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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?
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?
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