna. She isn’t really weird.” Thorna, incidentally, was Dick’s dog.

“What’s she look like?”

“Not bad. She has some facial hair.”

“Oh. You know she could do something about that.”

“It’s OK. Doesn’t bother me.” The next time he visited Dick brought Thorna and introduced her to Janice. She was a good sport.

Popular music, AC-DC, Styx, Kansas, Boston, Pat Benatar, was a nonevent for me. It lacked elixir or juice or something. The worst of the sixties made it through. The best didn’t.

December of 1980 John Lennon was murdered.

Janice and I flew to San Francisco on her 21st birthday. We drank champaign at the airport, then on the plane, then at the hotel in San Francisco. Janice had brought along a bag of cocaine. She kept drinking and snorting lines of coke. I passed on it but still awoke with a terrible headache.

Janice looked like shit that morning. But she sat at the table and snorted another line and perked right up. After two days of intense self abuse we reversed the process back to Seattle. “You know what your problem is?” I told her on the way. “Your problem is that you have unbelievable stamina. A normal person couldn’t do what you do every day and survive”.

Alcohol. It’s always alcohol. And cocaine, which blends well with alcohol. The situation with Janice was becoming unbearable.

The phone rang. It was Jan. “Hope you don’t mind. I got your number from your parents.”

“No problem. Always good to hear from you.”

“Well not always. I have some sad news. Ted died.”

I was stunned. “Ted? What happened?”

“Liver failure.”

“Alcohol.” After a while I continued. “Ted was the sweetest, kindest, most intelligent person I’ve known. Not a mean bone in his body.”

“He was really something.”

We talked on for a while, recalling some of the funny, endearing things Ted had done. I asked “Have you heard anything from Ode?”

“No. I got a call from John a while ago asking the same question. He just disappeared.”

“Vanished.”

“Vanished.”

Though the conversation covered sad news it came from a comforting source. I was again wondering if not trying to work things out with Jan wasn’t the stupidest thing any human being had ever done.

GB tried to set me straight on Janice. “You aren’t going to win this one man.” I had failed again. I could have helped her learn. I could have done so much more. I fell into a state of despair. I had done this tragic young woman no good. I should have been her acquaintance. Not her lover.

(phone ringing) “Hello Mrs. Denny. I need a place to live.”

“I have a vacancy” she replied. “I want the kitchen redone. You can live there no-charge. You won’t have a kitchen though”. Dick lived in one of the units and managed the apartment house, a high-end place in Queen Anne overlooking Elliot Bay.

(phone ringing) “Hello Annette?”

“Yes”

“This is Harry”

“How are you?”

“I’m OK. What are you up to?”

“Where have you been?”

“Oh, I left town for a while. Had kind of a shitty time.”

“Things fall apart with Janice?”

“Yeah.”

“And now you’re calling me?”

“Yeah.”

Annette seemed to be enjoying this. “Sorry Harry. I’ve got a real boyfriend now. We’re engaged.”

“Wow. Too bad. I mean, congratulations. I thought we had a good thing going.”

“Oh yeah. We sure did. Not interested. Hey, tell you what though. I know somebody who’d like to go out with you.” Annette chuckled.

“OK. You got a number?”

(phone ringing) “Hello Jackie?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Harry. I’m a friend of Annette’s. She suggested I give you a call.”

“Yes, I’ve seen you around. She warned me that you’d be calling.” We chuckled.

When we met I remembered having noticed Jackie with her piercing blue eyes and thick wavy black hair. She was a stunning picture. There were a few formalities. Hi, I’m Harry. Fine. Come in and I’ll be ready soon.

I moved out to Stretch Island for a while and painted Aunt Bonnie’s house.

Mom was a coal miner’s daughter. She never forgot the feeling of being unfairly held down. She occasionally swore. Things like “war mongering sons of bitches”. She published articles and stories in a hodgepodge of publications, everything from gardening to children’s stories as well as several books on early California. This was particularly remarkable given that she didn’t learn to read until she was a young teenager. She taught writing and volunteered teaching adults to read.

Dad, Big Harry, ran an insurance office employing secretaries, supervisors and agents. He invested in real estate and was in every way the model patriotic capitalist. He also received a package every week wrapped in brown manila paper with no return address, the “PW” he called it, the People’s World, was a publication of the American Communist Party. He was in no way a communist but he found the perspective interesting.

In China he was hit in the head in a bar fight with a full bottle of wine, which broke his mastoid process. After surgery and a long recovery he moved to Arizona to try to regain his health. Harry Sr and Mary met there. He recovered his physical health. The mental side of things was always a question.

As a youth, I wore a Marine Corps butch haircut. The first thing I learned to convey through song, at the age of three, was the Marine Crops Anthem. I would stand embarrassed and sing it to adoring guests. Everything I liked about my father had nothing to do with the military and everything I didn’t like about him did.

Big Harry was sometimes angry. Sometimes he threw things. Sometimes he was intimidating, threatening and out of his head. Then at other times he was engaging and full of the joy of life. He was willing to give anyone a break. He brought home everything from Circus Carnies to Olympic Gold Medalists who would sometimes stay for weeks or even months. There were no racial boundaries. No elitism. He was a self-read intellectual. Among his friends he counted teachers at the college and political activists.

When dad’s moods would decline mom would take me off on adventures. We often drove to Capitola and rented a motel room for the weekend. We rode a Greyhound bus to Disneyland in 1955, the year it opened when I was nine years old. We made many trips up to the Lick observatory on top of Mount Hamilton to look through Edwin Hubble’s big telescope.

They never once hired a “baby sitter”. If Big Harry was going sailing, why wouldn’t he want to bring his son along? If Mary was going to drive up to see the rings on Saturn, why wouldn’t she bring her son?

We’re close to our parents when we’re young, they help bring us into the world and we may be close to our parents when they’re old, We help them out of the world. These are the times when we’re most apt to get along. I found myself spending time with my parents because I enjoyed their company.

Harry Sr and Mary restored the vineyard that came with their house, they started Hoodsport Winery and the Stretch Island Fruit Tannery and sold alder sawdust under the name “Firespice” which they patented. They made money all kinds of ways.

When I was eight, Harry Sr reasoned that I needed a little toughening up. So off we went in May to Kings Canyon National Park where we rented two burros at the pack station in Cedar Grove. We packed the burros with supplies and took off walking. From the valley floor at 3500 feet we worked our way up the long ascent heading east toward Mount Whitney, at 15,000 feet the tallest point in the lower 48 states.

Step after step after step. The burros hung their heads. I grabbed hold of the tail and a burro pulled me along. Step after step. Hour after hour. Then the trail leveled off and we found a shady spot. Harry Sr built a fire and heated a can of green beans, the manifestation of joy and healing.

Many years before, for their honeymoon, Harry Sr and Mary had gone camping. They ended up camping for two years, cooking in a dutch oven. Mary brought her cast iron dutch oven along on every adventure as heavy as it was. We ate sourdough biscuits, pancakes and bread. We used it to fry trout.

In the valleys and the forks of the Kings River we caught large fish, a foot in length. In higher and more remote streams the fish were smaller and more numerous. In some places large schools of small fish were plainly visible. Catching them was as easy as putting a line in the water.

We continued on, traversing the high country, sometimes looking west toward California, sometimes looking east toward Nevada, sleeping at night under a million stars in the sky. One evening, a week into the adventure, we were relaxing around the fire’s embers when the sky in the east lit up like the sun had suddenly decided to rise. Then it went dark again. A half minute or so later a rumbling sound echoed through the mountains.

It was an above ground nuclear test. “Are we going to get radiated?””Is the water safe to drink?” The trip to paradise had turned sour and back we went to Cedar Grove.

We repeated the burro trips in Kings Canyon several summers, walking for two weeks or more.

One trip was to the North Fork of the Kings River, a place called Simpson Meadow. Before heading out Big Harry stopped by the ranger station. Looking at the map he asked “What’s this dotted line?”

“That’s an old sheep herder’s trail. Nobody’s gone through there in years. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Really.”

The ranger realized the reverse impact of his last comment. “If you were to attempt it, I’d like to know how it goes, you know, stop in on your way out.”

“You bet. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Once again, with a great big ‘if’ you decide to go that way you won’t find any trail. What you might find is ducks…. rocks stacked one on top of the other. Follow the ducks.

Getting to Simpson Meadow is no easy trick. First there is the vertical ascent out of Cedar Grove, then there’s a long traverse at altitudes above 13,000 feet, then the descent down to Simpson Meadow. It’s a three day trip.

Most days we saw nobody along the way. Occasionally we encountered people using animals to carry their supplies, sometimes mules if they were riding horses and sometimes burros if they were walking. The trip is too long and arduous for most people to carry enough on their backs. On the way north on this occasion we encountered a group on horses with pack mules bringing out a downed pilot who had spent the winter in a forest service cabin after bailing out of his jet.

In Simpson Meadow we set up a comfortable camp and relaxed. At night a bear would visit the camp and look through our stuff. Every night we ignored it and it continued its rounds.

I was riding Billy the burro through a meadow. Billy stopped, looked to his left and bucked me off his back and trotted off. I followed and we came upon another burro that had been grazing nearby. Billy seemed to think she was a pretty burro with her long mane hanging to one side. She turned out to be with a young long-haired man who was hiking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail. The only other person we encountered during our week there was a federal fire fighter who camped for the summer.

We began the return trip and sure enough Big Harry figured out where to split off onto the untravelled sheep herders’ path. At first there was an actual trail, switching back and forth down into a long valley. Near the bottom it vanished into the landscape.

In the distance we spotted a stack of flat rocks visible on top of a large boulder. We walked through the open high sierra terrain to the duck and surveyed the view. Down a narrow cut between large boulders another duck could be seen. We walked from duck to duck until we came to a beautiful spot by a stream and camped. We were now in Kennedy Meadow. We continued on from duck to duck the following day. At one point we could see no ducks but were able to surmise which way to go. At another point we briefly followed an animal path the wrong way.

Near day’s end we came to the end of the valley. Steep cliffs jutted up on both sides. The only conceivable way out was the end of the valley that slopped steeply upward toward the sky. A faint trail was visible heading directly into the base of a glacier. The only way up was to ascend ice at a 45 degree slope. Impossible for humans without crampons and definitely impossible for pack animals.

“How could that be?” Big Harry wondered. “The trail leads right into a glacier.”

“Well,” Mary replied “apparently when they would herd sheep through here, it didn’t.”

“Maybe the glacier goes away later in the summer. Or maybe it was warmer then.”

Mary and I built a fire and cooked up an early dinner. “It’s a long way back the other way and out of here” Harry Sr said.

“We’ve still got some flour and lots of beans” Mary replied. Big Harry went off to the glacier where he could be heard chipping away at the ice with an ax. “The eternal optimist” Mary chuckled. An hour later he returned and with characteristic exuberance called out “Let’s go”.

After a quick meal we began the ascent, climbing steps carved in the ice. Billy the burro, who were not going to be left behind, was able to break through the ice and get footing beneath. Near the top one of the steps broke. I was able to dig my hiking staff into the ice and hold on. Billy continued over me, digging into the ice on both sides, hooves on the left, hooves on the right, careful not to step on me. I regained my footing and made the summit. Mary filmed the episode on her 8mm movie camera.

Mary wanted her own money. She didn’t want to be dependent or beholding to Big Harry. She opened a beauty salon in an extra room in the front of the house with its own entrance over which a sign read “Petite Beauty Shop”.

Not long after opening the beauty shop Mary ran into an old friend from beauty school in Arizona named Lee and the two decided that they could partner in the shop, each making enough to get by. Lee was at the house three days a week and became like another mother, of which I now had three, counting my sister.

Lee was a Yurok Indian. She had dark eyes set in smooth dark skin and straight black hair. Lee’s family owned the Trinity mine I visited years later with John and friends, a productive placer mine in Northern California dating back to the nineteenth century. One day she mentioned “I’ve got to do something with the mine. I’m supposed to be taking an ounce of gold out of there each year. If not, I lose the claim.” Big Harry was intrigued.

So, beginning at the fourteenth summer of my life, the family forewent the burro trip in the Sierras for a long hot drive to Trinity. Lee drone her ’53 Chevy and Big Harry drove his ’58 Rambler. From French Gulch we followed a dirt road that switched back and forth up a steep incline. Since the switchbacks were steep, it was necessary to keep up one’s speed, gunning the engine and spinning the tires. The drop off in places was open space. Nothing but air.

As the road branched, each branch had half as much use. At each divide the road narrowed and grew more rutted. The final mile of road was covered with fallen trees in places which we cut with axes and saws and moved. We came to a stream that was too deep to drive through and piled rocks to form two parallel ridges on which the wheels could pass. A hundred yards from the cabin the road was washed out. We walked this last bit.

An old cabin looked out over a meadow where two streams converged. There was a full size bed in the main room and two others in the bedroom. The main room also contained a table and chairs, a sink and counter top with shelves above and below and a large, cast iron wood burning cook stove.

One stream came from the south, the other from the north and after converging they headed west. A long trench fed water to the cabin from the north stream. It flowed continually from a faucet in the kitchen sink. To turn off the water would have plugged up the pipe.

On the other side of the cabin was a two seater outhouse. The morning of the first day Lee was first to rise. She immediately returned, picked up a twelve gauge shotgun, loaded it and walked back out. A twelve gauge makes a lot of noise. Big Harry was out the door in a flash followed by the others. Lee was standing in front of the outhouse, two halves of a large rattlesnake at her feet.

“Not in the outhouse” she said. “Can’t have them in the outhouse.”

In addition to the shotgun we had a newish 22 calibre pistol that Mom preferred, an old lever acton 30-30 that was Duke’s and an ancient 32 calibre single shot target rifle with an octagonal barrel that was my preferred firearm. Then there was Lee’s personal gun, a 44 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver, a big iron, that she wore in a military style holster. We mostly shot cans and other garbage. On hikes Lee and Mary always carried their pistols, for snakes, though they never shot any. Lee once said “The only animal that worries me is the two legged kind”. The two legged kind would have more sense than to tangle with such a bunch.

The second day was spent with picks and shovels fixing the road washouts to get the cars to the cabin. The third day we went to work mining. Another larger flume above the one that fed water to the cabin fed water to the placer mine. Big Harry wanted to see the “giant” work. We spent a day feeding water into the trench and directing it along its way to the point where it entered a 12 inch diameter pipe that ran 100 feet straight down the hill. The water built up pressure and was fed into what looked like an artillery piece. We laid sluice boxes in place in the stream bed, long boxes with screens and cloth in the bottom and stood ready.

“OK” Big Harry yelled. “Let’er go.” Duke and I turned a large valve and water started to pour out the barrel of the cannon. Then it built to a rush. And then it roared. Water shot seventy five feet across the stream to the opposite hillside which immediately started coming apart and washing away by the truckload.

“Whoa” Big Harry yelled. Duke and I gladly shut the valve. “That was amazing”. We worked late into the afternoon pulling large rocks out of the boxes, then medium, then smaller, until we got to the small stuff in the bottom. This was then panned using gold pans. After so much work, we ended up well short of the necessary ounce.

Big harry had to get back to work. Everything then slowed down. Day four was spent building a little dam on the north creek for a swimming hole. The stream was glacier fed and cold. The ambient air temperature mid afternoon was frequently over 100 degrees. In the shade by the pool was the place to be mid afternoon.

At night Mary read War of the Worlds and other great tales to the hissing of the Coleman white gas lantern. She read with feeling, bringing scenes to life. The Alien beings in their tall legged machines were right out front.

In the morning Lee sat on the front porch doing her “breathing exercises”. She sat striking various poses, loudly puffing and snorting. Lee never offered to explain how she got started doing this. And although she never told any stories of her Indian ancestry and traditions, they permeated her being and one might assume the breathing exercises evolved out of these traditions.

We ate sourdough biscuits, pancakes and bread and lots of trout.

A couple of times each summer we’d all walk a mile up the road to where it intersected with the more improved dirt road and follow it up the hill for another couple of miles to a hard rock mine belonging some old friends of Lee’s, a clan that had migrated from Oklahoma during the dust bowl. We used carbide lamps in the mine that ran off gas that seeped out of a rock when you put water on it, loading rocks into a little car that ran on little railroad tracks and pushing them out of the mine. The mine had once been very productive. There was always the chance that a stick of dynamite would drop a ton of gold at your feet. It was kind of like fishing. Or gambling. We also reloaded ammo, 44s and 30-30s.

From where the streams converged they flowed downstream for four miles to the Trinity River. Every few days any variation of the group would hike down to the river, shooting apples off trees in abandoned homesteads. One of these places looked like a European chateau. The house was adorned with carved facias and other trim. A vineyard led up the hill in back.

Upon stepping through the front door of another place I stood facing a large buck. The deer jumped out a window. We enjoyed swimming in the river with the turtles and frogs.

The guns were fun. But the funnest of all the weapons was a sling that had belonged to Lee’s uncle. It was a simple piece of leather, seven feet long with a loop at one end and a pocket formed midway along its length.

“Here’s what you do” Lee said. “The loop goes around your middle finger, the stone goes here in the pocket and the other end is held between the thumb and forefinger.” Then she twirled it once around her back and once over her head and released the free end and the stone came flying out like a bullet. I practiced and got so I could hit a tin can from 20 yards, swinging the sling three or four times over my head. Lee wasn’t impressed. “You swing it three or four times like that, the rabbit’s long gone”.

“You know, when I was a kid” Lee said “People talked about a waterfall up the north branch of the stream. It’s supposed to be a magical place.”

“How far?” I asked.

“That I don’t know. A person could get there and back in a day.”

I left in the morning carrying only a knife and some lunch. The going was easy for the first half mile. I passed the place where we diverted water to the cabin with sheets of corrugated metal. I then passed the place where water was diverted toward the hydraulic giant. Continuing on, the way grew steeper. Large evergreen trees towered overhead. The undergrowth grew thicker. I walked up the stream bed from rock to rock. Then traversed the hillside above. I walked down the length of and crawled over fallen trees – through forests of ferns and fantastic things. I heard tumbling water. Then I saw the spray in the air above. I climbed a moss covered ridge and looked over the edge to see a pool of water at the base of a waterfall, everything bathed in shades of green and gray.

I made my way down and around to the edge of the pool, stripped and got in. The water was as cold as ice. Nice for a brief dip. Sitting on a rock next to the pool I wondered “who do you suppose was the last person to see this?”

Hiking back to the cabin I wondered again – who will be the last? Me? One big tree after another. This is federal land, all subject to logging. Maybe the logging won’t be too bad when it comes. Don’t kid yourself. This richness took centuries to mature. Log it, it’s gone.

The shortage of gold worried Lee and Mary. We continued to pull rocks out of the creek bed and pan the sand that had settled into the bedrock. This was more productive than the giant had been. Then Mary hatched another idea. Looking through the bottom of a glass jar she picked flakes of gold out of the bedrock with tweezers. We had our ounce of gold in no time, including a couple of nice nuggets.

Lee and Mary and I spent a month at the mine over each of the following two summers. We went directly to the creek with jars and tweezers and got our ounce of gold.

*******

Aunt Bonnie reminded me of the time I, at the age of 14, took a train north for a visit. On the drive from the station I mentioned to her that: “My mom and dad both had many opportunities to die prior to my being born. If I hadn’t been born to the parents I was, would I have been born to other parents?”

Aunt Bonnie didn’t have an answer to that or other questions. She seemed to think I was a weird kid. Now years later she had questions for me about my time at Langley Porter. When you remove language, a person’s potential emerges in other ways. She felt that Dr. Zurich was engaging in a true effort to understand autism. She also understood that the discovery can be a difficult process.

“Yeah” I replied. “Leaving was hard. One more lousy ending.”

“You know, there’s a job at the office that I bet you’d enjoy. You can move in here with me. Drive me to work everyday. Be my chauffeur”. It was an easy sell. I moved into bedroom number five.

Bremerton is a navy shipyard whose importance had slowly declined over decades leaving a glut of WWII era housing. It was a place where a person could live on public assistance. As a result it was a hotbed of phycological pathology. Penn Lodge was the fulcrum of that pathology. Bonnie as the resident Psychiatric Social Worker met with each client for fifteen minutes once each week.

Peninsula Lodge was comprised of a day treatment facility and the residence facility. I worked out of the day treatment facility, classrooms and offices upstairs and job training downstairs. My first day I was directed to a young black woman named Betty. I took a seat next to her in the 15 passenger Dodge van and we took off.

“Driving the nut bus.” she said. “You’ll love it.” We drove to a nursing home where a group of elderly people were waiting in the lobby.

“Where’s Gracie?” she asked one of them.

“In her room” someone replied. We walked down a drab looking hall to a room where an elderly woman was seated in a chair.

“Com’on Gracie, let’s go” Betty said.

“I ain’t goin’.”

“Oh come on. You love coming along.” Betty grabbed a wheelchair from the hall and moved it next to Gracie.

After some convincing we made our way to a few more people standing in the hallway where Betty announced cheerfully, “OK people we’re ready.”

We drove to another nursing home and Betty said “Why don’t you do this one and I’ll stay here with the gang. You’re just picking up one person. Angie”.

This nursing home appeared to be an old hotel that had seen better days. Near the front entrance a small elderly woman was seated in an armchair, her arms tied in place with sections of rope. With a single breath she called out “Help help help” and so on till she ran out of air. Then, after filling her lungs she repeated the call. I walked past to what appeared to be the nurse in charge.“I’m here for Angie”. The nurse pointed to the lady tied to a chair. She helped untie her and walk her to the van, Angie veering this way and that like she was intent on escape.

“I know it looks bad, tied up and all” the nurse said. “Angie’s a runner. And she’s got no place to run off to, do you Angie?” Angie shrugged. “Have a good time in school today sweetie. We’ll see you for lunch”.

Back at Pen Lodge people exited the van through wide double doors. A young man welcomed them each. “Greetings Joyce. Hello Ruth.” When one elderly man struggled to get out he offered a hand and spoke in an unfamiliar language. After a brief conversation we closed up the van and I asked the young man “What language was that?”

“That’s Charlie. He’s Czechoslovakian.”

“You speak Czech?”

“A little. My name’s Kenn.”

“Harry.”

At 11:30 everyone gathered and the process was reversed, dropping the old folks off at rest homes. We then drove around town picking up younger people at dilapidated WWII housing.

Betty had names for everything. Bremerton was Bummertown, The Warren Bridge was the Worn Out Bridge, Port Orchard was Port Tortured and so on. The last stop was the residence hall. From there it was only a block up the hill to day treatment. “Tomorrow this’ll all be yours. You gonna remember where all these folks live?”

“I guess.”

That night the staff held a party to welcome the new arrival. As I figured: Anne was sensual. Torey was secretive. And Nancy was at the moment on her side on the floor, Kenn standing over her with his foot on her neck singing arias from Wagnerian operas.

On the morning run, Charlie was waiting in a wheelchair, smelling of urine. I helped him into the front seat of the van.

“How you doin’ today Charlie?”

“Gonna get me a bottle of weeskee. Go to Tacoma. See Black Mama.”

“Sounds like quite a time.”

Once in the van a woman seated behind him asked “Where we goin’?”

“Good morning Carole. We’re on our way to Penn Lodge.”

“We gonna be back by lunch?”

“Yes we will.”

A short time later she repeated “Where we goin’?” and so on all the way to the lodge. It was a daily routine.

Except one time when Ruth answered in a loud voice “You know, you’re nuttier than a peach orchard borer!”

Carole looked shocked “What?”

A gentleman who always sat in the back seat wearing a cowboy hat named Henry interrupted “That’s OK, you be any way you want.”

“Ruth” I interjected “What’s a peach orchard borer?”

“It’s a grub that bores into the seed of a peach. A seed is a nut you know.”

I laughed “Well that’s funny.”

Then Henry began to sing at the top of his voice. “The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home. Tis summer, the darkies are gay.” Everyone in the van joined in. “The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in bloom. While the birds make music all the day. The young folks roll on the little cabin floor. All merry, all happy and bright. By ‘n by hard times come a-knocking at the door. Then my old Kentucky home good night. Weep no more, my lady. Oh, weep no more, today. We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home. For the old Kentucky home far away.”

We arrived at Pen Lodge and I sat in a state of bewilderment. “You all know all the words to that song? I’m amazed! I wonder what made the darkies gay. Smokin’ rope I bet.”

After noon, the first stop was Brian. He emerged from a small duplex as soon as I pulled up, apparently watching from the window. “Wow what a night” he stated. “All night there was a party going on outside. Look out for that car. Oh no another red light. These red lights are aggravating. They’re everywhere. Look out for that car. You ever seen an iguana? Now that’s a strange looking beast.”

We picked up Raymond who took a seat in the rear and sat silently. “How’s it going Raymond” Brian asked.

“Poorly.”

“How’s that?”

“The voices won’t leave me alone.”

“You just got to tell ’em to be quiet. That’s what I do. I tell them to shut up”

“Doesn’t work.”

Then we picked up Nick who announced “You guys listen to the news? We’re in another war. Killing people in El Salvador. And they tell us we’re crazy.”

“And profess to be normal” Brian added. “What’s normal? There’s mean or average and there’s maybe some standard deviation away from that mean. So maybe you’re normal if you can think about one thing for more than a minute. Or your shoes are slightly worn. Yeah I suppose that’s what normal is.”

“Maybe what they mean is ordinary. Maybe ordinary’s a better word”.

Then we picked up Joel. “How’s it goin’ Joel?”

“OK.” Joel looked at the floor for a while and spoke “I’ve got a very old nose.”

Nick interjected “You know why Ted Nugent wears leather pants?” Nobody answered. “Because he jams so hard he shits”.

Brian was a child prodigy with several degrees and multiple talents. He had danced with the Seattle Ballet. Some days Brian couldn’t speak fast enough to keep up with his thoughts. Some days he couldn’t speak at all and sat motionless, looking out the window, as if all the sadness of the world had enveloped him. On these days he offered no greetings. Answered no questions.

Brian was riding in the right front seat. “Think we’ll ever make it to Mars? I ate shrimp last night. Another red light! Hey you know Nick? Did you hear he has a girlfriend? How weird is that? Wait till he tells her about the little buggers that live under his house”.

“Maybe she’ll learn to accept them”

“Yeah right” he replied sarcastically.

There were two Debbies, Debbie R and Bible Debbie. Bible Debbie always carried a bible. The two Debbies were quietly seated behind me when Debbie R spoke “Would you just drop it.” Bible Debbie said nothing. After a few moments Debbie R said “I told you to shut up.” Once again Bible Debbie had said nothing. Then Debbie R yelled again “Shut up!” and began to strangle Bible Debbie. I brought the van to quick stop, opened the back door grabbed Debbie R by the shirt, pulled her out of the van onto the ground and laid on top of her.

“I’ve got no fight with you” she yelled.

“Just relax. Settle down.” I asked Bible Debbie to sit up front and we continued on our way. Debbie R had been hearing voices that she attributed to Bible Debbie, whose reactions didn’t indicate that she wasn’t the source. It was as if Bible Debbie couldn’t stop thinking something that Debbie R couldn’t stop hearing.

I picked up a new patient from the residence. Gary was in the navy. On leave he rolled his car and rumor had it put a dent in the roof with his head. Gary announced that it was his birthday. Weeks passed and every day as he entered the van he’d say “Guess what day it is” followed by “It’s my birthday.”

One day I replied to the inveterate question “It’s your birthday” and he in turn replied “No yesterday was my birthday, see the boots my mom got me” and raised his feet to display new cowboy boots. A week later he was back on his ship.

How is it that Gary knew from the day he arrived that his birthday would be the magic date?

Every day I picked up a woman named Karen from a small house near Silverdale. Karen was friendly and as far as he could determine emotionally unimpaired. I wondered why she was even in the program. One day a different person emerged from her house. I knew better than to inquire. If someone ever gets into the van, just get them to the program. “Good afternoon” I said “My name’s Harry”

“Kate” was the only reply. Kate appeared slimmer than Karen. She had a more angular face and a deeper voice. Whereas Karen was friendly, Kate had an unfriendly, threatening demeanor.

On our drive home that day I asked Bonnie who Kate was. She replied “Kate is Karen.”

“But no Bonnie. These were different women”.

Bonnie continued. “I’ve managed through hypnosis to help facilitate communication between Karen and Kate. This has not been to Kate’s pleasure. I tell her ‘I am benefiting you’ and she says ‘how’ and I say ‘by putting you together’. ’Does putting me together mean that I, Kate, will cease to exist?’ and I say ‘I don’t think so Kate. I believe you will become a part of Karen. You’ll still exist’ and she replies ‘as a memory’”.

As things progressed, in a later session Kate wrestled Bonnie to the floor and sat on top of her. But she didn’t harm Bonnie. At that point Kate ceased to exist outside Karen, for whom life became normal and ordinary.

Jane, another client, was a friendly kind person, normal to all appearances and unusually attractive. On weekends she took the ferry to Seattle where she assumed a different identity, that of a prostitute. Daniel was a free lance writer. He published articles in newspapers and journals. He and Jane were friends and both clients in the afternoon program.

In the van, Nick asked Daniel “You and Jane seem to be pretty tight?”

“Yeah, she’s my friend.”

“You guys ever get it on?”

“Almost once.”

“Oh come on man. Tell me more.”

“Sure. A few months ago we were at a party downtown. We ended up across the street in the graveyard. You know the one? We got undressed behind one of the headstones.” He paused a moment. “You know she’s being watched, right? They watch everything she does everywhere she goes.”

“They?”

“Yeah. So I asked her if we were being watched then. She said we were. So I thought about it. Well, I didn’t feel like giving a performance so we got dressed and went back to the party.”

A new patient named Beth, a young medium sized black woman, was working with Sharon, one of the teachers, in the kitchen. I heard something drop and poked my head in the door to see Sharon lying unconscious on the floor, Beth standing over her. I entered the room as Frank, the assistant director, stepped up beside me. Beth had knocked Sharon out with one punch. She glared, daring us to approach, which of course we had to do. She backed down a hallway, crouched slightly with her fists clenched.

Frank whispered “You go low, I go high.” We approached the young woman, Frank with his fists raised like he was going to box her. While she stood ready to box I charged in low, burying my shoulder in her chest and grabbing the backs of her knees in a wrestling take-down. Frank then sat on her chest and I wrapped up her legs. Though she was strong as a horse we were able to hold her until the police arrived and took her away, probably to Western State Hospital, probably to be seriously medicated.

I approached the Bainbridge Island Sanatorium for the first time to “Pick up Julie”, my first stop of the afternoon, the far end of the line as it were. The large, stone, aging three story building was dark and foreboding. Voices could be heard emanating from the barred windows of the third floor, yelling things that made no sense. Blank desperation. I told the person seated behind the thick glass window “I’m here for Julie.”

“Julie who.”

“I don’t know just Julie. She’s going to Penn Lodge with me for day treatment.”

“Day what?”

“Treatment.”

“Yeah I heard you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” After about a half hour a middle aged woman was ushered out.

When we got in the van the woman turned to me and said “Thank you for your persistence.” We drove back to Penn Lodge, stopping along the way to pick up clients. When we got to the parking lot, Dr. Sherman was waiting. This was not commonly the case. He was only at the facility once a week for and hour during which time he was always sequestered in his office.

Julie exited the van and stopped in her tracks looking squarely at Dr. Sherman and said “You bastard.”

“Moi?” Dr. Sherman replied.

“Moi? You think you’re cute with your little French? You murdering pig.”

Unless a psychiatrist is exceptional, their involvement with a patient will be superficial in this kind of clinical setting. A shrink doesn’t spend much time with a client. There’s an inherent dichotomy; the social worker engaging in therapy, the physiatrist prescribing medication.

Once admitted to a place like Penn Lodge, a mental health patient has lost all civil rights. A doctor, sometimes on the advice of a nurse, can order the administration of drugs that make people easier and cheaper to manage. Some nurses would use the threat in order to maintain order, and who can really blame them. “If you don’t stop that we’re going to have to review your meds.”

For people for whom psychiatric drugs are used for behavioral control, the drugs can be destructive. People are often admitted because of a drug reaction, usually to alcohol but also cocaine, angel dust and other drugs and immediately placed on massive doses of drugs for their treatment. The person then deteriorates into staring, falling asleep, drooling and sometime twitching and jerking uncontrollably, a condition called as tardive dyskineysia, which is life-long and irreversible. On the other hand some drugs can relieve the constant parade of voices inside a person’s head. It’s an attempted balancing act when done right.

Driving the half hour to work and back every day Bonnie and I had many opportunities to talk. I once asked “I see all kinds of diagnoses in files. Manic depressive, schizophrenic, and so on, what do they all mean?”

Her reply was “There are two classes of mental illness, those who hear the voices and those who don’t. Those who hear the voices probably always will. The trick is to learn to live with them.”

Bonnie had married an African American author named Horace Cayton in 1924. The singer Paul Robeson became a cousin by marriage and close friend. Living in Chicago she befriended Richard Wright and Louis Armstrong and had plenty of stories. A young white women in the company of black men and women at that time wasn’t always kindly received. Bonnie was nothing if not courageous. Sometimes we’d discuss clients in the most general terms. “The big concern” she once said, “is always that a patient will commit suicide”.

“You know Bonnie” I replied “it was the same at Langley Porter. Patients trying to harm themselves. It’s not that they’re continually on edge. It’s more like those moments of anguish are so intense they can’t take it”.

I picked up the afternoon roster noticing a new name. “Who’s Mandy?” I asked.

The nurse handing things out that morning replied “New gal. Got into some dusted pot. They found her walking up the middle of Warren Avenue, nude, with a towel wrapped around her head so she couldn’t see. Hoping to get hit by a car I guess. The cops have been holding her in their padded cell.”

The cell at the police station wasn’t exactly padded. There weren’t any sharp corners though and it was small enough that a person would be unable to get any speed up. It was visible from the main desk through thick bulletproof glass.

Mandy was pleasant looking and polite, apologizing to the police who were polite in return. She had ingested angel dust, wrapped a towel around her head so she couldn’t see and was picked up nude walking down main street hoping to be hit by a car. After a brief greeting she took a seat and rode quietly to day treatment. That afternoon, she moved into the residence hall.

The next day she moved slowly with a stunned look and said nothing. The day after that, she walked even more slowly with her elbows bent and forearms extended in front. In class, she laid her head on the table and drooled.

The van held 15 passengers. Anyone who sat across from me in the right front seat was either avoiding other clients or interested in talking. One day a new person took the honored seat named Tom. He said nothing, preferring to read a paperback book. After a couple of days I inquired “What’ch reading?”

After some prodding the young man replied “You wouldn’t be intuwested.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe I would.” After some more prodding Tom showed me the cover. “The Death Merchant”.

“Yeah. I’d love to read that.” The next day Tom gave it to me. I read the book that night. The hero entered a bus station disguised as an old lady armed with multiple pistols, machine guns, pockets full of ammunition, grenades and other things and proceeded to assassinate some people badly in need of being assassinated. The carnage was considerable. Lots of collateral damage. I returned it the next day.

“That’s a funny book Tom.”

“You enjoyed it?”

“Very much.”

The next day Tom got in the van carrying a paper bag containing a stack of books. “I bwought you some weeding mateweo.”

Every day Tom rode up front. He and I became friends of a sort. I valued what as far as I could tell was an exceptionally bright young man. One day I said “Do you mind if I ask, Tom, what the heck are you doing here?”

“My fathew has had twouble accepting my speech impediment. I twied to commit suicide. Fotunately I faoed.”

As the weeks progressed Tom showed an interest in Cindy a quiet withdrawn young woman with whom he worked in the downstairs print shop. Cindy was Vietnamese and like Tom her problems revolved around language difficulties. A few months later they were married, saying goodbye to Penn Lodge.