Chapter 8 - Twenty-Five Hundred Dollar Beach Lots

Chapter 8

We got back from Mexico that year and celebrated Elizabeth’s 3rd birthday with a big outdoor party. Our uptown Victorian had an extra lot next to it, just the spot for a party. The ancient old plum tree in the back of the yard was in full bloom and the grass was a vibrant spring green. We invited lots of friends and started a birthday party tradition that continued until Beth was 17. Susan and her girls were a big part of our celebrations, Susan felt like my sister and the girls my nieces. Dessa and Ryka, Susan’s twins, loved my kids. They had known Cameron since he was born and they were the first to hold Elizabeth after she was born. Our families did everything together. Thomas has been gone from our lives almost 4 years. That he had been dead almost as long as he had been alive was hard for me to grasp. I was so stuck in the past and yet my kids were rapidly getting older, next year Beth would be four years old, the age Thomas was when he died.

I started working for Susan that summer at the store and I loved it. I had a knack for talking to people. Susan had gone from having just used clothes and toys to a new line of clothes that she hand dyed. She bought shirts, long johns, any cute kids cloths and dyed them really cool colors. I could be a good salesman when I believed in something, and I believed in these children’s cloths. They were soft and comfy and my kids were walking models. In fact Beth was actually in a few of the catalogs when she was little. Also as I had every summer before, I threw myself into working in the yard. I had 2 lots now, where I had 4 lots before at the red roof house, but I still found it a challenge. I built several privacy fences toward the back of the yard and made a huge garden in front of them. I planted flowers against the fences and the old photos remind me how beautiful they were.

Sometime that fall I started thinking. “Susan”, I said, “I love you dearly, but you know, this is not right; we need to meet some guys. We are still young enough, though Thomas and Robert’s death have taken their toll, we need to meet someone.” “Na”, she said, “I don’t want to meet someone.” “Come on, there must be some type guy you like. Blonds, redheads, manly men?” “Well” she finally said after months of teasing, “someone like Lynn, the guy who is working for me.” Susan had made the big jump from her small store to a large rental downtown on Main Street. She was quite the business woman in those days. She saw how Port Townsend was growing and that many tourists were starting to come through. She rented the whole space downtown and had it made into 3 stores. She rented two and kept one for her business, Kidstuff. She had hired Lynn to finish the remodeling. Lynn knew who I was, I lived right around the corner from him uptown. “I know”, I said, “I’ll invite him to my Christmas party”. Well Lynn was not too sure he wanted to come until I told him that Susan would be there. It turned out to be a memorable night. Lynn showed up, Susan looked gorgeous; they fell in love right then and there at the party I swear. That Christmas magic.

Luckily Susan and I had tickets to take the kids to Mexico on January 1. She and Lynn had to drag themselves away from each other and it made her more exotic and harder to get – guys love that, I told her as we were leaving. We had a great time in Puerto Vallarta. I have photos of the kids swimming in the big pool at the hotel, they had a blast floating on inner tubes and learning to dive. It wasn’t the Hotel Marisol, but one just down the beach. I was walking in front of the Hotel Marisol one afternoon when I ran into my old friend Javier. I had made friends with he and his wife on my last trip to Vallarta, they lived in a lovely home up the hill from the main church in downtown, with a great view out over the city. He was a wonderful artist. He was surprised to see me and anxious to tell me that they had moved from the ever growing crowds of Puerto Vallarta to a small town north of there called Bucerias. You have to come he said, the beach is so much cleaner, safer and inexpensive. That is all we needed to hear, next day we were heading out to Bucerias in a taxi.

I had always wanted to buy land in Mexico. I had looked in Baja for property on every trip. I didn’t want to live in Baja though, it was a great place of adventure and camping, it didn’t feel like the mainland. I though Bucerias would be a good place to look. We rented a two bedroom apartment with a nice balcony and a view of the Bahia de Banderas, the big bay that Puerto Vallarta is at the center of, for $100 a month. In front of us was the trailer park, or would be when someone started using it, and the water was in front of that, I love easy walks to the beach. I was frustrated though, that even in this small and it seemed miles away from Vallarta little town, real estate prices were out of my range.

Finally one really nice agent took pity on me, “there are some twenty five hundred dollar beach lots in Punta Mita,” she said. “Where?” I said, perking up, two thousand and five hundred dollars for a beach lot, wow. “How do I get there?” “Punta Mita is on the northern tip of the Bahia de Banderas,” she said. It makes me smile just to think of my first visit there. Susan, Deborah my other friend who was with us and all our kids got onto the bus. We took the bus from Bucerias to La Cruz where we changed buses. The road to Mita was a narrow winding road along the bluff next to the bay. The village of Mita was 2 kilometers from the actual point of land where the bay ended and the big ocean started. We got off at the edge of town and walked straight to the beach along the cobblestone road. It was sure gorgeous there, like a picture, white sand and aquamarine colored water. Huge shade trees lined the shore, there was no development on the beach and because you were still in the bay the waves were fun to swim in and not too big. It seemed like paradise. We started walking down the beach. We went to the left, if we had gone to the right, we would have found the town, the palapa restaurants on the beach and the bus back. We didn’t, we went left and walked for a long way and finally found, thankfully one small restaurant with palapas for shade and tables in the sand. We had a wonderful lunch; the kids had a great day in the sand and water. Then we walked miles in the setting sun down a dirt road that would take us back to the main road, which we hoped the bus would come down, sooner or later. As we left the beach, I knew I would be back.

After Susan and Deborah left for home with their kids, I took the bus out to Punta Mita again. This time I turned right when I got to the beach. I had not walked very far when I saw a small unfinished looking house above the beach on the road. It had Se Vende written in black spray paint on the side - for sale. That was the place, the only house on the whole shady beach. The road from town curved down, went in front of the beach a little way and then headed back inland toward the road. This place was perfect, could it be? I approached the door and in my limited Spanish tried to explain to the older woman in a hammock on the shady side of the building that if this place was for sale, I was interested in buying it. Well that was way to direct and got very little response. We smoked a few American cigarettes and made some small talk, smoked more cigarettes, finally she said come back on Thursday and her husband would be there. Satisfied that I had at least gotten somewhere, I boarded the bus back to Bucerias.

On Thursday I was cautious, I brought her a pack of American cigarettes and we smoked several together before I asked about her husband. She pointed down the street. There was a small bar a few corners down. She said he was in there. I was about to go down to the bar when she said no, woman are not allowed. “Well how can I talk to him?” I asked. She suggested that I go down and wait at the corner for him to see me and he would come and talk to me. He knew I was coming. No point in explaining how ridiculous this seemed to me. I waited at the corner for awhile feeling like a complete fool, when sure enough, here came a man who introduces himself as Telesforo, the owner of the property. I had done fairly well up until now with my limited Spanish. Now I realized I needed help.

Jessica, Javier’s wife, who was also my friend, agreed to act as my interpreter if I paid her daughter’s babysitter. She and I made several trips out to Punta Mita and neither Telesforo nor his wife seemed in any hurry to sell me the property. It was finally decided that I would not actually buy the little casita which was on a tiny badly shaped lot, which they wanted roughly $10,000 for, but the small lot to the left of it for $2,500 and the larger lot to the right of it for $7,500, two lots for the price of one unlivable bodega. I figured that I could build a small casita myself one day. I figured wrong, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I wanted to make this deal happen and we were getting nowhere. Jessica, I said, tell him that I have the money in cash, in Dollars and that I will bring it to him in 3 days, well that got his attention. They did not want to deal with a gringo, let alone a woman. But as soon as he understood, 3 days, $10,000 cash, I was finally a real person and he was ready to go to the office in La Cruz and sign papers. To close the deal, three days later we again went to the office in La Cruz. The offices were in the upstairs of an old hotel. They did not make appointments and you waited in line in chairs on the long outside hallways in front of the rooms. You could see some rooms piled high with folders and boxes of papers, no real filling system or cabinet to be seen, only one old typewriter off to the side. There were 3 or 4 desks in the outer office for girls that worked there. The only things on each of the girl’s desks were a bottle of white out and a bottle of nail polish, bright red.

When we got into the inner office, we met Chela Medina, daughter of the great Medina bus lines. She was the head of the Fideocimiso for the state of Nararit. She was dressed to the nines, heels, heavy make up and fiery red nails. The first thing she asked was if we had the money, it turns out the lot was owned by her and Telesforo sold it for her, he only got a cut. It was pretty interesting to count out $10,000 in $100 dollar bills right there on her desk. I felt like I was in some B movie. She drew our lots on the Mita subdivision map, recounted the money, handed us the signed paper work. We shook hands all around and left. As I glanced over my shoulder, Chela took the pile of money off the table and was beginning to lay down what was Telesforo’s cut.

The kids and I were ecstatic. We spent many days hanging out in Punta Mita on the property that winter. The big lot had large trees that provided shade to set up under, swimming and playing in the sand all afternoon, taking the last bus back to Bucerias in the evening.

When we got back to Port Townsend that spring, I realized I needed to consider driving again. It is not like I didn’t ride in cars. I was making everyone else take the responsibility for driving and I just rode. It seemed like if I was going to be a responsible part of my culture, I had to drive again, take my turn driving to play group, it was only fair. It sounded good, still I couldn’t convince myself. Later I saw a car for sale that I was just so attracted to; it was a big old Mercedes, white with red leather interior. I bought the car and had to drive it home. I hadn’t thought about that, I was planning on parking it out front for a while and get use to the idea. So there I was driving it home from Quilcene, 25 miles from Port Townsend. It was a very tense trip, but it went okay. The car did sit out front for a while, then slowly I started driving. I was determined to be a good driver not a wimpy and timid one, that is even more dangerous. When Don Juan got in the car, Carlos said, he crawled in like he was going into a cave and then he would announce, “today is a good day to die.” That is about it, you take your life in your hands every time you take the wheel, you might as well get good at it.

I was not sure that I wanted to stay in Port Townsend. Thomas has been dead 5 years. I had never really planned on moving there permanently, I had just never left. I was musing on what it would take for me to want to stay. First I was ready to move again. The Victorian only had 2 bedrooms and while that did not seem to be a problem when I moved it, the kids were now 7 and 4 and needed their privacy, also living uptown was not all it was cracked up to be. People were really fussy about how everything looked. The neighbor next door called the city on me because I had a pile of wood in the yard. I needed more space and privacy. I found the perfect house. I am attracted to empty forlorn houses that just need someone to love them. Well the house on V Street certainly was that. The family who had owned it moved up to Alaska and their boys had rented it with friends, then it had been empty for years. The boys had trashed it before they left and the animals did the rest of the damage in the following years. The grass was waist high and the house was badly in need of a paint job. I feel in love with it immediately, the view out the front was of the shipping lanes of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and on a clear day you could see Mt. Baker, a huge snowcapped volcanic cone that looked like it rose out of the sea behind the straits. The house was an old farmhouse and the rooms were arranged a little odd, but the saving grace was the stone fireplace in the living room. It also came with a big old red barn. My friends were against it, too rough and scary they said, finally they came around and I remember Seiza helping me paint the kitchen so we could stand to eat in there.

While musing if I would stay in Port Townsend, besides a cool house to play with, my other wish was that I would meet a man. I was ready. It had so not worked out with the kid’s dad. It had taken me five years after Thomas’s death to really think I might be ready. Susan and I had talked about it last year, now she was with Lynn. Was there someone out there for me?

Soon after that some friends of mine, Becky and Peter, told me that there was someone that I should meet. Peter had been working with William and he really thought I would like him. I knew who William was; he was the founding director of the Swan School, the small progressive private school in town that Cam and Beth went to. The school was sponsoring Japanese exchange students for the summer, all the families had one, I had seen him at the Hello dinner we had for the Japanese students and a couple times in the morning when we were getting them on the tour bus. We had never talked though.

One week-end I was at a community dance. My friend Lana had William’s kids with her; she does day care and had just moved in next door to him. She was really stuck and had to leave the dance before William got there, could I take Noah and Sadie until he came. Sure. Cute kids. When he came to pick up the kids, he said something about being divorced, and then he mumbled something about his being a diamond in the rough. Since I was just in the process of buying the house on V Street and he being a contractor and all, I called him and hired him to come over and inspect the place. If he thought I was interesting before, he thought I was nuts after. He gave me a good inspection, but you could see he would not touch that old house with a ten foot pole. He tried not to be negative, but I could tell. I went on to buy the house, expecting to never hear from him again. A few weeks later he called and asked me if I wanted to go to Bumbershoot with him, Bumbershoot is a music festival in Seattle. I told him I thought that was too ambitious, that maybe we should meet for coffee and work our way up to dinner, Bummershoot was hours away and an all day affair. “No”, he said, “we’ll have a good time.” Okay. Not only did we have a good time, we had a great time, we got home late and sat on my back porch swing talking and laughing until even later.

William is the love of my life. We couldn’t have missed each other in a million years. Not that everything went smoothly, not by a long shot. He understood when I told him about Thomas’s death, he was no stranger to sudden death himself, his younger brother had been killed in a car accident when he was 16 years old. William was away from home in his second year at college. It changed his life. He said that his parents never talk about it. There are no pictures of his brother. One of the first things I said to his parents was, “oh so you have a dead son too.” I thought William was going to faint, but his mother looked right at me and saw that I had been there, that I understood and she starting opening up to me. The next visit to their house they showed us baby photos of William and his brother Ted. I know that talking about it for them with someone they knew understood had helped them get past an important point in their grief.

William noticed that I kept the box with T’s ashes it in my dresser drawer. He was looking at the box one day and said, “Wow, June 13th, that’s my birthday.” I just stared at him. June 13th? I ran to the box. I had forgotten that Thomas’s birthday on the box was wrong. His birthday was June 23 and they wrote the 13th. William’s birthday was the 13th, I couldn’t believe it. I remembered saying to myself years ago to watch for June 13th in my life, that it would be an important day.

Chapter 7 - Sand and Water

Chapter 7

Sometime the winter before Elizabeth was born, Rebecca, came into our world. She, along with Maggie, helped wake me up. Even before Elizabeth was born, I needed some help on the physical plane, cleaning, shopping, cooking were all beyond me, I was still held back in life, frozen with grief. Susan suggested someone, a woman who worked for her at her store. Rebecca came into our lives with the intensity of a tornado. She opened all the windows and doors, turned up the music, pulled the furniture away from the walls and let the vacuum cleaner rip. She brought energy and light back into our lives.

I stayed in my bedroom nursing the baby those first months that she came. By the end of the summer, she was holding the baby and I was mowing the lawn. The lawn, that huge big expanse of field that was my front yard really wasn’t a lawn yet. I worked a lot of anger and frustration out on that field making it into a real lawn. When she was finished, Rebecca would drive us to the grocery store where I could do my weekly shopping and we could all get treats for working so hard.

I didn’t drive after the accident. I didn’t drive again for five years. That did not stop me from wanting to go to Mexico that winter after E was born. Cameron would turn four in March and I wanted to be anywhere else but home. I dreaded his fourth birthday. I knew that it had nothing to do with Thomas dying but I couldn’t convince my body. I couldn’t somehow imagine Cameron getting older than Thomas. Besides that I loved Mexico and it was always very healing for me. So we flew down to Loreto. Loreto was where we had first met Nancy. Where maybe I could find no trace of the independent and happy soul I had been just a few short years before.

We stayed in the Hotel Davis which was just a short walk to the beach and not in the hotel where we had lived with Nancy. Here two babies once again frolicked in the calm water’s of the Sea of Cortez. Then it was Thomas and Cameron, now it was Cameron and Elizabeth. My head was still spinning. I was just looking at the photos from that trip years ago with Cam and Elizabeth. There is a photo of Cam coming out of the water with his bath suit on. When I saw it just now, I jumped - I have a photo of Thomas with the same bathing suit on, hunter green with white strips on the side, coming out of the water, same beach at about the same age. Maybe that was what made me rush north again to Mulege, to rent another place and celebrate Cam’s birthday there and not Loreto.

Mulege (Moo-la-hay) is a sweet little town on one of the two navigable rivers in Baja. We rented a nice little apartment on Madero a block down from the main square. There was has a wonderful old mission up the river through the palm groves. It was about a mile and a half walk from the bridge in town, and we walked it often, Bethy in the backpack and Cam running circles around me. The mission dates from the 1770’s. The massive building was built out of hand cut stone. It is a very powerful place. The mission sits high above the river and I never tired of looking out at the legacy of those first padres; the date, fig, banana, olive and orange groves below that still line the river.

Beth, the baby, had tourista, montazuma’s revenge or in plain talk – diarrhea. I wasn’t too worried. We have all had it at different times on our Mexico travels. I was still breast feeding her and thought she would be fine. One evening in our favorite restaurant across the street from the apartment, the woman who worked there came to the table, I didn’t know that she owned the restaurant then. Pardona mi, she said in shy Spanish. Pardon me. My Spanish was very limited; but I soon figured out that she was trying to tell me that my child was very ill. Inferma. Finally she took the baby and I into the back room. She took E and started sucking on her head. She was pointing out to me that her soft spot was depressed and that meant dehydration I now know. She gave me medicine and told me to come back the next day. The next day she sucked on her head again and for the next 5 days. Elizabeth was fine by then. I am sure the medicine helped too but I know that Josephina saved her life. Why is death always so close to life? She and I became fast friends and even though we did not speak the same language, she told me many things. She said she was a bruja, this could mean healer, witch, or magician. I have since heard the word used in many ways.

Dona Josephina was a powerful woman. She reminded me of the leaders in the Gurdjieff group that I had belonged to. I remember once when I was with one of the leaders of that San Francisco group, she said that she had to help me. What do you mean by that, I asked. Well, she said, it is my duty. You are nothing, she went on to say. You are in the beginning group and you know nothing but you have the special ability to recognize us, to sense and know that we have being. You recognize us and so we have to let you hang out with us. Do not be confused though, you are not us, you do not yet have greater being, you still will have to work very hard but very few know us in the way you do. I guess in that way I must have recognized Josephina.

Cameron’s fourth birthday went fine. It was just us. We decorated our apartment with balloons and streamers. I wrapped lots of small toys for Cameron in yellow tissue paper. It was the first time we played the Lotteria game, which is like bingo; you match a picture that is turned up on a card with a picture on your card and mark it. The cool thing of course was that it was in Spanish, it was an easy way to learn some basic vocabulary. We are still playing this game today, not that exact one of course, we have gone through several.

When we got home from Mexico that summer, my goal was to “get the lawn in shape”, that is what I had written in my journal. I also see that I often wrote that I was depressed. I still was having a very hard time adjusting. I didn’t know the enormity of what I was trying to do. I was hard on myself, why wasn’t I getting over this sooner, I pushed. Once I had chosen life, I didn’t want it colored by this tragedy, I didn’t want my children’s lives color by this, but of course they were. I mowed that field into a lawn, I dug a huge garden, I planted trees, I watered and I tried to work out the energy that was stuck in me. I tried to work away the huge hole; I tried to stave off the huge fear that something else like that was going to happen at any moment.

You would think that losing your child like this would make you closer to your surviving children, but surprisingly this did not seem to be true for me. I love my children, no doubt about it, but a part of me was dead too, that innocence I knew with Thomas before he died would never come again. Sometimes I think that I never got as close to C and E. That Thomas’s death held something back in me, didn’t allow me to be too close and what was I thinking, that somehow if they died I wouldn’t hurt as much? But it wasn’t about thinking. I wasn’t really thinking I was just trying to survive.


I filled our lives with flowers. I have wonderful photographs of the yard at the red roof house, which is what Cameron always called it, it had a red tiled roof, hence the red roof house. There were long planter boxes along the edge of the porch filled with trailing lobelia in two colors of blue, white and red geraniums and deep purple petunias. In front of the porch where you continue on into the doors, I made brick stoops and between them grew lupines, poppies and red and pink snapdragons. The garden had huge sunflowers, towering cosmos and it was there I grew my first hollyhocks. I have loved them ever since. Huge flowers all summer growing upward along tall stems. The ones I grew there were a deep wine color and some that were pink and frilly inside. They were beautiful, especially how the two colors grew together. I planted a large area of bearded iris, gladiolus and daisies near the driveway and sweet peas near the garage.

As the days shortened that fall and the garden died I was planning our next trip to Mexico. There is something about Mexico that is healing for me and always has been. I am drawn to Mexico as one is drawn to a lover. Maggie said that in many of my past lives I had been an American and Central American Native. I didn’t try to explain it, I just knew I need to spend some time down there every winter I could. It was like I had some kind of battery in me that got a yearly charge by being there.

I made a plan to drive down with the kid’s dad and have Christmas in Baja together. I still did not drive and felt very sentimental about the surviving children and the holidays. So to Mexico we all went. Just south of Mulege, was our favorite bay, the Bahia de Conception. In the last few years we were shocked at how many more people came every down every year and lived on the beach. They don’t camp, at least they don’t camp in the way we are use to, with a small tent tied to a 3 sided palapa and using a firepit for cooking, they have huge motor homes, trailers and fifth-wheels. At Santispic Beach, the first and largest beach you come to at the beginning of the Bay of Conception, almost all the sites were filled with big wheels of some kind. They had their doors closed, the air conditioners on and their generators blaring. There was even, gasp, a circle of them, just like the wagons on wagons trains of the 1800’s, circle up your machine partner. I wrote in my journal, “I’m not going to meet Don Juan at this beach unless he is now living in a Winnebago”.

We drove further south past Loreto. We had never driven this far down Baja before. When we got to Cabo San Lucas, I was distressed to find that there was no access to the beaches there. The beach was lined with huge hotels and they had fences to the water. Sure you could walk on the beach theoretically as in Mexico the government has a federal zone and owns the land to the high tide, you were discouraged from using it by the guards of the hotels and there was definitely no place to camp. Finally someone told us about Shipwreck Beach a few miles north. One of the only places left to make a rustic camp in the area. This was almost 20 years ago. I have not been back, but have heard about the development there. I am sure I would be shocked; I thought it was bad when we were there.

Shipwreck Beach was awesome then. It was a ways off the main road on dirt roads that were in very poor shape, it was not easy to access and our van almost got stuck several times. It was worth it though. We had a prime spot on a grassy hill with the beach a short walk down. The place was named for the ship that was wrecked off the coast, you could sort of see it at low tide. It was a favorite spot for divers, in fact the only reference to Ship Wreck Beach that I can find in the guide book today is that Cabo Acuadeportes will take you on a guided two tank scuba dive to Ship Wreck Beach for $75. US.

We were quite a bit further down the beach from the shipwreck and our beach was a perfect spot for children. Several larger rocks further out took the brunt of any waves and right next to the beach it was calm and there were wonderful little tide pools and stretches of white sand. It was very safe for the kids. We didn’t have snorkel equipment, but by just looking in the pools we could see schools of bright blue little fish, striped fish, flat fish, tiny tiny silver fish and long needle nose ones. Cam and Beth were ecstatic. So was I. I had never seen anything like it. What a Christmas present.

After Christmas we decided to take the ferry from Cabo to the mainland and drive home that way. We had not been on the mainland in a long time and not this part ever. After a 24 hour ride we arrive in Puerto Vallarta. It is not the Puerto Vallarta that tourists flock to today, well it is the same place but twenty years ago it was still a sleepy tropical village. I feel in love with it immediately and settled into the Hotel Marisol, an, at one time grand, old hotel on the beach in front of Playa de Muertos in old town Puerto Vallarta. When we got to the mainland the kids dad and I parted ways and the kids and I flew home later. I felt bad for Cam and Beth as I knew they loved both of us. If T had not died I knew we would not be spending any time together at all. We were both weak and said we were doing it for the kid’s. We had never slept together after we made Beth and since he was almost 20 years older than me, he had moved into an almost grandfatherly role, a cranky one at that.

When I got home to Port Townsend that spring I knew it was time to do what I had started to do when Thomas died and that was to leave the kid’s dad. Sell this house I loved, but that we had bought together, sell my property on Long Ridge so I would have money to live since I would never go there again, and finally establish a household I could afford on my own.

A funny thing happened here. When I was looking for a house to buy and escape the bunk beds, I found an old Victorian house for sale in uptown Port Townsend. I thought it was perfect. That was the whole bent of the town, beautiful Victorian Port Townsend. I would be able to walk downtown, as I didn’t drive and I could fix up this beautiful classic building. Well the woman who was selling it would not listen to reason. She would not come to terms. Even the real estate agent said that she was at least $20,000 too high. That does not sound like much, but in those days when the house was worth $50,000 and she wanted $70,000 that is 40% too much. I just couldn’t do it and come out okay financially. Karl’s house came up for $50,000, we bought it and moved in. Almost three years later I was again looking for a house so I could separate from the kid’s dad for a second time, and guess what - that same Victorian was for sale and not only was it $20,000 less this time, they had put in a cement basement and perimeter foundation, and finished the wood floor in the studio. Wow, I was delighted and bought it.

That winter I was Mexico dreaming again. I took a ride down to Bahia de Conception with the Kid’s dad. I know, I was a complete and desperate fool. I still did not drive and thought we could be civil. He agreed not to drink on the trip down. He didn’t and everything went fine. The minute we got to the beach he started drinking, next thing I know he is throwing our stuff out of the motor home, swearing and screaming. He speeds off and we are left on our own, which is actually better than being with an abusive drunk anyway. I set up the tent next to the palaypa and tied it down. We opened the lawn chairs and set them in the shade. We blew up the air mattress that we floated on by day and slept on by night. The kids found their buckets and boats and they were occupied for the next few months by sand and water.

Our tent was less than 10 feet to the edge of the water. I could sit on my bed in the tent and look out at the turquoise blue water lapping on the shore with barren mountains on the other side of the bay in the distance behind. We went to bed by 6:30 PM, after the sun had gone down and the coals from the dinner fire were still glowing. We were up by 6 AM and by 6:30 AM you needed both your sunglasses and bathing suit on, to get ready for a long day in the sun. We made friends of others who were camped there too. There was a family from central California who had a boy Cam’s age and a girl Beth’s. She also had a baby, which I was glad I did not have! She and I became fast friends. She would ride us on her ATV to the little restaurant on the next beach over. It could barely make it with all of us hanging on. The boys would be out with an inflatable boat early in the morning and stay busy all day, you had to go out 20 feet to be 2 feet deep, it was really safe for kids. I have great photos of my two; the sun had bleached their hair blond and turned their skin the color of a nut. Bare foot and smiling we all played on the beach.

There was a woman who pulled in next to us one day in a large fancy motor home. She looked to be about 60. She tried to stay to herself and I noticed her crying sometimes. Finally I went over and stated to make small talk. I’m a bad judge of age and she looked good but she was past 70. She burst into tears, I’m sorry she said, my husband just died. I lost my son, I said. She said oh and opened up to me. She and her husband had just bought this motor home, they had been planning this for years. When he retired they would drive down Baja and really start to enjoy life, well soon after they bought the motor home and before they took a trip, he died of a heart attack. She didn’t know what to do; she had this huge home on wheels, so she decided to drive down Baja herself. She was not a wimpy woman, driving alone at her age down Baja was feisty, but she was having trouble going on from here. They had wanted to try and find the lost mission of Santa Isabel. Story has it that when the Jesuits, who had come to Baja in 1697 and set up the first permanent missions, were expelled in 1767 by the Franciscans, before they were forced onto a ship and headed for San Blas, they sealed their treasure off in a valley. The valley of the mission Santa Isabel fit the description. The mission has never been found, nor has the treasure of the Jesuits.

My friend said she would watch the kids and that I should take this nice lady on a hike so she could get ready for the lost mission hike. Why don’t you take hike yourself I said. Oh, I am a girly girl and you are the outdoor type. Look I live in a big trailer and you live in a tent. I have a dress on and you have khaki shorts. Okay, okay, maybe I could use a break from the kids, maybe I can do some writing. When we told Golda that I would take her to see the petroglyphs, she was so excited, let’s take an overnight she said, take sleeping bags and sleep in a cave. Okay, right, whatever and that is how a few days later I found myself heading out of camp, across the road and up the dry stream bed with my backpack and sleeping bag. We went behind several small hills with no problem and without climbing much heading for the Sierra Coyote peaks to the west of us, part of the larger Sierra de Guadalupe range. We start up the arroyo and come across a large horizontal rock, there are 100’s of prehistoric petroglyphs and paintings in the arroyo. I heard later that the rock is called “Bell Rock”, and that this place was sacred to the natives, if you strike the rock with a stone or hard stick the rock resonates like a bell. Wish I had know that then, although the petroglyph themselves were amazing enough.

The creators of the petroglyphs and cave paintings are unknown. Harry Crosby, the cave paintings expert of Baja California calls them “the Painters”. The Cochimis, who were the native tribe there when the Spanish arrived, told them that the rock art was created by a race of giants who preceded them. The Sierra de Guadalupe west of Mulege contains the largest number of known prehistoric mural sites in all of Baja. Rabbits, mountain sheep and deer are the animals most commonly found on the rocks, also manta rays which I thought was very cool. Some were just outlines in black and others were red or white. The black color comes from charcoal, the white from volcanic ash and the red is made from crushed lava. Wow.

Once we started climbing it got a little rougher and we went slower. There was much sand and many huge rocks, cactus everywhere; organ pipe cactus and the giant cardon. I have heard Baja called the eight hundred mile cactus garden, over 100 different species of cacti have been identified on the Baja Peninsula – more than anywhere else in the world. Almost three quarters of them are unique only to Baja, I think we saw most of them that day. We saw another strange plant or tree I guess, the elephant tree. This tree has a really thick trunk and heavy limbs, but is not very tall. To conserve water, the tree only has leaves after a rain. When it doesn’t have leaves it looks dead and when it does it looks really silly, huge limbs with little tiny leaves.

I am getting winded walking, lets stop here I say. For the night? Oh no way she says, I want to get at least to that next ridge of caves up there, see? She points. My idea was not to hike your butt off all day, my idea was to hike a ways past the rock drawings, smoke a joint and write for the afternoon. The caves look closer than they are, it was a long strenuous walk. Once there we see the area has many caves, some larger and some smaller. She picks out a cave that faces north and is easy to get to. I see one higher up that is perfectly aligned to see the sunset. See you in the morning I say, I as I head up to it. The cave is awesome, about 20 by 30 feet inside with a nice open ledge, it is flat and full of sand. It feels like no one has ever been here before. There were no footprints, no trash, no cigarette butts, beer caps, the usual evidence of humans. I spread out my sleeping bag near the edge, roll a joint and watch a great sunset. I bring my bag further in the cave and try to fall asleep. I start to wonder if there are scorpions. I haven’t seen many before this but I heard that they are often under rocks. I take my flash light and turn over a fairly good sized rock near my bed, yep sure enough, there’s a scorpion. I freak, I try to smash it with the rock. It went under the sand, I didn’t get it, I don’t know where it is. I put the rock back and stand there for awhile. Finally I just went to bed, too tired to be afraid.

When word got to Josephina, the bruja, that we were staying on the beach, and she came right out, Mulege is not very far north of there. She closed the restaurant and brought her whole family out to the beach to visit. We had a wonderful day. They brought great food of course, guitars and especially their lovely kind selves. She said it was a shame for me to be living on the beach with two small children when she had a house for rent in Mulege. A house for rent? Why was she renting her house I asked. Well since I had seen her last she has opened a new restaurant called the Maranatha on the highway south of town and lives in the bedroom in back. All her children were grown and living on their own, they all nod. Why don’t I come see it? Why not indeed. She said, you come with us and we will show you. Before I even saw the house, before they even left the beach that day, it was all arranged. I would rent month by month for $100. $100. today please, I will pick you up on Wednesday, be ready.

I loved her house. It was on the other side of the bridge from town and close to the mission. The front yard was full of flowers and watering would be my job. She was sorry that there was no furniture in the house as her kids took all the things. The bedroom in back had a double bed and dresser at least and that would be my room. The room I put the kids in was in the front next to mine, they had sleeping pads on the floor. The kitchen was a board on bricks that I made with a one burner propane stove. The kitchen actually was unfinished and there were no windows only openings. The weather was so nice I actually enjoyed not having windows. The house had a big wide covered porch that stayed cool even on the hottest days. It was a huge step up from the beach and I was glad to have a bathroom after a few months of camping. Life sometimes had a way of working out. Mexico has always been good to me.

Chapter 6 - Birth and the Heart Begins to Feel

Chapter 6

Meanwhile, ordinary life went on. I couldn’t bear to stay in the little house with the bunk beds. We moved to an apartment and spent a lonely Christmas. I even got a present from Thomas. I had my camera with me in the accident and sometime that fall a friend had found it on the mountain. It had just sat on my desk for months and right before Christmas I had the photos developed. The photos were of T’s birthday and a few days after. There was one photo thought that I felt Thomas had just sent me. It was of him swinging on the trapeze bar that hung in his dad’s house in Zenia, a few days after his birthday, he was wearing sunglasses. He had on green corduroy pants and a red velour top. Red and Green, Christmas colors, he looked like a Christmas card. Somehow this actually made me feel a little better, like we still had some connection. The sunglasses seemed to say I am here, but you can’t see me.

By Cameron’s third birthday party in March that winter, we had moved to a new house out by the fairgrounds. I was hugely pregnant in the photos. The photos show a successful children’s party. Not like the few bad photos I had of Thomas’s last birthday. Last indeed. The house was new and very nicely built by a friend of Susan’s. It was simple and esthetic on four lots. The house set back and had an expansive yard to the front toward the street. It was a unique house; the whole front was one room with three sets of French doors opening onto a deck that was across the entire front of the house. There was one step down to the yard, which was expansive. The house set back from the road and the last house on a dead-end street. It suited me fine and turned out to be a good house in which to heal. Karl had built the house for his sweetie, they didn’t work out and it had been empty a long time though no one had ever lived there. I turned the yard into a lawn and made a huge garden off to the side. That at least kept my hands plenty busy.

My daughter Elizabeth Rose was born, April 16th, 1984. I was thrilled to have a girl. I had two boys and lost one, anything different was good. Though I have never felt Elizabeth’s energy to be Thomas, and though one child can never take the place of another, my heart did begin to heal with the birth of my daughter.

The day before Elizabeth was born; my friend and doctor from Garberville and his wife gave birth to a baby girl at the same hospital Thomas where had died just the summer before. They were ecstatic. I had three miscarriages before I had Thomas. They had a baby Cam’s age but had three miscarriages before the birth of this one. We were very connected on that level, even though when Thomas died I knew he didn’t have a clue about death.

E was less than a week old when I got the news – the doctor’s new baby was dead. Oh no, no way. I didn’t hear the whole story until they came up later that summer. The mom noticed that the baby’s umbilical cord was a little red, the dad looked at it, and he is a doctor. They lived out of Garberville in the mountains as many of us did and it was late, I have seen worse he said, we’ll take her in to town in the morning, by the morning, she was dead.

Maureen, the babies mom and I clung to each other that summer like ship wrecked sailors. We told each other all the details of our personal horror story of losing our child. We spared each other nothing. I will never forget the image she invoked when she told me what the most painful memory was for her. It was the inhuman way her baby was treated at the hospital. They had her lying on top of a stool, stiff, sticking out straight, head and tiny feet out over the edge. I can’t get that picture out of my mind. Neither could she and somehow I guess we supported each other’s most horrible memory. Though we let it all hang out on that visit, we didn’t go on to be friends, maybe we knew too much.

I so often wonder about why things happen the way they do. How each of those deaths got us where we lived, I was driving the car when T died and I feel so deeply responsible and Doctor Bill misjudged a medical emergency, he must feel incredibly responsible. Had his daughter been killed in a car or Thomas by an infection, how would we feel different? Would we feel better?

At that time Susan, my friend, was going through a divorce. She was bravely divorcing Robert, the alcoholic who didn’t drink anymore, but whose behavior had not improved in years. Robert was the classic alcoholic; he was depressed, couldn’t keep a job and literally stooped under the weight of the world. He locked himself in his room and read Nazi war novels to cheer himself up. That he had 2 adorable twin girls was the only thing he came to for. They had moved up from Sausalito in Marin County, north of San Francisco, a year or two before I did. I had met them down there; they were living on their houseboat on a dock outside a friend of mine’s funky boat workshop. I visited them in Port Townsend, when we came up to see Bob and Mary in Seattle. I was staying with Susan the fall that I bought my little house there and the fall that she knew she had to have Robert out of her life.

Susan is a strong woman and she taught me the definition of Alcoholic, she gave me a list of the classic behaviors of an alcoholic. It described my kid’s dad perfectly. He had almost every one of those behaviors, including blaming me. I knew I was going to buy a house in Port Townsend and over the next year leave him. Years later when I was at various treatment centers with my teen-agers and in one of those parents/partner support groups, they always asked me if I tried to get him to stop drinking or get him help. This was usually asked by some husband or wife who had been going to treatment with their wife or husband for years; you could hear the desperation in their voice. The definition of co-dependent comes to mind. No, I didn’t. He was almost 20 years older than me and had been drinking before I was born. I was not married to him. I was just thankful to have enough information to get myself and the boys away, save me I thought, I wasn’t looking for miracles.

Susan had stared a small used children’s clothing business called “Kidstuff”. She was brilliant at going to garage sales and flea markets and finding great used kid’s stuff. Perfect name. She had a really cute little building just off the main road into town. When I think of Port Townsend, I still think of driving up from California and arriving at Susan’s store. I spent a lot of time hanging out in the grass next to the store, the kids playing, watching the wind whip up the waves of Port Townsend Bay down the street and smelling the sea air.

Their divorce was moving along and then all of a sudden Robert decides that he is the rightful owner of Kidstuff, Susan’s store. Well we were all astonished, in addition to everything else he was threatening her livelihood. This was a Monday and the court date was set for that Friday. He was not living at Susan’s at the time. On Wednesday she gets a phone call telling her that Robert was dead, that he died of a heart attack. He was forty two years old.

Well, I guess this is how Susan became my best friend. Now, both touched by death, we were drawn together. Grief sisters. Thomas the love of my life was gone and Robert who had been the love of her life and had become her enemy, was gone too. She had just as much anger, frustration and guilt as I did. I felt so bad for the girl’s; they were so young to lose their dad. He really loved his twin’s and like I use to tell my kids later, your dad loves you and would like to do things for you but he can’t, he is sick, he has the illness called alcoholism and he can hardly take care of his self. I doubt I did say anything that meaningful to the twins then, I was in a fog myself, Thomas had just been gone less that a year and I was a nursing mother.

Elizabeth Rose was a beautiful baby. She was so good. If my sobbing everyday in grief over Thomas while she was in my womb adversely affected her, it wasn’t evident. Cameron was three and a bright, sweet boy. He was good looking too, blond hair bleached even blonder by the sun, always a good tan and a buff coordinated little body. We did everything together that summer, Beth in her bouncy chair, Cam in the sand box and I working in the garden. I had a big old stroller they could both ride in and we lived less than a half mile to North Beach, a city park on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, part of Puget Sound. Salt water, small waves and plenty of sand. On most clear days we strollered down, had a picnic lunch and built castles in the sand.

I still broke down a lot but not all the time as I had the first year after Thomas died. When I went down into that grieving place it was as intense as if he had just died. But the spaces between these break downs grew and I began to live my life in those spaces. I still break down with the same intensity twenty years later and I have some days that I don’t think about him, not many, but some and it always surprises me. I was so confused still at that time. I use to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic and not know what children I had, two boys or a girl and a boy? I was freaking inside on the downward slope of Cameron approaching turning four years old. And though I knew that there was no intellectual connection, emotionally for me it was somehow connected big time. Cameron was a very different child than Thomas and I never felt confusion over which one was still here. Thomas was very ethereal, delicate and not earthly. If Thomas seemed other worldly, Cameron was rooted in the earth, he was so grounded, so physical. Cam had the biggest and most loving smile ever since he was born. People always use to ask me if he was always that happy. For instance he taught Thomas to play with cars. Thomas was almost two years old when Cam was born. Cam was not very old when he stared using his bottle as a car, pretending it was going down the road and he would accompany it with a vroom-vroom. We were amazed. Thomas didn’t play with cars like that, where had Cam learned it? After that Thomas went vroom-vroom, driving pretend cars too.

Thomas almost died three times in his short 4 years before he really did. Right off he almost died at birth. I had wanted to have a home birth. I had been seeing several mid-wives from the clinic in Garberville, I had been practicing my yoga, my breathing and I was earth mother giving birth for the first time. When I was officially three weeks over due, they made me move into town. They said it was just too far away for them to be comfortable. I stayed in a large house near the river in Garberville. Trish and Amber were awesome. They were a gay couple almost as excited as I was at the prospect of a baby. Trish chop a pile of firewood everyday and keep there big old farmhouse toasty warm thinking that might be the day. I tried every old wives tale that was known to start labor, I took long walks, ran up the stairs, went for bumpy car rides, drank some awful tasting stuff and nothing.

By the time I was five weeks over due, the experts agreed that they needed to induce labor. The hospital in Garberville was not large enough to have a delivery room and we would have to go to Fortuna, about an hour north of Garberville. I was to be admitted to the hospital early the next morning so we came up the day before. I kept wondering what it felt like to start labor. I had heard that if you couldn’t talk through a contraction, then you were in labor. Well, it was really hard for me to picture not being able to talk. We had gone shopping for the afternoon and were having an early dinner when, I stopped talking mid-sentence. Whew, Kate said, is that what I think. I don’t know, what do you think? I think we should get to the hospital. In the car I was speechless. It was true! I thanked the universe that I had listened and learned the breathing, I had been sure I would never use it. I was sucking air in and breathing it out in little puffs. All thoughts of talking – gone.

After hours of agonizing labor a couple of x-rays revel that no way is a baby going to fit through that pelvis. Just not big enough, says the doctor. So if this was 100 years ago, one or both of us would die. This being the 20th century, a c-section was preformed and Thomas was born. Horror story, not right, not breathing right. He had to be hooked up to tubes for the first two days, they told me he might not make it. Then the third day, his lungs cleared up, he was breathing fine and they couldn’t believe it. They unplugged him and he was fine.

The second incident we really did lose T for a few minutes, which seemed like an eternity at the time. I had forty acres and a small cabin, about an hour and a half into the mountains from Rancho Doce Palos, Cameron was still a babe in arms so Thomas must have been about two, or two and a half when it happened.

The boy’s dad and I had made a deal to buy some property after T was born, so I would have something for myself, as it was always clear that his hundred acres was not mine. I found the land, did all the leg work and he put up the down payment. I found a half section of land for sale on Long Ridge, three hundred and twenty acres. It was the only section of land that was private on the ridge and was completely surrounded by the Mad River National Forest. It was section 36, the old school house section. When the Nation Forest was created, one section in a hundred had to be public for the schools. The school house was no longer there, though the spring was still called Schoolhouse Spring.

The road out to Long Ridge was an even slower going that the drive to Zenia from Garberville. When you went out to Long Ridge from Zenia you went further into the mountains and into Trinity County. You took the Zenia Bluff road up to the Zenia store and around to Kettenpom. The view from the ridge is awesome. The road climbs down into Hoaglin valley, where you take a road to the east, down through the prettiest, most perfect seeming little valley that I had ever seen: beautiful large expenses of flowing grass and wildflowers, with oasis of forests. Huge pine trees with large Manzanita bushes gracefully underneath. It got hot there and the pines gave off an aroma that I can almost smell today if I close my eyes and concentrate on it.

Past the valley was the switched back one lane dirt road down to Salt Creek. Salt Creek was a must stop if it was hot. There was the little swimming hole by the bridge with a big sand bar if you were in a hurry, but more worth it was the walk up the creek to the real swimming hole, a deep pool were the water runs cold. It was large enough to really swim around in even in September when the rest of Salt Creek was almost dry. No one swam in any cloths and we dove and splashed in the water till we were worn out and had to rest sun drying on a warm rock.

Refreshed we would pile back in the car and head back up the other side of the creek to the ridge and travel 5 more miles out the dead end ridge called Long Ridge. To the left at the bottom of the ridge, way down there was the middle fork of the Eel River. We were the last ridge before the start of the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness Area. This was remote.

First thing we did when we bought the property was to sell one hundred and twenty acres that was on a separate deed. That gave us our down payment back. Then we divided the two hundred acres left, I got 40 acres, the kid’s dad got 70 and we sold the two other parcels left to his friends. I essentially got the forty acres for doing the work and making it all happen. I was thrilled. It was a beautiful piece of property. When you stood on the hill were the cabin was the view was so expansive that you looked south into Mendocino county.

We were building a small cabin there planning on living out there the next summer when T was a little older. Then Cameron was born and I decided to rent the place out for the summer and try to live there maybe the summer after that. Emil and Sharon, friends of friends, moved up there. They had a great set up, bringing a tent, couch, TV and generator out to the mountain with them.

To get back to the point of this digression, we were out visiting Emil and Sharon, on Long Ridge, I was carrying Cameron and we were all up the hill looking at my unfinished cabin. There were several of us and we decided to go back to Emil’s campsite, Thomas was walking with us. We went through the yard past where the cars were parked and down to the driveway. We crossed the road dirt road on the property and turned away from the main road and headed down to Emil’s camp. You have to be looking to see the entry off the road into the camp but once inside the woods open out and they had a large living area, with tent, outdoor kitchen, the works. Well as we all met at the tent, we realized that T was not with us. Oh no. We were in the big wide woods. How could he not be with us? Emil took off running and we all followed, we separated at the drive. I was freaking out. Everyone was. We all came back and no one had seen him. It seemed like an eternity, before we hear Emil shouting that he had him. It is a while before we see them and they are coming up the road that goes through the property in front of the campsite. Thomas had kept going down the road when we went into the campsite and when he saw we weren’t there he started going fast down the road. He was headed down a dead end logging road, way out in the mountains. Thankfully Emil felt to go that way and keep going fast until he caught up with him. None of us believed how far he had gotten.

The third time that Thomas almost died was the summer he was three. Our friends from LA were up for the week-end and we were all sitting around the house on the hundred acres. Thomas was eating grapes. All of a sudden he jumped up and I could see from his face something was terribly wrong. Then I could tell he couldn’t breath, I grabbed him turned him upside down and squeezed him to dislodge the grape. Nothing was working he was going limp and turning blue. I tried to dig the grape out of his throat with my finger; I could feel it but couldn’t get it. I could see desperation in his eyes. Suddenly I stuck my finger way down, scratching his throat and drawing blood but I got the grape out. He started breathing right away and forgot immediately that something had been wrong. I didn’t forget. Were these events preparing me for what was to come, so that I could see there was only a breath between life and death?

Chapter 5 - The Search for Meaning

Chapter 5

By the time I got to the part about leaving Thomas on the mountain behind the tree, Ms. Franklin, the counselor, was already crying hard. I stopped talking, clearly this was not useful. Pity for me abounded and didn’t really help. I ended up trying to make other people feel better because my story was so sad. Then she surprised me, “Have you ever been to a physic?” A what? Then I actually remembered a conversation I had with my elderly grandmother years before in which she declared that all the woman in our family were very physic. She told me she consulted a pendulum when she wanted to know things, and she showed me how she swung this little bead on a string back and forth over her open palm. I was young and thought she was weird. “No, what’s a physic?” I asked. She said that she knew a woman in town who gave personal physic readings and she thought that she might be able to help me. She gave me Maggie’s card; it read Maggie Price, Automatic Writing. I was intrigued and made an appointment.

I was surprised to find that Maggie lived in a normal looking house. I was even more surprised when an elderly thin woman in her bathrobe answered the door. Come in, she said. She sat down in what was obviously her chair, surrounded by stacks of books and papers, lit up a cigarette and said pleased to meet you. We chatted for a minute then she said, let’s get to work. She closed her eyes, breathed slow and regular and then started to write. She wrote incredibly fast. That first writing was 5 pages. Essentially what I remember from that reading was; what a huge ego you have, to think that you have anything to do with your son’s life or death. Wow, it was like a slap in the face, just what I needed. The writing stressed that Thomas had come into this world knowing this was his path and that he had chosen his death. She looked right at me, her eyes bore into mine. “This was all meant to be.” I look back now and see that meeting Maggie saved my life.

I just reread that first writing Maggie did for me. I see that it was actually much kinder and much more spiritual than I have remembered. Here are some beautiful thoughts from that first reading that I want to share with you.

The feeling of grief she carries is keeping her from accepting happiness and in that way, she is punishing herself – perhaps if she could imagine her son speaking with her – she would surely know if would be in love – that his wish for his mother would be to release herself from what has past – to tell her it was not she who was responsible for his departure, but his own spirit.

In order to find Peace, it is necessary to Love and until one finds Love for himself, Peace remains elusive. The hope of the Universe is that Love which must be present in all who embrace the New Age with any degree of awareness. It is time for this person to make peace with herself, to give in to the Spirit and to accept that Divine Order has everything to do with all events in life.

I saw Maggie pretty regular over the next 10 years. I cleaned her house and traded for readings. I can’t remember ever seeing her outside of her home. I hardly remember her out of her chair, or out of her bathrobe and she was always chain smoking. But make no mistake, Maggie was powerful. She taught me to hypnotize myself. That was amazing, under her tutelage that winter she taught me to get to a state of awareness with hypnotism that had taken me 10 years to get to with meditation.

Maggie said I was a mentor to her too. She taught me hypnotism in those months after Thomas’s death when I was very pregnant with my daughter. She had never worked with anyone pregnant and so she was very tentative and expanding her boundaries at the same time. Maggie always let it be known that the power was not hers but a gift that passed through her and she was always mindful to be grateful.

To suck something out of yourself, you had to have put something there. All the things I professed to believe before anything bad happened came under the harsh light of reality. Right away I realized that some ideas and beliefs meant nothing and did not work to support me in my time of need. It is like you have built this bridge across a chasm and called it understanding. When you get out on it over the abyss, you see several of the boards are rotten, too small or not there at all. How can you cross? Hopefully you have put down enough good and solid boards to carry you past the ones that will not support you.

My best boards were laid down from reading Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, my readings of Stephen Gaskin, from Monday Night Class out of San Francisco and my study of the work of George Gurdjieff and my years with a Gurdjieff Group in San Francisco just prior to the accident. These were the things that sustained me, some combination of the work of these three men. Why there are no women, I don’t know. There are definitely great woman who have inspired me, Elizabeth I, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, just to name a few, but there really was no cosmology created and led by an enlightened woman. These and other enlightened men weren’t concerned with the woman/man issue, they were talking to humans. The language of the day was masculine; I had no problem with that. They spoke to my inner life, who cares about pronouns. While my religious friends liked to keep saying, “Thomas was with God.” That didn’t work for me. I wanted answers. Who are we and why are we here? And where do we go? I have always wondered about these things, now I had to know.

I have never been terribly religious in the Christian sense. I became disillusioned with organized religion when I was a child. It couldn’t have been any clearer in the innocent eyes of a child that though many people professed to be Christian, there was very little actual Christian behavior. If fact some of the scariet people I met as a young adult were Christians trying to save my soul. I could not get past the hypocrisy. I had and still do have many problems with organized religion. More horrible things have been done in the name of the church than not. It is unconscionable to me that evil is done in the name of God. I searched elsewhere for answers.

I had read Carlos Castaneda’s books in college and found them very interesting. I remembered a few things from them. They were the first books that gave voice to a search as to why we are here; they spoke to my inner life. When I was in Guatemala the winter before I got pregnant with Thomas, I was having a miscarriage. The doctor said to stay in bed for a week. On the way back to my room from the doctors I passed a bookstore. I knew the only way to stay in bed for me would be to read and how sweet that there was a bookstore right there on the way home. It seemed like one of those wonderful gifts from the universe. The only books in English in the whole store were the first four books of Carlos Castaneda. I guessed I was meant to read them again. I bought them all.

I had just spent months traveling down through Mexico and into Guatemala. Rereading those books in that context, made an incredible impression on me. I was in the land of the ancient Toltec warriors. I had walked through the chaparral and seen the barren mountains in the distance. I had my reality stretched the minute I arrived in Mexico. I remembered something from my first reading that Don Juan had said;

“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.”

Don Juan stressed that to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior. Be impeccable in your actions and have unbending intent. I had tried to live my life like a warrior before the accident, studying and struggling to be a “man” of knowledge. Now I was more like a whimpering baby. I tried to remember the things I had learned from those books. They were full of strong and positive ideas on how to live. He told how the greatest Toltec Shaman were cut down in their prime by the Spanish who slashed and burned their way across Mexico. He had a direct connection with those ancient shamans; his linage had kept their knowledge alive for 500 years. He talked about erasing self-pity, self importance and to use “death as an advisor.” That was easy to say when death was not a part of my world. Now I felt death was my enemy, I hated that death was a part of my life. I never wanted a dead child. But death had been my advisor, whether I liked it or not. I knew I wasn’t sure if I had kissed Thomas and told him I loved him the night before I died. Well I made sure I kissed Cameron and later Elizabeth every night after that in case it might be their last. When I say good night, I love you, now, I am conscious, I mean it. Death taught me that.

Don Juan said that to become a man of knowledge you must defeat four natural enemies of man. The first enemy is fear. When we begun to learn that the world is not what we expect we begin to fear. If we give into fear we will never conquer it and so would end the quest to becoming a man of knowledge right there.

The second enemy of man is Clarity. It is a joyful moment when we over come fear with clarity, though just as clarity dispels it also blinds. It is not power and must just be used to see. When you understand that clarity is only a point you overcome you second enemy and have real power.

But then Power is the next enemy of man. Most men, if they haven’t given in to fear or clarity, fail here. Power is the strongest of all enemies. Men who give into this enemy become cruel and capricious, though they retain their clarity and never regain their fear. If a man can see that if he does not have control of himself, his power and clarity bring mistakes. When he learns how to wisely use his power only then has he defeated his third enemy.

Just when a man has matured and conquered power with out warning comes his forth and last enemy – Old Age. Old age is the cruelest enemy of all and can’t be overcome completely; one can only fend it off for as long as one can. With old age comes the desire to rest, to lie down, to be finished. But if a man does this then he will have lost the last round. His enemy wins and cuts him down to a helpless old man. A man must live his fate, throw off sleepiness, and continue to rise to the challenges of life. Then a man may be called a man of knowledge, if only for a short time, as death is a hunter and may tap you at any moment. He said that your death is always on your left, just a tapping length away so really you have no time for “crappy thoughts” or moods. That just makes me smile.

This kind of strong belief system had always suited me. It fits with the suck it out of yourself philosophy. Don Juan said that it does not take much to die. To seek death is to seek nothing. I struggled to remember the best of what he had said and what I had learned to incorporate into my life. I had to buck up, have courage, take heart, have hope, and live. The art of the warrior is to balance the terror of being human with the wonder of being human. Well said Don Juan.

This was California in the seventies. There were numerous gurus, teachers, mystics and weirdoes that I could have been attracted to in my search for myself. I didn’t realize this at the time. I was shown a book by Stephen Gaskin, called Monday Night Class. He had lectured in San Francisco on a regular basis, every Monday night, the friend who had shown me the book had heard him. Just before I got to the west coast, Stephen and his followers had loaded up several school buses with their families and caravanned east looking for land to start a communal farm. Later on the land they bought and called “The Farm”, Stephen’s partner Ena May wrote Spiritual Midwifery. This book was to inspire me to have children and gave me courage and hope through all my pregnancies and gave me courage and hope in the face of Thomas’s death. Not all of them make it, Ena said simply.

Stephen also said things very simply and they made sense. A couple things he said really changed my life. They sound trite to repeat, but sometimes when you are in the right mind to hear truth, it comes in and lights you up for a moment and you get it. It is one thing to hear something and to understand it intellectually with your mind and quite another level to understand it with your being.

One thing Stepnen said, was that people can and will say anything they want, but “what is true is true and what is not true is not true”. I know that sounds so corny but I heard it on a deep level and it has rung my bell ever since.

Something else I got from him, and this may be easier to explain, was the idea that we need protect ourselves energetically from others and at the same time to be responsible to others. He said to pretend you are in a glass bell and on the outside is a small door with a guard. Some one comes up to you and calls you a jerk. Now, the guard asks itself honestly, has it been a jerk? If the answer is no, then the guard throws it out right there, before it comes in and messes with your energy. If the real answer is yes and you have treated this person bad, then you must take it inside yourself and decide how you will atone for this. This would save a lot of emotional energy being wasted on things that aren’t true. And on the other hand, it encourages personal responsibility, like the impeccability Don Juan talks about.

The major framework of my bridge of understanding across the abyss at the time of my son’s death came from studying the work of George Gurdjieff. I was introduced to the writings of this man and the writings of others who studied with him when I first arrived in southern California. I was fascinated, I had never heard of these things before, I read everything I could find and later I worked for several years with a Gurdjieff group in San Francisco. These ideas not only sustained me, they gave me proof that something more was possible for humans and these ideas continue to whorl in my inner life even to this day.

I remember being in Zenia that first early spring by myself. I was staying in the dirt floored shack by Dry Creek. I had a nice old easy chair by the wood stove, plenty of firewood and I spent my first week of spring rains inside reading tales of life with a man named Gurdjieff. First, I read Undiscovered Country by Kathryn Hume, and then Our life with Mr. Gurdjieff, by Thomas and Olga de Hartmann. These were nonfiction stories about a remarkable man. I have never thought of the world in the same way since. I then read Meetings with Remarkable Men, a book by Gurdjieff himself, which gave me another reality.

This is not the place to explain who Gurdjieff was, or what his work was about, that would be a whole other book and one I am not qualified to write. I can hear the sighs of relief of my early Gurdjieff teachers as I say that. Though I do want to give you some idea of the enormous effect his work had on me and show you how it worked in my life to promote health, hope and finally moments of peace.

The winter after T was born, I decided to not just read about Gurdjieff, but to try and find a group. The work stressed that you needed a group, direct contact between teacher and student, and conditions with others that were necessary for this inner work. I was five hours from San Francisco where I knew there was a group working under Lord Pentland, who had been a student of Gurdjieff himself. Students of Gurdjieff have always been very secretive. The meetings are not talked about outside the group and are definitely not advertised. I had no way to get a hold of a group, but I had an idea. I drove down to San Francisco and headed for City Lights, the independent bookstore started by poet/painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, down on Broadway. I hung out for a while and finally asked a likely young woman if she knew of a Gurdjieff Group. To my and her amazement, she said yes. I didn’t know then that if a student was asked directly by someone interested, they had to lead you to the group. She took my name and number and said that she would contact her teacher and call me soon. When she called back to tell me where to come for the first meeting, she also put me in touch with Mrs. Yates, a teacher in the group who rented rooms. I moved into Mrs. Yates laundry room with Thomas and began going to weekly Friday night meetings at Clement Street in San Francisco. I noticed right away that the teachers/leaders had a quality of energy not often found in others. They had a presence, an awareness that was penetrating and noticeable. Later I came to realize they had a greater “being” than other people. It was tangible, I could feel it, and just being near their energy brought my energy level up too.

We met once a week. They gave us assignments on Friday and we reported back to the group our efforts and experiences the next week. That sounds straight forward, but it was any thing but that. The energy in the meetings was enormous. I could never say anything; every thing I had to say was so trivial in the light of the energy in the room. Mrs. Baker my teacher even made fun of me. She said when she met me I was a big talker and she was counting on me to contribute at the meetings. I had always been an amazing talker, but for some reason in the meetings I was totally tongue tied, I don’t mean I didn’t have anything to contribute, I couldn’t talk. That was a totally new experience for me. When talking about my outer life I always had a lot to say but my inner world had no experience at expressing itself out loud in words.

Gurdjieff spoke about being. Not doing, being. The state of I am. A state of presence, of being here now. He described how we humans are asleep and need to wake up. We need to struggle with ourselves to wake up. My favorite memory of really realizing what he meant began with one of these assignments. For the upcoming week, I was told to work on opening doors with my left hand and report back the following Friday what my results were. I thought that was so clever of them, to know that I am right handed and that to open a door with my left had would be breaking my routine and not doing as I am use to. I always open the door with my right hand, I am thinking. When I leave, I am determined to gather data on myself. Wednesday, I “wake up” and realize that I hadn’t even remembered my task since I left on Friday night. Wow. Not only that, I must have gone through tons of doors since then. I was amazed. This waking up thing was harder than I thought. Then Friday during the day, I remember again that I am supposed to try opening the door with my left hand. Oh despair, I can’t even remember when I go through a door, let alone remember to use the other hand. Sigh. I am way more asleep than I thought. Later that night, while going through the door to the meeting at Clement Street – I wake up. I mean wake up. I see everything, myself included in a clarity I don’t recognize, it is if someone turned the bright lights on, everything is in Technicolor and highlighted and I see that I am in the act of opening the door - with my left hand. I was blown away, there I was using my left hand, I really believed I only used my right. I knew right then and there that I was deep asleep in life and that this was what waking felt like. I was astonished at the taste of that moment, the sensation, and how alive I felt. I can still remember it like it was yesterday.

I spent the following winters in Marin County continuing my work with the group. They did not like the fact that I came in the winter and went back to my mountains in the summer. They felt I was not one hundred percent committed. They wanted me to move to the city, get a new car, make money, look nice and be successful, in other words to become part of the movers and shakers of the new spiritual culture. I just couldn’t do it. I am a county girl. I love the rivers and the forests. I admired those who stayed in the work, I honored them, I just couldn’t do it. I remember when my decision became very clear. One day, I was talking with Mrs. Yates, the woman I was staying with. She was in the upper, upper group. I asked her how long it took. What took? The group work, how long it took before one can take the knowledge they have gained here and put it to work in ordinary life. That is when she told me she had been in the group 30 years. A light came on. There was no other life for her. Finally they forced me to make a decision, to stay for ever or leave for ever, I left.

When Thomas died the next summer I wrote them. I was hoping that they would have some magical balm, say some perfect thing. As I reread their letters now, some twenty years later, I am struck by the ordinariness of them. They were out of their element too. That was a big event, even for them, and they had no real answers. It was very sweet of them to write, they cared and they tried. I realize now how alone I really was.

.

Chapter 4 - Wind and Rain

Chapter 4

We continued heading north to Seattle. Though 3 had started out on the journy from Zenia, only 2 arrived, like the pioneers crossing the great plains, losing children to the harsh realities of life. Bob and Mary took us all in like we were family. Even my mother came and stayed. They lived in a big house on Capitol Hill, a beautiful old 4 story house that they were remodeling. There was a bedroom for all of us. I don’t know how Cameron and I would have survived without the love of those kind and generous people. In my mind, I had killed my son and yet they treated me like a normal, lovable human. They gave us the safety of their big wonderful family.

First thing I did when we arrived was try to get a hold of Nancy. She had given me two phone numbers of family members. I called the first number, “hello is Nancy there?” “NO!” And they hung up. Right. Ok so I tried the second number, “Hello, is Nancy there?” Never heard of her they say and hang up. Something is really strange here, so I try the first number again, and yell into the phone that I know they know Nancy and my son was just killed and I have to talk to her. They say hold on and give me the number, same as the number that said they had never heard of her. I call that number again and ask for Nancy. Never heard of her. Listen, I scream, my son is dead and I fricking want to talk to Nancy. She says wait a minute and soon I hear Nancy say Hello. “Oh Nancy, the most horrible thing has happened, Thomas is dead.” “Oh Deborah, oh no, oh shit, I’m getting on a plane tonight”, was Nancy’s response. I told her that I would get her a ticket and to stay put until tomorrow. I would call early tomorrow with a ticket and a plan as I couldn’t drive with a broken leg even if I wanted to and would have to arrange with someone else to be able to meet her. When I called the next morning, they told me that she had left late last night for Seattle to be with a friend who had just lost a child. I never heard from Nancy again and those on the other end of the phone numbers she gave me very claim they never heard from her again either, they were sure I knew where she was and holding out on them.

With in the first week after Thomas died, I got pregnant with my daughter. I had not slept with T and C’s dad since we made Cameron. He was freaking out that we had to “bring Thomas back”. I was distressed, I was on my period, I was stuck in bed and so I thought whatever. Whatever indeed. No matter what anyone says, you can get pregnant on your period. My friends thought that probably my hormones were screwed up with the death and all. What I know now she was meant to be, she has always been a precious gift. She and I have talked and she doesn’t think and I have never felt either, that she is “Thomas come back”.

I will have to say that at first I was not excited about this news. I wasn’t convinced I was glad that I didn’t die. I could hardly take care of my surviving 2 year old, how could I be pregnant? Pregnancy meant having hope for the future and I had none. How could I take care of a new baby when I had just lost my first baby? I was really scared; birth was too much like death for me to be excited about this. If fact the most amazing thing I kept feeling during that time was how much death was like birth, it is way more like birth than anything else; the suspension of time, the unreal quality of everything, the support of family and friends, but instead of someone coming in, someone was going out. Just as scary. I don’t like births even today for that reason; too much like death.

Another amazing thing to me at that most difficult time of shock and new grief was the out pouring of sympathy cards and baby gifts I received from my family, friends and community. I have saved all the cards. This is only the second time I have looked at them in these last twenty years. They were important to me none the less. I knew they were with me and I knew they were powerful. I remember how I had always thought of sending cards like this as corny or something, old-fashioned, but getting those cards, even as pat and trite as they may sound on the face, they really meant something to me. I have tried to remember that over the years and send cards and best wishes to others. It is so easy to not bother, or to feel uncomfortable like you don’t know what to do and so say and do nothing. I know from experience that the acknowledgment by family and friends is very important. It has taken me 20 years to be able to really read them again. Sure I’m crying, but I’m smiling now too years later. I want to thank all of you kind people from the bottom, middle and top of my heart, I probably never have.

I wanted to go back to Port Townsend; I had a baby coming and I needed to get my life back. Mary drove my mom, Cameron and I back to our little house on the Olympic Peninsula. The house had not been lived in for many months and the yard had run wild, the grass tall and golden. The roses were flowing onto the small porch. It was good to be back in this little town, it was Indian summer, the best season in the northwest I would learn years later, though that year it was summer in the yard but deep winter in my soul. The days were still long and sunny. The water in the bay still blue, in the little view we had of it. Not much had changed on the outside of my life, but everything on the inside of my like had been drastically re-arranged, ripped up and destroyed.

Thomas’s ashes were in a square cardboard box covered in white paper with a label. I set them on my shelves in the bedroom and lay down on the bed, my leg still not healed. Mom noticed that on the box of Thomas’s ashes where they had typed in the birth date and death date on the label, they had gotten the birth date wrong. That was very depressing, that they hadn’t even bothered to get his birthday right. His birthday was June 23 and they had written June 13. I tried to make the one into a two, but it never looked right. For some reason I felt June 13 would be an important date in my life sometime. It turns out that my husband’s birthday is June 13! But I didn’t meet him for many more years and it did nothing to help how flattened I felt then.

Mom said she would walk Cameron over to the grocery store and get some things while I rested. I tried to rest but I kept looking at the box of his ashes. I picked some roses out the bedroom window and put them by the box. I put my favorite rocks, crystals and tarot cards on the shelf next to it. It was a little altar of my favorite and powerful things. It didn’t really make me feel any better but it was the first time I had done any ceremonial or spiritual acknowledgement. As I was laying there I realized that I was finally back here. Who was I when I left last fall for Mexico? Oh and didn’t I have a stash of smoke somewhere? I find my stash, pretty slim pickings, but I roll a joint and lay back down on the bed. Not long after that my mom comes home from the store. Oh my God, she says, what are you doing? What are you smoking? She starts crying. You know never in my life would I have smoked herb in front of my mother, and here I was lying there smoking. “You never would have made this shrine if you had not been smoking that, that marijuana!” I never did have the heart to tell her that I did it before I smoked.

I never really knew how my parents heard about the accident and Thomas’s death. I remember calling them from the clinic that day or maybe the next day, I‘m not sure. When I was visiting my mom and dad last fall, mom told me how she had found out what had happened. The police had come to their door and told them that there had been an accident in California and that one of their grandsons had been killed. She said they would not tell her which one, nor did they know what happened. That must have been horrible for her. I never really thought much about how that impacted my folks. Now I am a 2 year old grandmother myself I see now how horrible that must have been for my parents.

Finally, of course, mom had to go home and Cam and I were alone in our little house. All I could see were the bunk beds I’d built last fall, with one empty bed. I saw two boys pushing their Tonka trucks in the yard when I know there was only one. Cameron kept following around boys a little bigger than himself, looking for Thomas. I did too, constantly looking for Thomas, like I had just misplaced him or something. It felt terrible and unsettling and I knew I could never be happy again. Nothing would ever be right again.

Soon the weather changed and the winter storms began coming out of the north and down the Straits of Juan de Fuca, blowing through Port Townsend. I didn’t mind the howling and raging of the wind, the dark fast moving clouds or the torrents of wind and rain. It suited my inner life just fine, the weather and I were screaming most of the time. For over 20 years that climate ruled my inner life until moving to southern Oregon 3 years ago. I wrote the first draft of this book the first winter we were here.

Though I was back in Port Townsend, nothing in my life was the same especially my friends. It is interesting how in times of crisis, some people rise to the call and others shrink. Things had gotten very real for me; all fluff had disappeared from my life. I couldn’t make small talk anymore. I only wanted to be around those friends I could really trust. People use to say some really dumb things to me after Thomas died. I know they were trying to be kind but they said stock phrases they had heard and they really hadn’t thought about. The one I heard the most was, “Time heals all wounds”, which they sang happily and as if there now everything is ok. I was always thinking, so even if it does, it takes about 100 times longer than you think and it never totally heals, not like a broken leg, because you can never go back, you never get that second chance. Once I realise that, it changed me, it scared me and it colored my life.

I found that certain friends, though they might mean well, totally grated on my nerves and I didn’t want anything to do with them. I found others, even when I didn’t expect it, were balm and salve to me. I was surprised and often disappointed at how others handled me and the situation. I think some of them were surprised by their reaction too. Susan, who I was looking forward to seeing as one of my best friends back in Port Townsend had trouble being with me. One “friend” called me up and said excitedly, Deborah, turn on Donahue, he is doing a show about mothers of dead children and I thought of you. I made sure I never saw that woman again.

Several of my friends from Zenia went to heroic efforts to comb the mountain we went off for things thrown out of the car. I saw the car only once the day of the accident when I was at the bottom with Cam; it was further down that us, the top was flat on the doors, and it was sitting upright, though tilted sideways. It was an old Volvo station wagon, navy blue. None of us were wearing any seat belts; the car didn’t ever have them. I had heard that getting thrown out of the car if you go off in the mountains was the only way to make it, not strapped into the car as it bounced and banged down the hill. Many of our cloths were found, though it was hard to see Thomas’s. I am very grateful that most of my photos were found, I had all of them with me as I was moving. Many of them have rips and scraps. They never did find my purse, several other things were missing and my bike was toast, but I had lost something so huge, so irreplaceable, so permanent that nothing else mattered. Someone said they saw the car and a tire was blown in such a way to indicate that is what pulled me off the road. I don’t know, we never had the car examined. I have seen many times since how just a second can make the difference between staying on the road and not. A one person accident, I totally blamed myself.

Movies and TV shows love to show a car going off the cliff, I hadn’t noticed this before the accident. I realized that there is some fascination with this in our culture. I hated it. If they had gone off the cliff in a car they would not be so fascinated. I still can’t watch anything with car crashes or violence. I have no tolerance for it. Why do I want to see a made up horror story, if I want a horror story, I can just replay my own.

I spent most days after returning to Port Townsend, lying on the day bed in the living room looking at those torn photos of Thomas and crying. My friend’s said that although I wanted to “suck something out of myself” and that “this was not a dysfunctional thing”, it quickly was becoming dysfunctional for my two year old they said and I needed help. They suggested a group. A Grief Group, they called it. I am not much of a joiner, not much of a group kind of person. I couldn’t picture sitting around with a bunch of other totally depressed and sad people, adding their horror story onto mine. No way, that was not happening. My friend’s kept on me, bless their hearts, and “Was it good for Cameron, my very much alive son, to see his mother sobbing all day? Was it good for the unborn baby?” They said I needed to “see someone” and “get some help”. We knew this was big, we knew this was out of our league. We dealt with, boyfriends, kid’s quarrels, even an alcoholic father or two, but this was something we never imagined happening to any of us. Something we had no language for, no treatment for, had not read any books on - go see someone.

I had gone to a therapist only once before in my life. It was when I was working on my master’s degree at Western Michigan University, in Kalamazoo. I had taught high school physics, chemistry and biology for two years in a small town in rural southern Michigan. Those subjects were a piece of cake compared to understanding the politics of the town and school system. Who was sleeping with whom and who wasn’t suppose to know. They wondered why I didn’t I wear a bra and the principal said, if you don’t catch your quota of smokers in the girls lavatory this week Ms. Daubner, you have to take on the after school study hall. Oh and the two doctors in town both had sons in my class and they went to the school board to say that they didn’t think a woman should teach physics, that physic and chemistry were was men’s subjects. I needed the money, I needed the job, then I saw that teachers that had been there 30 years were waiting as eagerly as I was to get that paycheck every other Friday cause the last paycheck was already gone and I knew I did not want to wake up there 30 years later.

I went back to the University, wow, at the graduate level it didn’t take me long to realize how incredibly more political it was than high school. It made the high school seem easy. I was teaching undergraduate zoology labs under a certain professor. I took my work very seriously and spent a lot of time with my lab students. About half way through the quarter, they all flunked a test he had given. I looked at the test; it had a date of eight years ago on it. It was nothing like the material he and I had been covering. I was sure he had just made a mistake. No he hadn’t. He had just been lazy and taken a test out of his files, he regularly does this I learned only it isn’t always that far off. Right. The head of the department said that is just how it is and if you want your job you will basically shut up, apologize, say you have made a mistake and tell your students to do likewise. I don’t want this job then, I said, my master’s degree passing before my eyes. Oh and at the same time my fiancé was breaking up with me for the third time. I went to “see someone” on my own that first time.

I choose the doctors at the university health center. I told the good doctor that my life had fallen apart. That everything I had pursued in my life to that moment was over, my teaching career, my masters program, the love of my life. He listened, thought for a minute and said, do you have any idea or plan? Tell me, no matter how crazy. I had thought of one thing – running away. I had a cousin in Southern California and I had been there once when I was 16 and I had fallen in love with it there. I told him I briefly had thought about going there. He said, Great. Your brave, that’s a perfect idea. Have a good life, good-bye. I thought I had an hour? I said. Oh you don’t need it, go to California, it’s the right thing, you’ll be fine. And so I did.

And he was right I was fine, better in fact I realized later. I gave up my adorable apartment, left, to his surprise, my adorable fiancé, packed a few things in my Fiat and this young woman headed west. I cried for the first few days. Everything I thought I had always wanted was already over. I didn’t know what would replace them. I was heading down a two lane road in west Texas when things started to get a little better, with Dylan on the tape player and a little toke as the sun was going down. This was a big wild beautiful land and though I was scared, I was on an adventure. By the time I got to my cousins in the San Fernando Valley, I was having a good time.

I was not at her house an hour though, when her roommate came home and kicked my cousin out for sleeping with her boyfriend. I left them screaming and yelling at each other while I went out to my car and looked at the map, I saw that a road called Topanga Canyon went to the coast and I started out, really on my own this time. This is where I leaned about maps and roads out west. It was a narly, twisty, windy road to the pacific coast, not the little black line short line it had looked like on the map. Coming out of the canyon and seeing the sleepy blue ocean appear around the last hill was breathtaking. When I finally got to the beach I jumped out and ran up and down. I’d left winter and snow back in Michigan and here I was on the beach in shirt sleeves, soaking up the sun and staring out at the big blue sea.

I drove south into Santa Monica and stopped at a gas station. A kind looking man, a little older that me who was walking by stopped and asked if I was from Michigan as the plates on my car said. We got to talking and it turned out he knew of an office in an artist’s workshop down the street that might be for rent. He worked there during the day doing ceramics. The workshop, actually called The Workshop IE, rented space to artists needing a kiln, a press, work space what ever. Jack the owner was agreeable and that began my stay on Main Street Santa Monica. I am sure there is a whole book about that place but not for telling here. Leave it to say that Jim, the children’s father, was living in his van in the parking lot of the workshop at the time I arrived.