May 12 is International CFS Awareness Day

The Thief of Many Lives
© Kathleen Houghton — Alaska CFS-MCS Association 2002.

I am constantly on the prowl in search of new victims. I do not
discriminate—health care workers, teachers, students, airline personnel,
teens, moms, dads, and innocent children are my prey. If you are dynamic
and have a lust for life, I will seek you out, and I will find you.

Just when you are at the peak of your endeavors, climbing that career
ladder or building your family and home, I will find you. There is nothing
that you have in your life today that I am not capable of destroying
tomorrow, your career, your education, your goals, your dreams, your
family, and your life. I will have it all. I will strip you of your ability
to function at any level above minimal, and from this day on you will refer
to that minimal as a “good day.”

I have the ability to create an invalid out of you overnight, and I will.
It will take a marathon effort for you just to get out of bed. At a
cellular level your immune system will be in a constant war battling itself
and unnamed viruses, which will painfully be replicating in your brain. I
promise you, I will bring you despair along with pain, isolation and losses
far beyond what you can ever imagine.
Your mind will be in a constant “fogged” state, your expression will be
unable to express, and your eyes will have a noticeable “glazed
over/drugged out” look. You will find it most difficult to pay attention,
concentrate, or even process the simplest of thoughts. Making change from a
dollar may well be beyond your ability now. Your mouth may feel like it is
full of marbles when you try to speak, as your tongue twists and nothing
you try to say comes out right. Who would believe your level of education
when you can’t even string enough words together to make a complete
sentence … or one that makes any sense for that matter.
I promise, I will bring you at any unsuspecting time, severe abdominal
pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea along with a host of gastro-intestinal
disorders. I will make you weak and lifeless as one could be without being
confirmed dead. You will be housebound or in bed for several years if not
the rest of your life. As part of incapacitating you, I will make your
heart race and your head pound; your throat will constantly be sore and
your lymph glands will swell. That will all seem trivial after I inflame
and spasm muscles throughout your body. Crushing a grape between your
fingers may take too much energy or be too painful now.

On those nights that I allow you to sleep, you will awaken drenched with
sweat or throbbing with pain. Perhaps I might even throw in a little
seizure activity. On those nights that I do not allow sleep to occur; I
will torture you with thoughts of death…. Not suicide, but death. Simply
because you have not come to realize that this is your new life, and that
you are not living. You will need to re-create your being every day, as
every day I will bring you unpredicted symptoms and suffering.

I have also done a few things that you may not be aware of yet. I placed
some lesions on your brain (have you noticed how you have difficulty with
balance and memory yet?) and I have permanently altered your immune system.
I have shorted out your nervous system so that you have intermittent
numbness and tingling, which might resemble an electrical current zapping
you from time to time. This is called neuropathy. Nope, it’s not curable
either!

Now I have you. I have taken over your body and mind. I have stolen your
life but left you alive, not very functional, but by clinical definition
you are still alive.

Your family will not be able to give you all the constant care that you
need on a daily basis. As for your friends, well, they’re still on that
ladder climbing up. Rest assured, I am looking for them too. By now,
chances are good that most of your family and friends have abandoned you,
so you must have learned the definition of isolation. This newfound
isolation will save you from having to explain how sick you really are to
others, they won’t understand anyway. Isolation will save you all that
energy.
Your health insurance has already been or will shortly be discontinued as
you lost your job from not being able to “keep up.”
Perhaps you got caught dozing off or called in sick one too many times. Now
that you are no longer employable or insurable, when you seek medical care,
any medical professional that figures me out will diagnose you and say that
what you have is presently not curable.

Now it is time for you to seek out medical care, nation if not worldwide.
However, most so called medical professionals will not even have the
ability to recognize me when they see me, as they have not learned about me
in medical school. So, chances are good that you will be misdiagnosed. You
will give more blood samples and have more examinations than you ever
imagined existed. Then you can take the results to dozens of doctors in
search of a diagnosis. One that is valid as well as socially and medically
acceptable. One that does not label you as depressed or say that “it is all
in your head!!!” Most doctors will suggest a vacation, weight loss diet,
new or increased love life, help with the children, or change of scenery as
the “cure,” mainly because you may look like the picture of health. This is
my mask of deception.

You will pray for a positive word from current research. Research, which
you will soon learn, is quite limited due to lack of funding and government
support. You will learn new vocabulary which contains words like: T-Cells,
Cytokines, Nuclear Antigens, Natural Killer Cells, Immunoglobulins,
Cytomegalovirus, Seratonin, Cerebral lesions, and Immune Dysfunction are
among a few. However the most important words that you will need to know
and fight for are Social Security Disability and Medicare.

At one point I may give you a false sense of recovery or remission. Let me
assure you, I will be back, as you are my prisoner and that makes me your
keeper. I have placed the lives of millions of people nationwide in limbo,
I continue to do the same world wide. I would consider this an epidemic,
wouldn’t you?

Eventually I will bring the government, health care workers, and society to
its knees in search of unraveling my complexities, which are crippling
humanity. I leave it up to you, my victims, and your caretakers, to educate
the public and let them know that I am very real and that you are very
sick. Unfortunately, I have been given a totally ridiculous name, which
will make your job even more difficult. Until that name is changed, I am.
CHRONIC FATIGUE AND IMMUNE DYSFUNCTION SYNDROME

About the author: Kathleen Houghton is a 47 year old woman who has battled CFS, FM and MCS for more than a dozen years. Pre-illness, Kathleen worked as a pediatric special care nurse caring for infants and children on life support. Kathleen, now mostly homebound, works in conjunction with other national & international health organizations, researchers and medical professionals providing information, education and awareness about
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Environmental Illness & Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.

Kathleen Houghton
cfs-mcs@gci.net

MOTHER-updated

There is a tiny bit of irony in the coincidental way in which my blog from a couple of days ago, about my first stepfather, led to the comment that in turn led to yesterday’s frank portrayal of my mother’s personality.  Then, the comments below made it apparent that my Mama’s blogs were going to run right into Mother’s Day.  How appropriate!  Mama would be so proud.

I wonder what happened to her as a child that led her into those traps?  Must have been pretty bad.
blankityblank

In comments yesterday, I responded:
I don’t think there was any particular trauma that made her as she was.  She was taught that men were the strong ones and women needed those wiles, that women had to “put one over on” a man and could not approach them as equals or compete with them without cheating.  Plenty of women in my generation and those following mine still play that game.

Her attitude toward sex was fairly common in her generation, the standard Victorian thing:  women had to perform their marital duty, but only the bad ones enjoyed it.

Now I think it’s appropriate to add that my mother’s youth did, I know, have its share of trauma, in poverty, her mother’s death bearing the child right after Mama, and her father’s harsh discipline and lack of sensitivity shown by his “running off” her young suitor/lover Jim.  Were they actually, physically, lovers?  I don’t know, but maybe so.  If so, Mama was so ashamed of it she would never admit it.  Could she have had an early pregnancy that was hushed up?  Anything is possible… and wouldn’t that be just perfectly (Freudian typo department:  I initially wrote perfuctly) ironic?

Just think of how many women grew up the same way…it’s a creepy world when that’s the best survival method offered to you.  Most people have a lot of trouble questioning the basic beliefs they grew up with, so it’s no wonder your mom wasn’t able to see a different way of being. 
LaughingRat

“No wonder”??  I wonder.  Despite the fact that Greyfox keeps telling me that when he speaks of “people” he’s not referring to me, I continue to think of myself as a person.  As for me, I’ve always had a lot of trouble NOT questioning everything, including myself and my beliefs.

But I am in complete accord with that, “creepy world when that’s the best survival method…” bit.  Creepy, indeed, that for millennia men bought and sold or stole women from each other, beat them into submission and warped their minds and souls.  Creepy even now that some of the creeps blame women and refuse to see how their forefathers created the mess.  I’ve been engaged in an off and on debate here for months on this very topic, mostly with Exmortis.

In THIS generation, when the GRANDMOTHERS of young women can remember our efforts and those of our own grandmothers to gain equality for women, it is absurd for any of those young women to behave AS IF they believe themselves to be either inferior to men or entitled to some special privileges just because they are female.  The really creepy thing about all this is that so many members of both sexes work so hard to blind themselves to the historical reality and continue to impede our species’s progress out of that morass.

I feel for who your mother was and wasn’t.  We were raised with so many hang-ups.  I was born in ’39 and believe me it took terrible rebellion and a bunch of guilt on my part to try to get out of the box!  Wasn’t easy and still isn’t.  We were raised on DENIAL   Am so very much living your life with you…thanks in the sharing.  Nancy
Nanny

Yes, Nancy, I went through the same guilt and rebellion.  Can you imagine what it took for my mother’s daughter, trained and conditioned to that body-shame my mother euphemistically called “modesty”, to get up on a little stage and dance topless?  Can you imagine how LIBERATING it was to get over that?!?

I agree that we were raised on denial, and I cringe when I see how pervasive that denial still is in our culture.

I like your blunt record of memories.  I do feel sad for people like your mother, but I do  understand that the times made them who they are.
Whateva

I feel as if I just read the memoir of Blanche Dubois’ daughter-never-born.
I’ve always liked your unflinching style.
Thanks.
MyKi_Whatzerface

The first time I saw Streetcar, MyKi, I saw and heard my mother in Blanche.  It was painful, but not nearly so painful as seeing and hearing echoes of Blanche and Mama in my own daughters.  Mama, bless her heart and damn her soul, had a hand in that.  She, who was so driven to have a child of her own, did everything in her power to remove my children from my custody and care (and finagled, in the process, to maintain her own contact with and influence over the elder of them).  As futile as I know it is to think of what might have been, I still think I might have reared my girls to be more independent in their thinking and more responsible in their actions.  Who knows? 

All I really know about that is how painful it was for me living without my kids and with that judgment Mama laid on me, that I was an unfit mother. I BELIEVED her, and it devastated me.  Even her own sister knew better.  My Aunt Alice set me straight on that score on my last visit to her and Mama in 1979.  She told me I had been a good mother in those three years that I had Marie, and that she had opposed my mother’s efforts to get the girls away from me.  I now know that I am a better mother than my own mother was, but it’s no consolation to me, nor to Marie’s orphaned kids.

Celeste, it was so much more than “the times” that made Mama what she was.  There was karma involved there, too.  Some people come back and redress or balance the karma from past lives, while others come back and just repeat old patterns.  Mama, in that life, was among that latter group.  If there was any single force more than another that worked to make her as she was, that force was fear.  Fear was the keynote of my mother’s life, and after my father’s death it became mine for a couple of decades.  Mama chose to run scared instead of facing her fears.  She suffered the consequences, and she really did suffer.

Mama smoked to “calm her nerves.”  She drank to “unwind”.  She ate starch and sugar addictively and, unable to simply live with herself as she was, she wore constricting “foundation garments”–girdles and support hose, to hold in and try (unsuccessfully) to hide the results of her gluttony. 

She ceaselessly pursued men, looking for one who would have her.  She found a series of them who stayed around for a while, and she endured many sorts of humiliation and abuse just so she could be acceptably paired off and hold her head up in society.  She also ceaselessly criticized and cut on other women who did likewise. 

If there was ever even the merest chink in her denial, if she ever caught a glimpse of her hypocrisy, she must have hated herself.  I was there a few times when in the truth that comes with drunkenness she bared her soul and blubbered out her self-revulsion.  Both her indulgences and her denial were choices she made.  Nobody forced her to run scared.  I know that is true, because I broke out of the same conditioning she knuckled under to.  I stopped running, faced my fears and –VOILA!– the fears backed off.  Mama never made that effort, never discovered that joyous reward.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Update/Addendum

As I reread this for the third or fourth time, it struck me that there is a little in-joke there that practically no living person on the planet besides myself would “get”.

I’m referring to the, “bless her heart and damn her soul” bit.  That’s not the sort of phraseology I use, since neither the giving of blessings nor damnation falls within my belief system.  That’s Mama speaking.  When I say dammit, it’s usually because I’ve already used “shit” and “fuck” redundantly and am looking for a new expletive.

I can’t recall ever having used that phrase before, but Mama used it frequently.  It was a sort of formula or mantra for her, a way, I suppose, through the “blessing” to scoot out from under the onus of the “damning”.  It typifies her hypocrisy. 

I never heard Mama say, “Bless his heart and damn his soul.”  Mama apparently loved men and hated women, in general.  Other women were her rivals, competitors, and, I suppose, constant reminders of her own shortcomings.  The ones she picked on the most were successful women, beautiful women, happy ones.

It was her style to try and make herself feel bigger by cutting other people down.  Daddy didn’t raise me that way, but after he died I picked up Mama’s attitudes.  It took imprisonment with 60-some women to teach me to love my own sex.  It took therapy to enable me to stop trying to build myself up at others’ expense. 

My page is rendering very weirdly… loads of blank space between the end of my last post and the time stamp/comment links line.  I wonder if that’s Xanga, or my Internet Explorer.  Anyone else see it weird?

On my first step-father’s “disappearance”, RiottGyrrrl wrote:

“I’m amazed that Jim just left your mother like that.  Was there ever a reason?”

I think Jim probably had two or three excellent reasons for pulling a disappearing act.  I was one of them;  my mother was another; and the ghost of my father, our memories of him, the way he would always come up in conversation, was probably a factor, too.

Mama apparently sent this old shot of the two of them to Jim right after he found her in ’52, and then got it back again.  In her hand on the back, it says:

“How about this–ain’t we a handsome couple?  I’ll bet we were about the happiest couple in the country.  I know we were certainly in love.  Please don’t let this get away.  It’s the only one I have.  Maybe you have one.  This was taken about 1926 or 1927.  I was about 15 or 16.”

This is how he remembered her, a teenager whose world revolved around him.  By the time they met again, I don’t think she had matured significantly in any emotional or intellectual sense, but her body had certainly aged.  Her weight was close to double what it had been last time he had seen her.  Pregnancies and surgeries had left her with a pendulous abdomen.  Working on her feet for years had left her with ugly varicose veins in her legs.  Whether on the job or off, she usually wore a hairnet, as I now wear a bandana, to keep her hair out of her way.

I was a smart-ass, know-it-all kid.  I loved posing riddles that adults couldn’t answer.  I enjoyed showing off what I knew and making people feel stupid.  At that time, when Jim married my mother and took us first to Arkansas and then to Kansas, I was morose as well, consumed by grief and guilt. 

My mother was a bitch.  She was an Aries, so it wasn’t a matter of wanting to get her way, she just didn’t realize there was any way other than hers.  The tactics she used to get her way were passive-aggressive, manipulative, seductive.  She explicitly taught me that the way to get a man to do what I wanted was to make him think it had been his idea.  If that didn’t work, she’d whine and play the martyr to try and guilt people into serving her.  If that failed, she nagged.

She had serious hang-ups about sex.  She would not talk about it.  My birds-and-bees education came from a book.  When she handed me the book, she wouldn’t meet my eyes and couldn’t speak.  Once, when I was about thirteen, I told her a dirty joke I’d heard in school.  She blanched and ran to the bathroom and vomited.  The joke really wasn’t all that bad.  I do believe her about not having consummated the marriage to Jim.  That might have been a problem for him.  I would guess that it wasn’t what he was expecting.

If Jim failed to grasp that she was grasping onto him to rescue her from her widowhood and poverty, he had to be pretty stupid.  Maybe it took him a little while to catch on, or maybe he just didn’t get a comfortable opening to make his break before he did.

The time they got together again, in the late ‘sixties, my mother and I had a new sort of long-distance relationship that was gratifying for me and uncomfortable for her.  I was doing speed and psychedelics.  I had let a lot of my inhibitions go.  I’d get high on the weekend and call her collect.  She always took the calls because it fit her martyr image.  I spoke straight to her, told her what I was doing and how I felt.  I was trying to work things out between us.

I questioned the things she had taught me, the feminine inferiority, co-dependency and all.  I wanted her to be open with me.  That just wasn’t in her repertoire, and she did a lot of sighing and crying during our phone conversations, her standard ploys for evading questions or handling criticism. 

Jim was retired, living on Social Security, and had had a few heart attacks.  When I asked Mama if he had any explanation for his staged disappearance, she said he had “cold feet”.  When I asked her why she took him back, she cried and said something to the effect that if I didn’t understand “love” she couldn’t explain.  Later on, when I asked her why they split up that time, she had no real answer, just some facile crap I don’t even recall.  She said she left him that time.  If that’s true, it was because of his ill health and poverty, and maybe for revenge.

For a while, back then, I thought I could shake her out of her bullshit, but it never happened.  She died at age 75, mired in bullshit.  The last time I saw her she was in her sixties and still practicing feminine wiles, playing head games, batting her eyelashes and trying to endear herself to men by making them feel “big”.  She had appeared ridiculous in my eyes when she did that in her forties.  I seriously doubt that she ever gained enough self-awareness to realize how absurd she appeared, trying to play the coquette so long after she’d lost all her girlish charm.

Very rarely, I embarrass myself by expressing some of the crap I learned from my mother.  When I catch myself sounding like her or, even worse, thinking like her, I drop that shit fast.  In my youth, her influence got me in a lot of trouble.  As an adult I have gone to the opposite extremes of frankness and self-sufficiency both because I learned from my own errors when I followed her example, and because she appeared so pathetic and absurd in that role she played.

1953–California to Kansas via Arkansas

I recall hearing Mama tell someone that she “led a charmed life.”  She had met the “man of her dreams”,
married him and they had a wonderful life together.  Then, after
his death, along comes her childhood sweetheart.  She must have
considered that a godsend.

Mama was a good waitress.  I say that to give her credit where
credit is due. It was really the only thing she did well.
 She taught me how to pay attention to customers, anticipate their
needs, speak obsequiously and earn good tips.  From her I learned
the cardinal rule of retail and service industries:  the
customer is always right.  She taught me to look busy even when I
wasn’t, so my boss wouldn’t get the idea that he could do
without me.

She was trained as an institutional cook.  She could follow
recipes but she never enjoyed cooking and never became a good
cook.  At home, I started doing much of the cooking after my
father died.  She could ruin a boxed spaghetti dinner:  “al
dente” was Greek to her.  All foreign languages, mathematics,
mechanics, and many polysyllabic English words she would say were,
“Greek to me.”  Few of the basic nutritional principles she
learned at work were transferred to her home cooking.  Even in the
school cafeteria, she often overcooked things.  I learned to cook
in self-defense.

Mama was hopeless where home and auto maintenance were concerned.  She could
change a burned out light bulb.  When window panes rattled and let
in the wind and rain, I went to the basement, found the can of putty,
and sealed the windows.  She didn’t even know where the dipstick
was to check the oil in the car.  I remember trying to show her
how to adjust the carburetor, but she just didn’t get it, didn’t want
to get it.  It was “man’s work” and none of her concern,
especially since she had her little tomboy around to change the oil and
do all the rest of that dirty work.  But God forbid that I
should ever come to the dinner table with dirty hands or face.

I used to think my mother was stupid.  Now I’m not so
sure.  It could have been lazy craftiness, creative incompetence,
a way to avoid having to do those things she “couldn’t” learn to
do.  She tried to teach me feminine wiles and ladylike behavior…
or, more accurately, she expected me to know those things.  She
would yell at me or shame me for dirty fingernails or for not keeping
my skirt down and legs together, although I’d grown up
greasy in pants and overalls with little experience of skirts
before I went to school.

Some of her “teaching” took.  Some of it didn’t
work and never could have worked for me.  My father and I had
laughed with derision at her incompetence, in much the same way that
Doug and I laughed at Greyfox during the years that his addictions and
his NPD were running rampant and his favorite coping mechanism was
creative incompetence.  Even if Mama was faking that helplessness,
THAT was stupid, so… I guess she was actually stupid.

In her desperate grief, fear and loneliness after my father
died, the appearance of Jim, her childhood sweetheart, must have seemed
like salvation.  There was no courtship, no caution or
reservations ever expressed on her part.  They started making
plans for him to come to San Jose that summer when school was
out.  They planned to marry then and we would move back to
Arkansas with him. 

She started referring to him, when speaking to me, as “Daddy Jim,”
even before I met him.  I was relieved that she had stopped crying
all the time and stopped talking constantly of my father.  She
didn’t know that I had killed him, but every time she cried for him or
reminisced about how happy they had been, I felt the pangs of that
guilt.

She sold our house, or rather, sold her equity in it.  It
hadn’t been paid for.  We packed our treasures:  mementos of
Daddy, the painting of the old sawmill in the Sierras that his cousin
Richard had made for me, and a trunkful of this and that.  It went
into a shed behind Buck and Alyce Rogers’s house, where a flood a few
years later destroyed most of it.  After the flood, a box came in
the mail from Alyce (Buck had died by then, suddenly, much the same way
my father had.) with Daddy’s old Kodak folding camera and a few other
things she salvaged.

Jim flew out from Arkansas and we met him at the San Francisco
airport.  They were married by a justice of the peace at the
county courthouse in San Jose and we loaded our TV and clothes into the
trunk of our ’48 Chevy coupe (which she’d traded the Dodge sedan for
because it netted her a few extra dollars in those first desperate
weeks after Daddy died).  With Jim behind the wheel, we headed
south to Route 66, then east.

Somewhere in the mountains before we were out of California, I saw
odd-looking heaps of gray sand or something in the roadside
ditches.  They said it was snow.  I begged them to stop and
let me see it up close.  I scooped a bunch of it into an empty
paper cup and watched it melt as we drove down into the desert.

I loved Arizona and New Mexico.  For reasons I didn’t
understand at the time, it felt like home to me.  I understand
that now.  I lived in that area through a series of lifetimes, and
some of the descendants of my previous incarnations live there now.

I
wanted to stop at every roadside attraction and Indian trading
post.  We did stop at most:  Jackrabbit Trading Post,
Rattlesnake Trading Post, all those tourist traps that advertised
themselves with little signs saying how many more miles to…
whatever.  Jim bought me picture postcards at almost every stop,
but we didn’t have a camera with us to take pictures.  For a year
or so, then, my life wouldn’t be recorded in photos, until I got my own
camera.

Jim was a nice man.  He was divorced and had grown-up
children and a grandchild or two.  He kept the car radio turned up
and sang along with it.  When we had ridden in the car with Daddy,
the radio was always on, but often it had been tuned all the way down
into the short wave band, listening to police and fire calls.  Jim
liked country music.  His favorite was Hank Snow, and he used to
give me nickels to play “I’m Movin’ On” on the jukeboxes in cafes along
the way.

We
stayed in motels a few times and I started collecting miniature bars of
soap, something I’d never seen until then.  I also picked up a few
rocks at roadside stops, the beginning of a collection I continued even
during the time I was living out of a backpack on the road in the
‘sixties.  Since there are no photos to illustrate this segment of
my memoirs, how about a shot of a small segment of my current rock
collection to break the monotony?

Speaking of monotony, Texas was… Texas.  I remember one of
the postcards I got there:  “Texas ain’t so big, and acrost it
ain’t so far.  I went across from border to border, and only wore
out one car.”  There were only 48 states then, and Texas was the
biggest.  Everywhere was evidence of just how badly that had gone
to the Texans’ heads.  Since Alaska has put things into
perspective for them, they’ve taken to selling “Texas speed bumps”,
little pieces of gray felt or fleece with black rickrack “tire tracks”,
mimicking roadkilled armadillos.  Charming.

In north Texas, we drove through a sandstorm.  The interior of
the car, with windows and vents closed, filled with dust. 
The plush seat turned to sandpaper on my legs.  Eyes, ears, nose
and mouth all had grit in them.  That night in the motel when
we opened our suitcases, which had been riding in the trunk of the car,
there was a line of red-brown grit on our clothes, on all four sides
along the seam where the lid met the bottom of the case.  Mama
said she would never live in a place like that.  (foreshadowing
alert)

Jim did let me stop at a lot of roadside attractions, but he was
usually in a hurry to get back on the road.  He drove in the
daylight and Mama often drove long into the night before we’d stop for
food, a shower and a bed.  I slept in the car a lot, and studied
through many miles.  I had brought along an old edition of a
National Spelling Bee speller, and a high school math textbook, where I
picked up the basics of algebra at least four years before I would get
to use it in school.  It helped me in life before that, though,
when my mother bought a business and needed my help with inventory and
bookkeeping.

The trip was hurried because Jim had a business in Pine Bluff, the
tire shop where Uncle Walter and Aunt Lilly had found him.  He had
left one of his sons in charge while he was gone, and they had started
advertising the business for sale.  The plan was to sell it and
then he and Mama and I would all move to Kansas. 

He put Mama and me in an apartment near the VA hospital in Little
Rock and was gone all day every day and often very late in the
evening.  Mama spent her time the way she usually spent her time
when she wasn’t at work.  She read True Story and True Romance
magazines, and watched TV soap opera or listened to it on the
radio.  Before we got a TV, it had been radio soaps all the time,
and I recall hearing radio soaps in her house even after I was
married. 

I have clear recall of my play while I was in Little Rock.  When we moved in, I
found in the cupboards a stack of small rectangular plastic trays,
maybe big enough for a sandwich and some chips.  I played with
them constantly, arranging and rearranging them, trying to make
symmetrical or balanced designs out of an odd assortment of
colors.  If I were to see a kid play that way now, the words that
would come to mind would be “obsessive-compulsive”.  I had no
other toys except my basketball and a couple of tennis balls, and I
wasn’t allowed to play with them in the house, nor was I allowed to go
out to play in the “strange” neighborhood. 

A buyer was found for the tire shop.  We packed Mama’s and my
stuff back into our car (Jim had a green station wagon, a woody,
that would stay in Arkansas until he went back for it.) and drove
to Kansas.  Mama was really looking forward to seeing my Aunt
Alice, her eldest sister.  Mama and most of her siblings called
Alice “Mom”, because she had reared them after my grandmother
died.  My grandfather had remarried, but “Nellie” was always
“Nellie”, said with a sneer, and never “Mom”.

Aunt Alice lived in this cute little house that had made history
when it was built.  Uncle Harry (in the state hospital when we
arrived there, and for most of the rest of his life) and she had built
it around the end of World War II, from materials they salvaged on
their jobs at Beechcraft.  The framing, cabinetry and
interior paneling were from packing crates.  The siding, from
flattened oil and fuel cans, was the first aluminum siding in Wichita.

Uncle Harry had collected broken glass, pottery, marbles and odd
bits of rock, and used them as decorative mosaic in the concrete
retaining wall that bordered two sides of the lot, and to build a patio
and planter boxes on the side opposite the house from this view. 
I always liked that house, and lived in it several times, both before
and after I was married.

We took Jim to the airport for a flight back to Little Rock, and
then Mama and Aunt Alice and I went the 30 miles or so from Wichita to
Halstead where her son Eldon, known to everyone as Red, lived with his
wife Blondie (AKA Charlene) and their daughter Elizabeth.  We were
going to stay there with Red and Blondie until Jim closed the sale
on his business in Pine Bluff and drove back up to Halstead. 
He and Mama were considering buying the Halstead Sundries store from my
cousin Red.

Jim phoned that evening to let Mama know he’d made it back to
Arkansas okay.  I spoke to him then, and never saw him
again.  He disappeared.  After a while, my mother got their
marriage annulled.  She said it had never been consummated, and I
have no reason not to believe that. 

A dozen or so years later, he turned up again in my mother’s life,
and they got married again.  They lived together in Louisiana
for a while until he took another powder.  This was during
the time I was on the West Coast, running with bikers.  At the
time, my mother’s relationship with Jim astounded and baffled me,
but not any longer.  It is, after all, fairly typical soulmate
stuff. 

San Jose, 1952

The immediate background for this part of the story is HERE and HERE.

I saw a lot more of my father’s best friends Al Walker (2nd from left) and “Buck” Rogers (the tall man with bottle and gun, flanked by his sons Roy and Bob) after Daddy died than I ever had while he was alive.  They stepped in to help fill his shoes for a while, and it was fortunate that they did.  My mother was devastated and not up to the task she was faced with.  Buck and his wife, and our old neighbors Erne and Ella Gustafson, helped her clean out a lot of Daddy’s things, sell his power tools, etc.  We had an immediate need for money without his paycheck every week.

Mama had worked part-time since I started to school and now she was looking for better-paying full time work.  She entered an on-the-job training program for “nutritionists” (just cooks, nothing more) in the public school cafeterias.  She was overjoyed that it meant she would not be working weekends or school holidays and could be home when I was.  I don’t think she thought it through very fully.  She soon found out that her paychecks for that full-time work were less than she was making part-time in the Thrifty Drug lunch counter, after her tips were figured in.  But she didn’t have to pay child care or work weekends, so that helped.  She also hadn’t thought through what she would do for income during the summer months.  When she finally thought about it, we scrimped and tried to sock a little away for summer.

Someone must have suggested to my mother that I needed diversion.  The first thing she suggested to me was music lessons.  I recall a shopping trip to a music store where we looked at instruments.  I saw a “beautiful” accordion.  It was all shiny and colorful, and if I were describing it from my current perspective I’d call it garish.  But the little girl I was at the time coveted it immediately.

My mother’s budget might have stretched to cover a harmonica or a little recorder, possibly an ocarina, maybe, but not the lessons to learn to play any of them.  I never heard anything more about music lessons. 

Marlene Gustafson (kneeling to left of me) was a few years older than I.  They had lived two doors down from us in the little house on Fox Avenue.  I had been wearing Marlene’s hand-me-downs all my life.  She was taking twirling lessons, and that was where I ended up.  I did eventually gain some twirling skill, on my own over years of solitary practice with the baton Mama bought for me then. 

In those lessons with Marlene and about fifty other girls, in a quonset hut that had been an airplane hangar during WWII, all I ever got was bruises from the rubber baton tip, frustration, and public humiliation.  When the instructor told my mother I needed a sequined costume so I could march with the company in a parade, Mama explained to me that she couldn’t afford the costume.  I dropped the lessons.  I wondered even then why she had let me start it if I just had to quit so soon.

One Saturday when Marlene and her mother came for a visit, Marlene brought her new puppy, Trinket (the lighter-colored pup in the crook of my right elbow here) and Trinket’s brother.  The male puppy was for me.  I didn’t expect my mother to let me keep him because she had always made me give back every dog I’d ever been given.  This time she relented.  I named the black and tan pup Mugsy, after my favorite Bowery Boy.

I checked out a book on dog training from the library.  My mother’s chief concern was Mugsy’s housebreaking, and I watched him like a hawk, scooping him up and setting him on a newspaper each time he started sniffing around or squatting.  Very soon we only needed to put down paper for him when we left for school, because he would let us know when he needed to go out.  He was so well paper-trained within a short time that once when we went on a quick trip to the grocery store and forgot to put down a paper for him, he left a neat pile of feces on a small strip of cash register tape under the table. 

I loved that dog.  He owned my heart.  He became the first dog my mother made me take to the pound when we moved.  For some reason, she would never consider taking a dog with us when we moved… but I’m getting a bit ahead of my story here.

The spring after my father’s death, we got our first TV, a 17″ black and white Zenith.  I recall the season because one of the first things we watched on it was the Kentucky Derby.  My mother bet me a quarter that Native Dancer, the favorite, would win.  I watched the horses prance to the starting gate, and bet on the one who showed the most energy and spirit:  Dark Star.  Dark Star won.  I’ve always been good at picking winners.

Needing more money, Mama decided to rent out part of our house.  Buck Rogers and his sons built a partition and installed a shower on the screened-in back porch where there was already a toilet and a pair of laundry sinks.

Mama slept in one corner of the back bedroom that had been Daddy’s den, and I kept my room, sharing it with boxes and heaps of Mama’s stuff.  Her clothes went into my closet and her closet became our pantry and dish cupboard.  She cooked our meals on a 2-burner electric hot plate on a metal cart next to the closet door.  The other four rooms she rented to Marie (right, above) and Tobe Patterson.

Mama started talking about leaving California not long after that.  The way she kept presenting the idea to me was that she saw Daddy everywhere she looked in that house.  It made her cry.  He wasn’t there for me, but then of course I’d killed him, so I supposed that was to be expected.  I didn’t know what she meant.  I didn’t really want to go anywhere. 

I learned much later that Mama’s determination to leave California was based on an incident with the state’s child welfare agency.  One day when I was ill she asked our tenant Marie Patterson to look after me while she worked.  A neighbor across the street saw Mama leave for work without me and called the welfare people, thinking that I had been left alone in the house. 

The incident was easily resolved, I’m sure, but it left Mama shaken, scared, and wanting out of there.  She told me years later that she just couldn’t cope on her own and wanted to get back “home” to Kansas.  When she felt she was threatened with being declared an unfit mother and having me taken from her, she wanted to flee. 

She knew that California had the country’s strictest child welfare laws and wanted to live somewhere with more old-fashioned codes of family law, where children were their parents’ concern, not the government’s.  Being “on Welfare”, going begging to the government, was anathema, a scarier thought than going hungry.  We didn’t really ever go hungry, but we ate lots of cheap starchy food.  Both of us were pasta and potato addicts, as far back as I can remember.

I had never gone hungry in my life, but she had.  It’s probably one reason she tended so to run to fat.   The first time I recall ever going hungry was during that time that my father’s friends were including me in their weekend plans to give my mother some leisure alone.  I went with the Walkers to a reservoir an hour or so out of town.  We ate the picnic lunch early and didn’t get home until after dark.  I got hungry long before we got home. 

It was the first time I felt the deep ache of hunger in my belly and the headache, chills and nausea that follows the first pangs.  I was crying most of the way home.  I told my mother I was starving to death.  She sat me at the kitchen table and looked in the cupboard.  There was one can of soup, chicken noodle.  I hated chicken noodle soup.  The only canned soup I liked at all was tomato, but I’d tolerate vegetable.  We had no tomato, and not even any bean with bacon, only nasty chicken noodle.  I sniffled and sniveled and ate the chicken noodle. It was delicious–best food I had ever tasted.  Since then, it has always been my favorite soup.

I was in second grade at Broadway School in our new neighborhood when Daddy died.  They promoted me to 3rd grade in the middle of that year.  My mother finished up her training and went to work as a cook’s helper in a high school for the rest of that school year.  That summer, we went from one aunt’s or uncle’s house to another, living off our relatives.

The best was “Aunty Pat”, my mother’s half sister, Nora Gavin.  She had all the class in that family.  She was widowed young in World War II, childless when my mother’s brother Earl’s wife had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized.  Nora adopted their middle child, red-haired Virginia. (shown here between my father and her adoptive mother Nora, who preferred being called Pat) She supported them and sent Virginia to college working in the lingerie department of an upscale department store.

She had books, not very many of them, and not one piece of trashy fiction.  Her apartment was small, quiet and cool.  There was a comfortable chair under a floor lamp where she read in the evenings.  While she was at work I’d curl up there and read.  At her house that summer I read all of Poe’s “Tales”.  I also read Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.  I got so into Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that I later checked it out of the library so I could finish it.

The year I was in 4th Grade, my mother was to be the sole kitchen staff at Longfellow Elementary School on the north side of San Jose, across town from where we lived.  She got permission for me to transfer to that school so I could go in early and stay late with her, and not need other afterschool supervision.  I spent most of that time on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.  When the weather was bad, I would hang around the cafeteria, either reading at one of the tables or standing on a chair beside Mama, watching and learning.  Many of my basic, most important culinary skills go back to that.

That winter, my mother got an exciting phone call late one evening.  Jim Henry had been her first boyfriend when she was about sixteen.  My grandfather had run him off.  My great Uncle Walter, Mother’s father’s brother, and his wife Lilly had been traveling through Arkansas when they had a flat tire.  They ended up in a tire shop in Pine Bluff near Little Rock, where they saw a familiar face:  Jim Henry.  When he found out that his old time sweetheart was newly widowed, he got her number and called her.

That changed everything.

Update:

FRESH BLOGS FROM SALAM PAX

InvisibleAng, JennyG, dolly, and Crazymomma all expressed interest or curiosity about the dream I reported Monday.  Jen even asked if I had any theories.  How could I resist such an opening?

I don’t place any trust in old-style quasi-metaphysical or magickal “dream books” which list symbolic elements in dreams alphabetically and assign meanings to them.  I think C.G. Jung had a pretty good handle on the language of dreams.  Dr. Jung said that each of us has a dream language of our own, that a snake in my dream does not necessarily mean the same thing as a snake in your dream.  That works for me.  I love snakes… and spiders, too.  Do you?

Jungian analysis recognizes several types of dreaming including wish-fulfillment fantasies, fear-based nightmares, and subconscious processing of waking events and experience.   They might also recognize prophetic dreams too.  I don’t know.  I never studied Jungian analysis.  As with many things, I know only enough about that to be slightly dangerous and in some danger of misquotes or misattributions. 

Even if Jung didn’t recognize prophetic dreams, I do.  I also respect the Native American tradition that says some dreams are “little dreams”, just fantasy or processing, while other dreams are “BIG”.  Big dreams, like prophetic dreams, come not from one’s subconscious, but from the collective unconscious or Spirit.

This dream had some elements that are pure wish-fulfillment fantasy.  It has been years since a man asked me for a date, or since I’ve felt that electric thrill at someone’s touch.  I’m married to a man who does not like touching.  Ever since the last of his Xanax wore off in 1991, he hasn’t shown any sexual interest in me.  I’ve subsequently lost interest in him, but not in sex.  Erotic dreams and autoerotic play are the sum total of my sex life, so that part of the dream is easily understood.

Jung said that each character in our dreams is a facet of our own personalities.  The woman warning me about messing with two younger men at once is obvious to me.  I frequently stifle my own urges to try and stir up a bit of fun with someone, because I am aware that I’m in no position to finish what I start.  But I can dream, can’t I?

As I considered the other elements in the dream, it occurred to me that the “engine” and “fuselage” could refer to my health.  I’ve lost a lot of weight lately.  I’ve found the frame that was under all that fat.  But my motor’s not really running any better:  I still hit the fatigue wall ‘way too quickly, get laid low by opportunistic infections in cascading bunches, need meds that stress my heart in order to keep my lungs working… but the old frame still causes an occasional younger man to say he can’t believe this old great-grandma has grandkids.  I’m thankful that I don’t look as sick as I am, but I’m still looking for that new engine.

I think that the one woman’s concern in the dream, that people would think she stole the fuselage (which she didn’t), could refer to the importance I place on presenting an accurate image, being understood and accepted for myself.  My diet is almost universally misunderstood by everyone who knows about it.  Even when I explain that weight loss was an unexpected and long-unnoticed side-effect of my eliminating the addictive allergens from my diet, it seems to go over people’s heads.

I’m a fragile addict in recovery, hoping that the pains and effort of abstinence will have some payoffs in improved health.  It’s nice not carrying that extra 70 pounds around, but that’s not why I lost it.  I just LOST it, somewhere, while I wasn’t looking.  I want people to understand that.

Why my dream was set in a little coastal Alaskan town, and all the rest, I don’t know.   I wonder why it was the husband of that couple who (so uncharacteristically for a male) picked up on the vibes between me and the pilot. [afterthought:  Can there be another man around, paying more attention to me than I realize?  Has he noticed my two young friends?]  I haven’t a clue what the noisy, happy crowd of little kids was all about, but if my dream needed set-dressing I can’t think of many things that could be better than that.

The immediate lead-in to this episode is here.

Nobody was home when I got there.  My ride had dropped me off at the corner of C Street and I had shouldered that big heavy pack for the last time to walk the half block home to my little basement apartment, now shared by Charley and Hulk.

The mess I found there was disgusting and a little bit disturbing.  I had been gone for close to two weeks total.  No one had done dishes in that time.  A partial package of paper plates gave evidence of the solution the guys had found for that problem.  The disturbing part was in the trash:  empty beer cans.

Hulk and Charley were both recovering poly-addicts with histories of alcohol-fueled crime and violence.  Charley dried out in jail and had been fanatically and vocally anti-booze for as long as I had known him.  I found that a refreshing relief from Stony’s endless pursuit of intoxication and his sporadic domestic violence. 

Hulk loved both uppers and downers, preferring amphetamines, barbiturates or heroin over alcohol, but booze, I knew, could be a springboard into… anything.  It had been Hulk’s fears of returning to that life after prison that motivated him to call on me to get him out of his old milieu. 

Briefly, I considered shouldering the pack again and escaping the situation.  Then the control freak in me took over and I started cleaning up the mess, rehearsing what I would say to the guys when they came through that door.

I was still cleaning when Charley came in.  He pitched in to help and assured me that the empties were not his.  He also reassured me that Hulk wasn’t off the rails.  He had been having a few beers after work in the evenings.  I wanted that to stop and Charley agreed with me.

When Hulk did come in, it all became a moot point because he was only coming back to pick up his clothes.  He was moving in with my former co-worker from Open Door, Mollie.  I had introduced them at a staff party right after Hulk had arrived.  He had made some effort to talk her into a group marriage with us, but she had talked him out of it, instead. 

I wasn’t disappointed.  There’s a lot of Libra in me:  Moon, Mars, Venus, Midheaven and more.  I had been unable to choose between the men and yet not ever truly comfortable with both of them.  They certainly weren’t comfortable with each other.  Hulk and I had grown in different directions during our separation and my passion for Charley was fresh and wild, but Hulk was my husband and had rescued me from the bikers, after all….  Sometimes it is comforting to have a difficult decision taken out of one’s hands.

Then, just as Charley and I were settling back into something a lot closer to normal domesticity, I bounced a check.  No big deal to most people, it scared me, shook me deeply.  I had a felony record for bad checks and prison was still a raw wound in my memory.  To top it off, there was supposed to be a few hundred bucks in my checking account… our checking account.  Before I’d left on my backpacking trip, I’d made it a three-way joint account, though I was the only one who had made any deposits.

When I’d gotten home, I’d noticed a few missing checks that weren’t recorded in the register.  Charley had told me he had written some checks, and their amount wasn’t too much.  The account shouldn’t have been overdrawn.  I’d been expecting to be gone a month or more, and had left enough in the account to pay rent and bills.  Before I could figure out what happened, two more checks bounced, including rent and utilities.

I phoned the bank, hoping it was a clerical error.  They read off the check numbers and amounts, and the mystery became clear.  I found Hulk and confronted him.  He confessed.  Wanting to buy himself a tape deck and a few other things while Charley had the checkbook, Hulk had gotten another pad of checks out of the box.  He didn’t overdraw the account, but left it so low that I started bouncing checks as soon as I got home. 

It was a dirty trick.  The few hundred dollars in that account had been all I had.  I had no resources.  I was waiting for my unemployment compensation to start.  Charley was over a week away from his payday, and Hulk likewise, since they worked together.  Try as I might today, I don’t recall how I got out of that hole.  I know I talked to the landlady and she agreed to hold the check until I could get some money to buy it back from her.  The phone and lights… I dunno.  In the end my panic was a tempest in a teapot and life went on.  I learned from the incident.  I pay a bit more for duplicate checks, but I’ve never had one bounce since then.

I remember wishing at the time that I could go to group and vent my anger, fear and frustration, but that option was closed to me.  I had been on facilitator Theresa’s shit list for aiding her colleague Craig’s departure from their residential heroin rehab program the previous spring.  Even though Craig was a graduate of the program, a paid employee, his departure was viewed as defection and failure.

After Hulk had arrived I brought up our threesome in group and Theresa came unglued.  She gave me an ultimatum:  “normalize” my domestic arrangement, or leave group.  That caught me totally by surprise, considering the stories Theresa had told of prostitution and manslaughter, for which she had done time.  I’d never heard any hint of moralistic judgment from her before.  By that time, I had been her co-facilitator for the women’s group.  I felt betrayed.  Trying to get back into the group after Hulk moved out never occurred to me. 

I missed group and still sometimes long for a place like that to work through my personal messes.  I’ve kept the self-honesty and self-esteem I learned there, and my confrontational skills.  I wonder, sometimes, what happened to Craig after he left Alaska, and what happened to Theresa Stahlman and her husband Terry after the scandal that cost them their government funding and shut down Family House. 

I wonder, too, if they remember me, and if they have any idea how much effect the things I learned from them have had on my life and on the lives of my family, friends and clients whom I’ve been confronting with my own variant of Reality Attack Therapy all these years.

This story continues here.

Stampede Trail, Summer 1974

It has been months since I worked on my memoirs.  To briefly recap:

Five years previously, I had been rescued from biker captivity by The Incredible Hulk (That was the man’s nickname; I’m not making this stuff up.), a speed freak and mid-level dealer.  We got busted and one or both of us were in jail for several years afterward. 

Free on the streets while my husband Hulk was still locked up, I met Stony, violated my parole and went on the run.  Then I got caught and spent about 6 weeks in jail fighting extradition on parole violation.  That led to a full pardon for my crimes.

Stony was waiting around for me when I got out, and when I’d finally had enough of his abuse and left him, he followed me from Colorado to Utah.  From there, we traveled together to Alaska, where I finally ditched him.

I then met and fell in lovely lustful love with Charley, another jailbird I met in my official capacity as professional ex-convict for the State of Alaska.  No sooner had we moved in together, than Hulk called me asking if I would pull some strings and get his parole transferred from Oregon to Alaska.  No prob.  I sent him plane fare, my husband joined us and we became three.

We had enough time in such family togetherness to demonstrate to my full satisfaction that two men were four times the trouble of one.  We struggled on with the triangular relationship, and I must admit it had its moments of fun.  We had three bicycles and with long-time Anchoraguan Charley as our guide, Hulk and I became familiar with our new home turf.

I came to value my time off from work.  When my contract was up on the weekend job at Open Door Klinic where I was a crisis-intervention counselor, I resigned.  I had a few carefree weekends of long summer days and white nights.  Then I lost the second job.

I was bummed out.  I’d tripped myself up by trusting and trying to help someone, against the stupid rules.  I had been feeling as if I had blundered into a promising career, then suddenly found that I’d blundered back out of it.  Falling back on parental programming in my crisis, I decided to make the most of the opportunity.

To my regret, I had been so busy working 96-hour weeks plus a little overtime that I hadn’t been outside Anchorage since I got there.  There were legendary places I wanted to go:  Katmai, Nome, the Chilkoot Pass, Prudhoe Bay.

Charley has a sardonic laugh.  It’s the only laugh I’ve ever heard him do.  He doesn’t laugh often, but he laughed at my enthusiastic travel plans.  Then he brought home a map and showed me the flaws in my plans.  I might, for example, be able to hitch a ride on a float plane from Lake Hood out to Katmai on the other side of Cook Inlet, but I’d need gear and accomodations to stay there.

My travel budget was small.  I’d been thinking like the Lower 48 hitchhiker I was.  Now, about thirty years later, there is the Dalton Highway off across the tundra to the North Slope, but at that time, the North Slope Haul Road was not open to the public.  The construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was just gearing up to start.  Looking at Charley’s maps, I was amazed at the scarcity of roads.  So many places to go, so few ways to get there.

We had eliminated, for economic reasons, most of my chosen destinations.  (Still to this day I have not been to Katmai, Chilkoot, Nome or Prudhoe, but I’m not really rarin’ to go anymore, either, unless I can afford to go in comfort.)  Charley asked me what it was I wanted to do, why I picked the places I’d chosen.  I answered that I wanted to get away from the city, see new places and spend time in the wilderness.

He had the answer.  Alaska was full of places I’d never been to before, full of wilderness.  I could easily get to a trailhead on the railroad and spend a month or so walking around out there, then get out to the highway or railroad and back to Anchorage.  While I was at it, I could ride the train to Fairbanks first, and see what Alaska’s other city was like.

I packed my gear: some stuff I’d had for a while, such as the mountaineering tent I’d boosted by mistake while trying to replace my sleeping bag that had been stolen in Santa Cruz; and a lot of essential things Charley recommended, such as Cutter’s insect repellent.  My backpack was heavy. Both Charley and Hulk said I should leave the books behind, but I took my I Ching and a thick metaphysical tome by Alice A. Bailey.

The pack wasn’t so bad.  I could lift it alone, swing it onto my shoulders.  And as the hike progressed, the food would be coming out of the pack, into and through me.  It would grow lighter as I went.  Funny how that pack just kept feeling heavier as I went.  The Backpack of Paradox was my first problem.

As Charley watched me pack, he said I might as well leave those cut-off Levi shorts at home.  “You don’t want to be wearing short pants out there,” he said.  Like hell I didn’t.  What’s a little sunburn?  “It’s not the sun,” he said, “that’s no problem.”  It was the bugs and the bushes that Charley thought I needed to protect my legs from. 

I was tough, I thought.  There was a trail.  I’d traveled the great American West in shorts and halter tops.  I would put a couple of pairs of jeans in there, sure, for bad weather or formal occasions, but I’d take all three pairs of shorts as well.  It was summer, a weird wonderful kind of summer that never got dark.  Two pairs of those shorts, I never wore–just more dead weight in the incredible backpack from hell.  The sandals and moccasins, I never wore at all.  What at stupid noob I was… Cheechako all the way.  To this day, I’ve not mastered the art of traveling light, but I’ve improved.

The train ride north was pleasant, once we got through all those trashy yards on the outskirts of Anchorage and up this valley I now live in.  If it doesn’t have a few junk trucks in the yard, it’s either not an Alaskan homestead, or it’s so far off the road no truck could get there.

I rode in the domed sightseeing car with the blue-haired tourists and their bald-headed husbands.  We looked and looked and saw trees and mountains, but very little of the wildlife we were all straining our eyes to find.  I guess the bears, caribou and moose don’t like the trains.

In Fairbanks, I found a coffeehouse and a tiny hippy community of transplants from the Lower 48 much like myself.  I crashed at the little log cabin home of a young woman and her small daughter for a day or two, then caught the train back south again.  Hearing my plans, someone in Fairbanks had said I needed a bear bell.  I hung a little cowbell from my pack frame so the bears could hear me coming and get out of my way.

I told the conductor where I wanted to get off:  Lignite Siding.  He told the brakeman.  Then the conductor asked if I would be getting back on the train there in the near future.  I said no, that I was going to be hiking the Stampede Trail down to the Toklat River, then up the river to the Toklat Ranger Station and out McKinley Park Road.  He looked at me, and my backpack, and explained to me how to walk up the tracks half a mile, tie a red bandana to a tree by the tracks, then walk back to the siding and wait for the next train to stop.  I wondered if his ears were bad.  Didn’t he hear me say I was walking out another way?

At Lignite, the train stopped just for me.  I jumped down and nearly went down under the backpack when the conductor tossed it out to me.  Before the train had pulled away, I had shrugged into the pack straps and headed out the jeep trail that led west from the tracks toward the Toklat, the summer feeding grounds of the famous Toklat Grizzlies.  I could still hear the train in the distance when I struggled out of the pack straps and dug out the Cutter’s bug dope.  For all I could tell, I might have been the only warm-blooded creature for miles.  Every mosquito for miles was homing in on me.

I trudged along in my little black buzzing cloud, trying to avoid inhaling too many skeeters and pausing occasionally to reapply the Cutter’s around my sleeves and shorts, where the fabric wore it away and the mosquitoes swooped in for a sip of me.  This was not my idea of wilderness, either.  The trail was littered with beer cans and broken bottles of all ages.  Some of the most colorful litter was an array of spent shotgun shells in a rainbow of colors.  Then, out of nowhere, or probably out of the great big open sky behind me, a sudden downpour caught me.  I pulled my rain poncho out of my pack, looking around for some cover.  Seeing nothing but open country and the two parallel tire tracks to the horizon in two directions, I kept walking.  At least, while it was raining, the mosquitoes didn’t bother me.

The shower passed and the ground steamed in the sun.  The mosquitoes returned with reinforcements, as if they’d bred a new generation or two during the rain.  I shucked out of poncho and pack and renewed the covering of Cutters that had been washed off.  The poncho back in my pack and the pack back on my back, my cloud of skeeters and I went on down the jeep trail.  I started wondering when I’d get to the river.  Then I came to the highway that runs roughly parallel to the railroad and river.  That meant, according to my map, that I’d gone about two miles.  Only six more miles to Eightmile Lake, where Charley said was some beautiful country and good camping for my first night on the trail.

I have no idea how far I got on that trail.  Either I missed the little lake trail that turned off the main Stampede Trail, or I just didn’t get that far.  I’m pretty sure it was the former, but not all that sure, either.  That first two miles took forever, dragging that cloud of mosquitoes with me under the towering backpack of Gehenna.  I hiked on down that trail until I couldn’t go any more, meanwhile enduring two more sudden showers and the newly hatched millions of mosquitoes that found me each time the rain passed.

My Stampede Trail campsite

When a solid cloud cover moved in and a cold pelting rain began, I left the trail.  Climbing through brush that scratched my bare legs and removed what was left of my Cutter’s, I went up a small hill and set up my tent in a little open space between trees.  The shorts went into the pack as soon as I got into the tent and into a pair of dry Levis.  I’d gone through one little bottle of Cutter’s and part of a second.  I had only that one and one other bottle.  I knew I couldn’t keep expending it on bare legs any longer.  I was learning.

The view from my tent

It rained off and on–mostly on–for the next three days.  I decided that wasn’t such a bad place to camp.  I sorta liked it there in the tent with the mosquito net between me and the whining horde.  I started having a little fun with them.  Lying there in my tent with my face inches from the netting, I’d wait for an enterprising thirsty one to force the front half of her body through a space in the net, then I’d put out one mighty finger and squish her back through the nylon mesh.  Then I’d sorta flick and rub at the mesh to get as much of her off as I could, and wait for the next brave bug to crawl into my trap.

I was glad I’d brought the books, and such good books.  I learned a lot and they put me in a reflective and meditative mood.  I searched my soul and got to know myself a bit better.  At first, I was waiting for the weather to let up to get back on the trail.  And then I started getting strong feelings and persistent impressions that the guys were getting in trouble without me, that I probably shouldn’t have left them alone.  A couple of times I built a campfire and had some hot tea and soup.  Most of the time I just lay in the tent, squashed skeeters coming through the net, thought about the famous Toklat Grizzlies, and read or reflected or meditated or thought about my two men back in Anchorage.

After three days of that, when the sun came out and the skeeters really came out in force, I struck the tent, cleaned up camp, and headed back out the trail.  At the highway, I avoided all the hassle of flagging down a train by setting down my pack and sitting on it with my thumb stuck out.  My first ride took me all the way back to the city.

The earth moves, and makes news.

I had a dream that I intend to blog about, but before I do that I want to take note of some notable earth movements.

Rocks shift and fall all the time, and sometimes people notice.  The recent crumbling of New Hampshire’s signature rock formation, The Old Man of the Mountain, made the news.  Not content to just let time march on, some people are already planning to reconstruct the craggy old face. 

Bah, humbug!  Let it go, people.  You have pictures to remember it by.  Does this fairly commonplace natural event really warrant the shock and grief I’m hearing expressed?  The symbol fell but the state still stands.  How can people get so hung up on symbols that they neglect reality for them?  The stone face had been artificially propped up and held together for some time.  Gravity won.  Get over it.  It was the natural crumbling of the rock that made it look like a face to begin with, and now the geologic process has swept it away. 

In Utah, over a week ago, a big egg-shaped boulder shifted a couple of feet and trapped the arm of rock climber Aron Ralston.  He stayed there 5 or 6 days hoping for rescue, before amputating the arm below the elbow with his pocket knife, freeing himself. 

I heard an interviewer ask the man whose family found Aron and helped him out of the canyon if he thought he would be able to do such a thing if he found himself in that position.  The man said he didn’t think he would have the courage.  What courage?  Does it really take courage to save one’s own life by sacrificing half an arm?  I suspect that Aron was desperate.

I made up my mind long ago that I could and would perform a similar act in similar circumstances.  Those thoughts were prompted for me by a question from Greyfox.  He had just watched in horrified fascination as I did a bit of minor surgery on myself with my folding knife, the serrated Spyderco Clip-Flip I always carry in my purse.

My little operation would have been performed in private, except that I needed to borrow Greyfox’s lighter to sterilize the knife.  Then he just had to watch, there in a tourist hotel in Glitter Gulch at Denali Park.  A tooth extraction had healed nicely, but then a bone chip had worked its way out to near the surface of my gum.  It was painful, not only when I ate but every time my mouth moved to speak.  I wanted it out of there.  No big deal:  a quick cut with a clean sharp knife; nothing even remotely approaching the feat of sawing off an arm or leg.

But Greyfox wasn’t ready to let it go.  He cringed and shuddered as I held out the tiny chip of bone on a bloody fingertip for his inspection.  As I tucked a little wad of crushed yarrow leaves into my cheek and tidied up, he asked me if I would be able to cut off my leg, for example, if the need arose.

I hesitated only briefly to think it over.  I knew the answer.  Of course I could do it, if I had the tools.  Hell, If I was desperate enough, I might be able to chew my leg off to save my life.  I’m flexible.

That Aron Ralston sacrificed his forearm and hand to save his life comes as no surprise.  Who would not do that, if driven to it?  Perhaps there are a few idiots who do not properly understand the value of life, who might not do whatever needed to be done to preserve it, who would just lie down and die.  Not me, man!

The thing about all this that amazes me is that a crew of 13 people took machinery out there and moved that rock to recover the arm and take it to a mortuary.  Geez, people!  It wasn’t going anywhere.  Why expend all the time, energy and resources to dig it up one place and bury it someplace else?  It was far too late to reattach the arm.  What a waste!  They could have just kicked a little sand over the bloodstains and let time and scavengers take care of the rest. 

Dear God, please help me enlighten this benighted and superstitious planet.

In the dream…

I’m in a small coastal Alaskan town, looks like Haines.  On the street I encounter someone I know, a man of middle age, younger than I, heavy-set, not particularly handsome, but smart and interesting.  He is a bush pilot who repairs and restores old aircraft.

I deliver a message from a third party, a mutual acquaintance, that she will meet him, “with fuselage”, at the cafe we had both been walking toward.  As we approach the cafe in easy bantering conversation, we make a date to meet later for dinner.  We have known each other casually for some time, without intimacy, but in this meeting, for some reason, we made a new sort of connection.

We enter the cafe’s kitchen/service area.  It is busy and crowded with 3 people working:  the couple about my age who own the place and their employee, a fat young man.  The man I came in with moves to the other end of the kitchen and out of the way, to the other side of a large pass-thru window.  He leans on the counter there to converse with the kitchen crew and me.

I’m standing near the door where we came in, staying out of the way of the workers.  One of the owners asks the man if he has “found an engine yet.”  He answers in the negative and adds that he made a deal with someone for a fuselage.  Asked who it was, he replies that it’s the woman who runs the museum.

As we chat, the couple there notices something different in the tone of our relationship.   The husband asks about it and my companion discloses our date.

Then, the young kitchen helper moves to my side of the room on some task and our arms brush together.  It is a classic electric moment.  We are in close quarters there and he makes a few more opportunities to touch me in passing.  I move closer to him in response, until we are just standing there almost leaning on each other, silently gazing into each other’s eyes.

He is not anyone I had ever considered as a date or a mate.  I have grandchildren his age.  I barely knew him to speak to.  If the pilot notices us standing there together, I don’t see him noticing.  The couple definitely notices.  One of them asks what’s going on with us.

That breaks the spell.  The young man starts, shakes himself, and goes on with his work.  I reply with a hand gesture and a shrug, indicating that they saw what happened and know as much about it as I do.

The woman gives me an intense look, and then glances from the young man to my friend the pilot.  In a half-joking tone, but with cautionary overtones, she tells me to watch out, that I, “could become a regular Claw.”  I recognize the reference to a popular movie, and a character something like a Typhoid Mary, who spreads an awful disease.

I catch a bemused look from my date, and indicate that I understand the woman’s warning and agree with her.  The tension is broken as we are interrupted by the arrival of a noisy group outside.  It is the woman from the museum, leading a laughing, chattering group of children who carry the wooden framework of a small plane’s fuselage on their shoulders.

The husband of the pair in the cafe remarks on its being a museum piece.  The woman who brought it looks uneasily over her shoulder and expresses the hope that the townspeople don’t think she is selling off museum property.

…and I awaken.