Angel Beach

Rain or shine, I would pull on my sweats and windbreaker and drive to North Beach. From my house on the bluff, you took Cherry Street across town to the Chinese Gardens Lagoon and parked at the end of Kuhn Street, where the trails sloped down to the sand or wended up into the forested lanes of the state park. I'd pull a woolen cap down over my ears and set off into the prevailing wind, picking my way between rocks and foam and seaweed.

If you turned west, the beach would narrow and the path would bend around glistening rocks and sun-washed stumps of dead-fall, ducking into the freezing shadows of the bluff, and suddenly out again into the bright sun. You could watch the broad neck of the Admiralty Inlet where specs of cargo ships on the horizon made their way through the morning fog, moving at a crawl with precision through the passage, tendrils of smoke in the morning light, their superstructures taking shape as they neared, their bows pushing a mighty wake before them. You could feel the vibration of their heavy diesels through the dark gray sand as you walked.

On lucky days, I would walk five or six miles west to Glass Beach on the ebb tide, counting herons along the way or laughing at the splashing play of otters as they coasted on their backs in the carpet of the seaweed. When you rounded the bend at McCurdy Point you could see Hurricane Ridge and the jagged spine of the Olympic range where it thrust into the blue sky. If it was a clear day, that is. And yet, on days unfit for sunning, an eagle would round out the sky above you.

When white settlers chose the Port Townsend area for a home in 1851 they found a bustling trade route used by Chief Chetzemoka's Klallam tribe. By the turn of the century, Port Townsend was a booming seaport, and residents used the beach beneath the towering cliffs at McCurdy Point as the town dump. You can still find shards of pottery, bottles, and china at the bottom of the bluff. I'd find marbles, in perfect condition, buried under a few inches of sand. I'd try to imagine the life of a settler's child.

I liked to gather feathers, dried wood, blue and purple glass, and the occasional sea-star shell. Some days I'd carry them home, other times I'd build a small shrine of Earthly delights and pray in gratitude for my new-found sobriety. If I went out early, I'd have the entire stretch of beach to myself. We tried to keep Glass Beach a local secret, but you'd find hikers galore out there on weekends.

If you turned east at the parking lot, the beach trailed off toward the inner curve of the inlet, with the Mount Baker volcano rising into the clouds. To the farthest end, where the peninsula curved south, stood the Point Wilson lighthouse and its booming foghorn. I liked to go this way in the evening, when the beach was still and quiet save for the susurring of the waves and the rhythmic wail of the horn in the dark, misty air. The light would spin its bright eye at you as it swept across the channel.

I'd often stop near the point and sit in the dark and talk to my grandfather. I had lived in Port Townsend about a year when my brother and I visited Uncle Mort in Eugene and he told us the terrible secret of my grandfather's suicide--hidden from us for all our lives. Scarcely fifteen years later, Mort would take his own life.

But here, on the beach below the Point Wilson light, I'd sit and ponder the good luck of my finding a way out, a town where kids shouted to me in the street, and friends called my home if they hadn't seen me in several days just to see how I was. And I'd sit beneath the whirling eye of the Point Wilson light and talk to grandpa Max, telling him how I had come this far, that I had lived through the madness that at times seemed only a paper-thin moment away, how I had found this house on the bluff where Klallam friends helped me build a native sweat lodge, where my dearest friends would come and sweat and pour water, and pray for the earth and our ancestors and our loved ones and, afterward, eat sumptuous food and laugh about how easily it could have all ended in disaster.

One night I sat beneath the lighthouse until dawn and in the the drizzling fog of morning thought I saw an angel perched in a lone cedar where it rose on the bluff. The tree had been struck by lightening and in the shadowy shape of dawn, I saw the slow unfurling of wings where the stump had been cleaved through the heart.

Though I often tried, I never saw the angel in that tree again, though she was there, as certain as the wind-swept bluff and the hissing tide. I don't know where I'm going, but I have ruled out certain options, ending one legacy with my piece in the line. And now, hundreds of miles away, I am forever on Angel Beach, grandpa Max, dear Uncle Mort, a noose and a bullet, and I'm so damn sad that you never found the path that led me home.

-30-

I recently received a very kind letter from my Aunt Naomi. She had been divorced from my Uncle Mort when I was in my early teens and I had not had any communication with her since. In her note, he remarked that she heard that I had become a writer, that I had always been a writer and had wanted to be one when she and my uncle gave me a thesaurus when I graduated junior high school.

At Porter Junior High we celebrated career dress-up day once a year. You'd come to school wearing the clothes that best reflected your highest aspirations. Mine had been to become Edward R. Murrow. I found a fedora, wrote the word "press" on a small index card, and wedged it into the hatband. I imagined myself trooping up the steps to the CBS studios on Manhattan, notepad in-hand, hurrying to beat the competition with my latest scoop.

By the end of my first year of college, I had already amassed a considerable portfolio of stories, culled from interviews with Katharine Ross, Ray Bradbury, and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I had a press pass that let me into the great venues of Los Angeles, the Hollywood Bowl, the Cinerama Theatre (where I attended the opening of the film Woodstock), the Pantages, the Greek Theatre, the Ice House in Pasadena (where I'd brush elbows with emerging bands and comics), and the Shrine Auditorium. I had been to the opening of Hair, a concert of little-known Loggins and Messina, and covered anti-war marches along the Sunset Strip. By my senior year, I had transferred to San Jose State, where I amassed clips of anti-war riots, marches for Civil Rights, and the burial of a brand new Ford Pinto to wage an environmental protest. I was ready for great things.

Hardly a week following graduation I took a job with a small-town daily in Davis, a college community just west of Sacramento. We had an afternoon deadline, which meant I drove to work around 5:30 am, wrote six or seven news stories, then drove to Woodland, where a competitor paper was printed in the morning. I'd buy a copy, race back to my newsroom along Route 113, and re-write any stories that we might have missed.

My editor at The Enterprise was young, energetic, and a great mentor. But our publisher believed that the role of the paper was to echo the concerns of business and advertisers, which meant that everything I wrote passed through his heavy filter. He would re-write quotes or facts that cast the slightest aspersions on local businesses and their push for economic growth. Not an unusual role for a paper, but in a town exceptionally devoted to preserving the environment and stemming growth in the mid-1970s, it was the kiss of death. The mayor, Bob Black, had been arrested for laying his body across the railroad tracks in town through which munitions trains carried weapons westward to the Vietnam War. Now he led an effort to stem town expansion and spur the development of open space and parks.

I would cover a meeting where the council voted to stem growth, write the quotes accurately only to have them corrupted by my publisher. After a fashion, it was difficult to get anyone over at city hall to talk to me. But on the morning of September 15, 1975, I finally had my coup.

I drove to Sacramento to witness the arrival of President Gerald Ford at the state capitol. I wore my press pass in my coat pocket and carried a large format camera. Shortly after Ford arrived, I took positions with the press corps, and followed him and his secret service agents across the capitol grounds. Just outside the east entry, we passed a woman dressed in a hooded red robe.

It was Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme, former member of the Mansion Family, who muttered something about the country going to pieces, pulled out a .45 Colt pistol and took aim. Two secret servicemen tackled her while the rest formed a wedge and spirited the President into the Capitol. I ran to a telephone and phoned in my story. We were an hour ahead of deadline and it would make the afternoon edition.

But my publisher, unsure of my ability to get facts strait, or with the right slant, decided to hold the story, awaiting confirmation of the assassination attempt by the wire services. He held it beyond deadline, and my account ran a day late.

Seventeen days later, I took my notebook with me to San Francisco. Ford was speaking at the St. Francis Hotel and I hoped to run into Megan Marshack, a college friend who was now covering the White House for AP Radio. As we waited for Ford outside the hotel we watched the secret service prepare Ford's limo. The moment the President emerged, Sarah Jane Moore was barely 40 feet away when she fired at shot at him. She was carrying a .45 automatic, 113 rounds of ammo, but the secret service got to her before she could fire a second shot. Again, my paper held my account until they could get a wire story. I had been an eyewitness to two assassination attempts and lost two scoops.

The summer of '76 I went to the Ford White House, courtesy of a press pass from Megan. As I sat in the press office, I saw a bunch of hard-drinking, bloated correspondents who awaited for "official" documents to come from the Press Secretary before heading to their typewriters and telephones. At that moment I knew that even at the apex of my career, I would be a fetch-it scribe for the interests of people in power.

It soured me. And four months later I walked into my office at my new daily paper in the Bay Area and pasted up a huge poster of Nelson Rockefeller. Under the portrait was a refrain from Daniel Webster about preserving the health of the union by breaking up large, corrupt interest groups. My editor, pissed, took it down. There was a clear rectangle now on a wall, a spot surrounded by bumper stickers, posters, press releases, and sports photos.

In the place where the poster had been, I pasted my resignation letter.

The Dragons of Rochester

“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

In my family there is a saying that what you don't know won't hurt you.

Here's what I do know: My father was only seventeen when he was called out of school to go upstairs into his father's tailor shop. Grandpa Max was a talented and successful suit-maker; he had cut fabric for New York's renowned actors and politicians; and my father was sent over to identify his body.

At least that's how the story goes, but the story is hardly ever told, and the details change between times and tellers, and I grew up without hearing any of it.

So when I turned 41, I visited my uncle Mort in Eugene and he brought out photos of my grandfather Max and told me who he was and how he died. Until that day, I was told, alternatively, that Max had died when he fell out of a boat crossing out of Russia, that he had disappeared, or that he had lived a long time ago and the details of his life didn't much matter, or my questions about my relatives and their lives were just met with evasions, talk about the Dodgers, the weather, which chores I had failed to do up to snuff, or the grades I should be making.

So here in my uncle's living room I was looking at a photo of a stranger--and yet I knew him indelible intimacy, the curvature of his chin, the odd nobility of his countenance that I had seen in my father's face: the Hyman obstinacy to survive no matter the details, to put your head down and keep charging, the non-acknowledgment of inner agony and suffering that somehow--as water seeks its own course through cracked granite--finds expression in convoluted ways.

I grew up loved and without want of any kind. My parents' home in Los Angeles bears little resemblance to the crowded tenements of New York's Jewish ghettos where my grandparents landed without language and scraped pennies together for sustenance. The home is decorated with photos of my mother's family, of Harry and Tillie, of maternal uncles Manny, Moe and Sol, but none appear of Max, or of Max's wife Libbie.

Today I live in a lovely cottage on a hillside in Northern California. They discovered gold near here. Deer graze in my yard. There's a pond outside my window dotted with geese and the ripples that drift outward in their wake. This morning it is cold and in the still gray before sunrise I can see the bubble of light in the distance where Sacramento is sleeping--where the waxing moon lies in the seat of dark clouds--and I can feel the shadow of my grandfather Max, sullen, the vapor of unspoken grief, the larval fury which gnaws restive on the valley below. If, in Langston Hughes' words, a dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun, then a grief deferred grows like a dragon in the earth.

The dragon has consumed some of us. It doesn't always kill you straight off. For some, it chews on us for a while, then backs away and waits patiently in an offshore corner, watching for signs of revival. Some of us have used alcohol and drugs, some prescription medications, some food, some workaholism. The dragon demands homage.

One summer not long ago I was riding in a car with my parents and Dad's niece, named Maxine after my paternal grandfather. Quite out of nowhere, she asked dad how far Max jumped to his death.

"Not far," my father said. "A chair is not that high."

I began to weep in the back seat.

"Were you close to your father," I finally could ask.

"Yes," my father said. "But it's not such a good thing to be so close."

What Maxine and my uncle seemed to agree upon in their stories was that my grandmother Libbie was a piece of work, a selfish, voraciously driven soul without center that preyed upon Max and his family. No one could do well enough, in her eyes.

There are facts and fancy. I've quilted this much together.

Let's say it's 1906: Max is himself seventeen--the same age my father will be when Max ends his life. Max lives in a small Romanian village where the summer heat is stifling and the humidly nearly unbearable. The still, evening air fills with the drone of mosquitoes. If you think of current-day Bosnia, you have an idea what it's like being a Jew in this village. Daily life is depressing for most Romanians, who find themselves in a downward economic slump, but for the scapegoat Jews there is only excruciating fear and torment. Their businesses are burned and homes leveled. And one evening, as Max returns from synagogue, he finds his family in the remains of their home. He is alone now.

And then, here is Max, with nothing but the box of jewels his mother has hidden in the sun-scorched garden, and a lifetime of horror to digest, and perhaps (I like to imagine) the drive of the family survival mechanism which, beyond all emotional disaster can operate at a steady thrum. And there is that winking gem of America and all it signifies across the sea. So Max and his box of treasure are smuggled out in a caravan of refugees--like today's refugee of the former Yugoslavia who sew their jewels into their coats with fishing filament as they are driven by bus to the camps outside the war zone.

Let's say Max lands first in Brussels where he buys passage to England and from Liverpool sails in steerage class on a shipload of Irish immigrants to Ellis Island.

There is a joke in my family about the Jewish man who comes to America in such a vessel. His Eastern European name contains so many consonants the Irish shipmates give up on using it. They give him a name--Joe O'Leary --to use when he lands, but now, dockside, at the table where the first line of immigration authorities interrogate him, the man cannot remember the simple, four-syllable name given him by his fellow travelers. In a fit of despair he says over and over that he has forgotten. The authorities shake their heads and ask again, and over and over he wails in Yiddish, "Shayen fergessen." Finally they understand, and on his immigration form in the block marked name they write, Shane Fergusson. And so Max enters the country as an Irishman without a word to share.

I don't know Max's real last name--before it was changed-- although we natty-haired Hymans are not Fergussons. And the name Hyman, with so much irony it seems, comes from the Hebrew "Chaim"--life! And when I walk the hills here in Gold Country and wonder why Max was never able to carry himself forward into so many truths, I acknowledge that survival itself at any cost is not life enough for me. I've come this far, Max. See the hills here? I've been on glaciers in Alaska in the midnight sun, wrote my name in gold foil in the ceiling of the Golden Buddha in Nara, Japan, placed prayers for our family in the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, seen the deep blue of Loch Ness, saw the birth of your great granddaughter Emily and cradled her in my arms as we danced to a recording of "What if God Was One of Us?"

I'm sad that you ran out of options. And I'll never go out that way.

On the streets of Manhattan's Lower East Side where Max lands in 1906 at age seventeen and already the owner of a lifetime of horrific secrets that he cannot communicate in the common tongue with Americans. I wonder even if he would even speak of such horror among the Romanians or other Jews he encountered in the ghetto who spoke his language, or whether the slaughter of the Jews by now had become so commonplace that it was the baseline of silence: this is where we all come from but it's passed and now we have this life to lead. Don't talk about it, now put your nose to the grindstone. That's certainly my father's message.

And perhaps it worked, for a while. Did Max already know how to tailor suits with such delicate workmanship? What of my great-grandfather and his skills? Gone into the silence. But this was America now of the industrial new century, the streets of Manhattan awash with merchants, the Babel of Immigrants. You have to leap a lot in the story to get to the next part--but it a leap worth taking, for all that ensues in the next few years is silent, steady toil. And Max learns English, finds work, and by all appearances--since appearances have become so important in America--is a huge success. Bully for Max! He does so well that he buys himself a motorcycle. This, I know, is fact. My uncle was certain of it, but I so wish I had that photo--Max in his leather cap and goggles, revving the throttle on that Indian motorcycle.

Work is going well. So swell, in fact, Max has time on his hands. He decides to ride the Indian up to Montreal, or maybe northwest to Toronto. The road from New York City passes through the Adirondacks, the trees blossoming with fall color, birth and death at once. Past the Finger Lakes he rides, flushed with excitement, and he gets as far as Rochester before he finally gets lost.

It is there, so Uncle Mort had told me, that he asks for directions at a house. A white picket fence frames the yard. The woman in the garden is his bride to be. And from there spools out the history of my father, my family, my brother and sister and their children.

I wish I could know more. But one day before my father's 89th birthday this year, Uncle Mort took his own life. There was a note, as unreliable in relation to the truth as any other speculation here. But here are some facts: after his stint in the Navy, Mort visited our home in Brooklyn. I was a toddler. There are home movies of us in the almost-accurate color of the time. Mort is strumming a ukulele and I am dancing. Other stories have Mort asking me to put a tune on the record player. I am too young to read, but I have associated the look of the writing on the record label with the music that comes out when it is played. If you asked me, I could put on The Jones Boys. "The whole town is talking about the Jones Boys," it went. And so went I, beyond the boys to Shostakovitch and Springsteen, Miserlou, and MP3s.

I have Mort to thank for that--and for my love of words. When I graduated junior high, Mort gave me a thesaurus and invited me to explore the "adventure of words". The blue hardback catalog of synonyms sat at the side of my desk, in all the states I traveled, during my years that I worked as a journalist, at my side when I completed graduate school and taught writing in the Big Ten. I kept it until my niece Jessica, my brother's eldest child, graduated school and I sent it to her. I want her to go on this adventure of words, too. I want her to seek the truth.

And all these words, unworthy as the best may be, are for Ted and Linda, for Emily, Jess, Nathan, and Christian. Dragon slayers.