One Man's Trash

Highway 101, the West Coast's route from Mexico to the Canadian border, rises along Washington State's Olympic Peninsula and wraps itself in old growth forest, looping to an end at Neah Bay where the American continent tapers into the North Pacific. Further south, where it meets the Hood Canal and State Route 104, you'd find me with my crew of a dozen teenagers in hardhats and red vests as we picked more than 30 years' worth of trash from the lush berms and rugged cliffs along the road.

After I had left the home for the bewildered and my 28-day stay, I found myself near unemployable as my mind began the slow trudge toward sanity, rewiring its synapses, trying to spark without intoxicants. The State was a godsend, viewing my classroom experience a virtue when it hired me to run a clean-up crew of teens. The tipping point was that on Fridays, when the byways in the Olympic Forest were choked with weekend campers and logging trucks, we'd get the kids off the road and treat them to an educational day at an environmental site, a hatchery or recycling facility.

I went to Olympia for a week's training, gathered up my white van with state plates and a flashing orange light-bar, stocked it up with day-glo warning signs and highway cones, hardhats and vests for the kids, and a huge water cooler. We'd start at dawn at the county terminus near Brinnon and Quilcene, mark the road, and begin walking. We'd take lunch breaks along the Big Quil or the Duckabush, watching the wild rivers blast through narrow channels beneath a canopy of trees and giant ferns. We'd bag the recyclables in white bags and take them away, leaving the less savory trash in orange bags along the road for the state highway crews.

I needed humbling: I had been a college professor at a Big Ten university and now was bagging filthy diapers, beer cans crawling with worms and slugs, discarded syringes and secret stashes of porn magazines and whiskey bottles from along the road. But that university professor had graded student papers in the Esquire Lounge and helped himself to pills left by his landlord physician in the forest house where he taught in Alaska, and having the grace of working with kids at their summer jobs, cleaning up the detritus tossed from speeding cars and semi-trucks by drunks and addicts seemed like karma to me.

There were six boys and six girls on the crew--when they all showed up--some from poor homes, all a little distracted and in danger of wandering thoughtlessly onto the highway. So I spent most of the day herding them around, setting out traffic cones and signs, and discouraging the kids from picking up needles and dead animals. Along the expanse of pines and granite between Quilcene and Chimacum we found a discarded deer head, tossed out by a hunter, and a makeshift dump where locals had chucked busted refrigerators, stoves, boat engines, motorbikes, beds and couches.

Someone had made a parking spot behind a wall of wild rhododendrons with a firepit, a lawn chair, and a carton filled with girly mags. We picked up the empty beer bottles and magazines for recycling, dumped out his cache of whiskey bottles and bagged them, too. Along the route we found a discarded appliance box filled with Audubon Magazines.

I marveled at how long some of the trash had aged along the road: tin beer cans that had to be opened with a church key, newspapers and magazines from the 60s, cans and bottles of Bubble-Up, Falstaff Beer, other products long since discontinued in the marketplace.

On the last Friday of the summer, I took money we had received from the recycling center and bought the crew pizza and sodas. I asked if they wanted the balance of the money for their own pocket change. We hugged and went our separate ways. No one had been injured, although once I had to grab one of the girl's shoulders and heave her out of the way of a logging truck that blew down our sign and blasted through our line of cones.

For the remainder of my seven-year stay on the Olympic Peninsula I drove the length of Highway 101, knowing it better than most people, knowing parts of it intimately, and had the satisfaction of doing a full day of work for minimum wage, helping the forest to survive us, and befriending local boys and girls that called out my name when they saw me walk the streets in Port Townsend, waved at me in their caps and gowns.

It was a good first job back from the dead, all I could have hoped for in those early days when hope was but a glowing ember.

Humbug Dharma

It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust! -- The Ghost of Christmas Present.

It may have been the oddest search for man's soul undertaken by a Jewish man in a Northwest mill town. But I was new to the realm of the spirit and was fanning through the arcana of world faiths that year in search for the puzzle piece that settled my doubt. In our Victorian seaport the mill filled the mornings with the sour aroma of soggy paper. I had little work, so spent my days reading spiritual poetry--Rumi, Kabir, Al-Muntafil, Li-Po--and walked along North Beach where the straits fanned out between Whidbey Island and the cloudy crown of the Mt. Baker volcano.

Rumi advised that when parading through the dizzying aisles of the spiritual supermarket it was important to come home with something. So I crossed the peninsula in search of a meal that would fill me, spending hours sweating in lodges of S'klallam elders, bashing drums at the men's wisdom councils in Seattle, sitting the nervous wreck through an Episcopalian Christmas mass as the priest advised that "we were unfit to eat the scraps that fell from His table", squirming in my seat in synagogues where I remembered the pre-gnostic chants but had no sense of what they meant to me. A year passed and I had yet to find my way.

Christmas was coming again and, pudgy with a heavy beard, it appeared I'd renew my role as local Santa, visiting public places and private homes where I'd issue my hearty chuckle as kids sat in my lap. But the holiday loomed as yet another occasion where I'd feel exiled anew from my Christian friends in town. Instead of feeling alienated, a friend advised, why don't you dive in headlong and see if you can have fun with it? So I auditioned for the town players' production of The Christmas Carol and won the part.

It was the perfect role for an over-the-top guy like me. The Ghost of Christmas Present wore his striking velvet robe and garland, spoke with an overwrought West-End accent, and boomed out grim speeches about doom and destiny and karma. I could relate. Plus, he had two spindly children hidden under the robe that, at the perfect opportunity, I'd sweep open to reveal the shuddering denizens of spiritual failure. How sweet was that?

I had taught theater at the university, but all notions of theory had apparently been lost on me the moment the lights caught my eye. Aside from several stand-still roles, I had never really acted. But as we neared opening night, I had waxed fully into the role, skyrocketing beyond the mark at times that made the director wince. But it was all in good fun--community theater, for chrissakes! And the message, that gluttony and pride goeth before the fall, meshed with my recent readings in eastern poetry. That I was embellishing myself more as a symbol of the very deadly sins rather than a herald of their dangers escaped me the moment the curtain rose.

All my friends and well-wishers packed the front rows on opening night as I paced nervously outside the dressing room, running my lines. I looked fantastic in those robes! The words would flow as nectar from my trembling lips. As Scrooge and I took our places behind the curtain, he tapped me on my shoulder and smiled. It will all be fine, he said.

We were to enter center stage in the dark, I would announce my opening lines, and the spotlight would find The Ghost of Christmas Present, dashing glittering dust over the front rows of audience as we proceeded down left. But the spotlight never came on after my opening, and Scrooge grabbed my elbow and steered me across the boards in the dark. I sprinkled glitter that no one could see and spoke in a frightened monotone, sounding more like a weak recording of the play on an old phonograph record than the boisterous ghost I had been for weeks.

We had traversed the stage fully when I completed my speech and the lights came on behind us, brightening on Tiny Tim's crutch where it lay in the fireplace.

"It may be," I said, "that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child." And instantly I was transported to the pew in the Episcopalian church where I was unfit to eat the scraps from God's table. I felt confidence draining from me like so much foul air and finally, went up on my lines, committing the unutterable sin of silence. Scrooge picked up and improvised like a pro as I stumbled along until, at last, I could open my robes to reveal the girl of "Want" and the boy of "Ignorance" clinging to my legs. It was over.

Afterward, Scrooge joked backstage. It was all good fun. He was a true saint in humbug's clothing. And my friends said I had been fabulous. I was sure they were snowing me. The stage was not for me, nor was Christmas. Let those better equipped to handle it revel in the hour!

It would take another decade before I found my calling in Buddhism and the truth that my friends had loved me, had indeed witnessed a stellar performance--just not the one I had planned for them. To believe that I am powerful enough to control the unfurling of days and nights is to create my own misery. That ignorance and want are my demons. That nothing needs to happen. That between the indelible past and unwritten future there is infinite grace where I am fully fit for all the crumbs--and for the banquet, too--so long as I take loving kindness down from the shelf, tote it home, and wear the world as a loose garment.

Gonzo Instructs

Jane Fonda walked to where I stood in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room and put her hand on my arm. For a moment, I thought it was a kind gesture.

"Miss Fonda," I said, reaching for the notebook in my jeans pocket, "Do you have a second?"

"No," she snapped and used my elbow as a fulcrum for shoving past me.

At that moment it was clear that I was a nobody. We had driven five days across country, Proton and I, doing our best to stay loaded all the way. We were intent on mirroring our Gonzo journalist idol Hunter S. Thompson. No matter that we had gone to see Thompson at Stanford and the guy was too drunk to speak. He wobbled at the microphone, uttered a barrage of profanity in a garbled rant, and left early. Nonetheless, Proton (a fellow newshound from the East Bay daily where I worked) and I packed our clothes, an assortment of illegal drugs, and a road atlas into his Volkswagen van, and drove to New York City where we had press passes to cover the 1976 Democratic Convention.

Now, spun out in the aisle of the Liberal Caucus room, I watched the aft end of Ted Turner's future bride disappear into the crowd and fell, crestfallen, into my seat. I wasn't much of a newshound anyway and the week of mindless driving had left me a dumb spectator. Proton had raced off after Candace Bergen, a strikingly beautiful actress who, cameras draped around her neck, was working the convention as a photojournalist.

I sat in my seat, listened to Rep. John Conyers review platform planks that in no way would ever be supported by Jimmy Carter. After the Nixon horror-show and brain numbing Ford years, you'd think the country was ready to try liberalism again, but the way the caucus was headed, it was clear that Reaganism was a suggestion away from reality. The liberals would have to accept a plate of leftovers here in New York, a reality that rinsed away whatever ambitions I had left to write anything of my experience.

I found Proton and we left to tour the streets of Manhattan. We went along the central post office, past buildings with lion statues and colonnades draped with patriotic bunting. We passed the throngs of protesters and lobbyists--signs proclaiming everything from legalizing prostitution to tirades against abortion--and made our way to Times Square. I had thought the convention floor a zoo, but walking the New York streets was more entertaining.

We came upon a movie theatre showing a crime drama. In those days there were no video trailers, so it was enticing to see a scene from the film played out on an outdoor screen. In the clip, a man had his victim pinned against a wall and was running the bit from a power drill in and out of his thigh. A closeup showed the bit corkscrewing into the man's bleeding leg.

"No big deal," said a passerby in a thick Brooklyn accent. "You see that stuff all the time."

Later in the afternoon we returned to the convention floor, sated with pizza and pretzels dipped in mustard that we rounded up from sidewalk peddlers. Reporters crowded around Senator Kennedy, who held forth, ruddy as a beet, at a corner of the hall. At the platform a speaker from Florida rambled along in tinny monotone about objections to the welfare plank.

That night in our motel room, Proton and I divvied up the four-way hit of paper acid that we had ferried out from the Bay Area. In the morning, Carter would announce his running mate, which everyone expected would be Walter Mondale, so there was nothing to miss. We would have breakfast, then gobble the acid and walk the convention floor for a while. I had already bought a ticket on the afternoon Metroliner to Washington, so I wasn't staying anyhow. I planned to take the high-speed train to D.C., where I'd stay with a member of Rep. Don Edwards' staff. Edwards was a powerful liberal--had led the Judiciary Committee's call for Nixon's impeachment. Edwards had an office in part of the Bay Area that I covered, and I had come to know his staff. In fact, I had come to really know two of his secretaries, which fully demonstrated my commitment to narcissism.

After breakfast, Proton and I loaded up the ponies of transcendence and went our separate ways. I would be flying home to the Bay Area while he would drive the VW to his family in Kentucky. I must admit, I never really liked LSD. The first hour of giddiness very much appealed to me, but the subsequent hours of melting at the whim of a drug I couldn't control scared me to death. I typically spent most of the time wishing it was over. But we had agreed to do Gonzo journalism and I wouldn't wimp out.

And during the hour of giddiness I found myself in front of the bank of microphones when Carter dragged Mondale on-stage. Mondale's face waxed and waned in acidic throbs. Mondale had a lion's head, huge and shaggy. My body rang like a struck temple bell. The blare of spotlights and the sudden bursts from motorized cameras made me dizzy. I had to go.

After a few hours wandering with dubious judgment through Times Square, I found my way to Grand Central and found my seat on the Metroliner. I had done well to book a plush chair by a picture window. Waiters came up and down the aisles with cocktails and snacks. And I raced along between New York and Washington at a furious clip, the countryside streaming out the window like a painting in rain. In fact, it had begun to rain. And when we pulled into D.C. there was a furious summer thunderstorm, lightening forking down atop the Capitol Building and all across the Mall.

I found the phone number to Edwards' staffer at the Rayburn Building and called from the station. Sadly, the staffer wasn't there. The Congressman himself answered the phone. I was dumbstruck. He was delighted to speak with me. He wanted to know the latest scoop from the Convention. I could feel another door of great opportunity closing on me, slammed shut by my own idiocy.

I told him I would come see him in the morning, that I couldn't talk now as I was under the weather, which was amazingly true on many counts. The storm crashed down around me and after I hung up, I took a cab to the staffer's home in the Virginia suburbs.

What had seemed so glamorous in Thompson looked shabby on me. Of course I would not go see the Congressman in the morning. I had nothing to report, save to say that in the name of God I would never try acid again. Even so, I still had plenty to experience in a long career of self-sabotage. It was July 1976, the nation's birthday.

From the Balcony

Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born in Chicago in 1918, the daughter of a traveling salesman for a rubber company. An Episcopalian tomboy, Ms. Bloomer took a job teaching the fox trot to young girls when she was only 11 years old following the stock market crash. Four years later, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning--an apocryphal occurrence that may have been a suicide. Later she studied dance with Martha Graham, actually appeared at Carnegie Hall, and following a disastrous first marriage and divorce in 1947, she met a veteran pilot and former Michigan football star named Gerald Ford and married the future President in October the following year.

Megan Ruth Marshack was born in Sherman Oaks, California in 1953. She had wanted to be on the boys football team, and kept her aggressive edge long after she completed her two year degree at Valley College and her journalism degree at California State University, Northridge. Tenacious, she took at job with Associated Press radio and worked her way into White House coverage, where she undoubtedly met First Lady Betty. Not long after presenting Vice President Nelson Rockefeller with a individually-wrapped supply of Oreo cookies, Megan came back to her apartment in Chevy Chase with his gift of the elegant sculpture of a Chinese jade horse.

I know, because I was staying there that week. I had been in college with Megan and admired her quick success. She was exceptionally talented, a voluptuous stunner with striking long hair and yummy lips...and the temperament of a bulldog on your cuff. She was brilliant, knew art of the Ancient Near East, and conversed with White House reporters on their own turf, on their own topics, mano a mano. She was great friends with Helen Thomas. And that summer, the summer of the Bicentennial, she had finagled a White House press pass so I could stand the following morning with the media on the White House lawn during the visit by Queen Elizabeth.

The next day, I put on my suit and caught a bus from Chevy Chase to Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. It was a stunning, sunny day with a light morning breeze. You stopped at the security kiosk on the side facing the Executive Office Building and presented your credentials, then walked the circular drive toward the press entry and the south lawn.

The entry to the south portico was roped off and the press corps crowded against the apron. Press Secretary Ron Nessen appeared on the balcony briefly, summarizing the schedule for the visit, then out came the Queen, Ford, and Betty into the brilliant sunshine. The Queen wore a blue suit, white gloves, and matching pillbox hat. As the cameras flashed, the Queen issued her stiff royal wave and plastic smile, then posed between the President and First Lady. Betty had a wide grin plastered to her face as she waved, her body uncomfortably stiff as they stood together.

After the photographers had sufficient opportunity, Ford put his hand at the Queen's elbow and steered her back toward the open door to the White House. The pair ducked inside and for a moment we were stunned. The First Lady, who apparently had no idea she had been abandoned at the rail, continued to wave and smile at the press corps. Reporters began to twitter. After a deadly odd moment passed, Ford reappeared, took his wife by the arm and escorted her off the porch.

Later in the White House press room, a reporter from the Detroit Free Press explained to me that Betty had a bad back, had been on a course of pain pills which, perhaps, accounted for her quirky trance. Later, of course, the nation learned the truth about Betty.

She had long been an anomaly among Republican First Ladies, speaking candidly about CB radios, mood rings, divorce, abortion, and drugs. Her breakthrough candor about her struggle with breast cancer and 1974 mastectomy made her a national heroine. But I am more impressed about her open struggle and victory over drugs and alcohol and her founding of the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, not far from where she and President Ford retired and lived up until his death in 2006. Renowned as a treatment center for Hollywood personalities and other wealthy people, Betty's center has flat out saved families, saved lives, and brought peace to countless others.

Here's sufficient irony if you need it: On February 8, 1940, financier John D. Rockefeller hosted a dinner for Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. The watershed event helped publicize the organization's new treatment for alcoholism while lending it credibility among New York's highest social circles. Unfortunately, Rockefeller fell ill that evening, so he sent son Nelson to host the event.

As for Megan Marshack, when I finished my Bicentennial Tour I lost touch with her forever. What I do know is that she was hired as a research assistant to Nelson Rockefeller and was the woman who called 911 as he lay dying from a heart attack. Her New York co-op was only two doors down from where the former Vice President was living, and she suddenly disappeared from public view shortly after his death, fueling suspicions in cities where suspicion is king.

It could not be as easy or simple for Megan to have escaped the limelight and achieve the peace that Betty found following that awful day on the balcony. Her name flickered briefly in the news during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. I'd rather associate her bravery, intellect, zest, and panache with the angels of Betty Ford's highest nature. After all, albeit briefly, Megan played tackle football with the big boys.