Michael

My personal goal-setting story goes like this: In 1963, when I was ten years old, my family moved to Switzerland.  My father was a U.S. negotiator working on the nuclear test ban treaty in Geneva.  My fifth grade teacher at the International School was Mrs. Elderfield.

One day Mrs. Elderfield passed back our graded essay books. She announced that she’d, “like to ask four students to come up and read their stories to the class.” She called for the first reader and the girl came up and read her work.  When she finished, Mrs. Elderfield said, “Wasn’t that a wonderful story! That was the best essay in the class.” Then she called up the second and the third saying, “Now we’ve heard the next best two.” I was delighted to be called up fourth.

Once I’d finished reading, she clasped her hands in front of her and gave me a stern look.  “And that, I am sorry to say, is the worst story I have graded in all my years of teaching.” Then she told me to go sit down.  Oddly, the day she revealed me as the ‘worst writer she’d ever had’ was also the day that I decided to become a writer.

Notice how I put that: ‘to become a writer’.  I did not say ‘that was the day that I decided to write’. The difference may seem slight, but the subtlety would vex me for years. The problem was that I had no idea if I wanted to write. I’d never practiced it at all. I was only in fifth grade. Worse, I was apparently no good at it. So, while I had no idea whether I wanted to write, I knew I wanted to prove Mrs. Elderfield wrong.

But compare Evan’s ambition to mine.  Evan hadn’t said, “I want to be a lawyer.” That would equate to, “I want to make a high-six figure salary, drive a fancy car and join the country club”. He’d said, “I want to legalize gay marriage.” I, on the other hand, hadn’t said, “I feel inspired to deepen people’s awareness of man’s inhumanity to man.’ What I’d said was ‘I want to be a writer.’  Evan has accomplished his goal in spectacular fashion.  I continue to struggle with my words.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1963, when I was ten years old, my family moved to Switzerland.  My friends and I loved to keep up with the latest US trends.  We took to hanging out at the school’s wood working shop where we spent countless hours perfecting homemade skateboards.

I loved the shop for many reasons – not the least of which was that it was a refuge from Mrs. Elderfield. But I also loved the power tools. I liked the rip of the saws and the torque of the drills.  Even the smell of the sawdust gave me a thrill.

My friends and I took to scheduling weekend time there as well.  Mr. Adams, our Californian shop teacher, was happy to oblige. One day as we were finishing up, Mr. Adams asked if I could stay behind.  He said he had an idea that would polish up my nearly completed board. As soon as my friends left, he grabbed me and started tearing off my clothes.  His hands were all over me and I began to cry. When he worked his way into my pants, I felt my stomach rise and I threw up. The burst of vomit startled him into letting me loose for an instant.  It was long enough for me to break away and run outside.

When I got home, I ran to my room and lay crying on my bed. My brother came in and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t have the words to explain it.  All I knew was that Mr. Adams had fondled me, kissed me and groped me in a way that only aligned with ‘affection’ in my young mind. But I also knew that what I felt was so ugly and disturbing it had caused me to retch. I told my brother that Mr. Adams had ‘hugged me’ and I’d thrown up.  I recalled an expression I had heard but never understood. I asked my brother if he thought I might be ‘lovesick’.  I never went back to shop and even now the smell of sawdust makes me sick.

 

My abuse scarred me in many ways.  It made me distrust authority. Mixing abuse of authority with a school setting became my personal ‘perfect storm’.  I found it again in high school. 1968, the height of the war in Vietnam, was my senior year.  My school invited a classmate’s father, who was in charge of the Veterans Administration, to address a school assembly.  The topic was ‘our patriotic duty to support the war’, a war we all opposed.

Midway through the speech, I rushed the stage and grabbed his microphone. I did it on shear impulse, without a moment’s thought.  I bellowed, “Do we want to hear any more of this shit?”  My classmates’ reaction astonished me.  The auditorium erupted in a thunderous ‘No!’  Then I shouted, “So let’s get the hell out of here.” And to a person they got up and fled the school. Fortunate for them, Bishop Ireton High allowed them to return the next day.  Unfortunate for me, they threw me out.

While still in high school, I became an avid camper.  It wasn’t a natural fit for me. I don’t hunt, fish, or chop wood.  And Mr. Adams ensured that I’d never use a saw.  But not only did I take up camping, I often camped alone.  One time I got a back-country permit and stopped, as usual, wherever I found myself at dusk.  I strung a little tube tent between two trees and fired up my cooking stove.  Later that night, one of the Shenandoah Park’s legendary thunderstorms came through.

Until that night, I hadn’t known what lightening sounds like when it is really close.  When lightening comes down so close that you can actually feel its heat, the sound isn’t its typical ‘boom’.  It’s more like the deep base buzz of an electric arc. And that night I heard that sound quite a bit.  The next morning, I wrung out all my gear and decided to pack it in. I left the woods by the most direct path, heading straight out for the road.

I hadn’t been walking long when a park ranger pulled up beside me. “You camp out last night?” he asked. When I told him that I had, he offered me a lift. We talked about lightening as we headed for the place I’d left my car.  I told him about the arching sound of lightening I had heard. He nodded solemnly and said, “Yep, that sure is how it sounds alright…I know all about that.” When I asked him how he knew, this is the story that he told – in the very words I had recorded long ago:

“I was told the following day by a park ranger, who offered me a lift part way back, that the park is the most lightning struck place on the planet and he himself was the Guinness world record holder for the most lightning struck person in the world – three times. He proudly displayed the scar across his throat, as wide as a butcher knife of melted skin. “Sitting right here in this truck. Bolt hit the truck and the lightening arched between the metal of the window vent on the passenger side and this window vent right here,” he said. [He was tapping the little glass triangle older cars used to have].

Here’s the next note I have from that original document:

[Note on the above: It is a sunny Sunday morning in February some years after writing this, and yesterday the Washington Post had a book review for a new book called ‘The Improbability Principle’.  It says this:

“Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, no doubt spent a great deal of time outside in all kinds of weather. He was struck in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1976 and 1977…”

The reference made me wonder if this was the same guy who had picked me up the morning after the storm.  I looked up Roy Sullivan on wikipedia.  This is what I found:

Roy Cleveland Sullivan (February 7, 1912 – September 28, 1983) was a U.S. park ranger in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Between 1942 and 1977, Sullivan was hit by lightning on seven different occasions and survived all of them… Sullivan is recognized by Guinness World Records as the person struck by lightning more recorded times than any other human being…

The first documented lightning strike of Sullivan occurred in April 1942. He was hiding from a thunderstorm in a fire lookout tower. The tower was newly built and had no lightning rod at the time; it was hit seven or eight times. Inside the tower, “fire was jumping all over the place”… 

He was hit again in July 1969. Unusually, he was hit while in his truck, driving on a mountain road—the metal body of a vehicle normally protects people in cases such as this by acting as a Faraday cage. The lightning first hit nearby trees and was deflected into the open window of the truck. The strike knocked Sullivan unconscious and burned off his eyebrows, eyelashes, and most of his hair…

The text goes on to describe five more after that.

Given my lackluster high school grades, it would have been hard for me to get into any decent school.  But with my high school enforcing a ‘no reference’ policy because of the school assembly incident, my chance of getting into college was nil.  So I felt very fortunate when, at the last second, Regis College in Denver agreed to let me in.  At the time, the original ‘flower children’ counter-culture was becoming mainstream, and its ‘back to nature’ movement was as central to it as sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Back to Nature ethos played itself out in the Rocky Mountain High state as much, or more, than anywhere else.

Regis responded to this imperative by allowing me a three day a week school schedule. I dedicated the rest of the time to the mountains – skiing, hiking and camping out. When four days off became insufficient, I left school for a semester in Aspen. I found temporary work in a kitchen and spent my afternoons walking in Maroon Bells.

After two years at Regis, I enrolled in Denison. That meant I’d managed to switch from majestic Colorado to, well, central Ohio. In this part of the mid-west, hippies were not a thing of the past; they’d never arrived at all. Denison was a fraternity-oriented culture. I was fortunate to find a group of faculty and students who cast themselves outside of that. We got credentialed by a program called ‘Challenge/Discovery’ to take students on month-long wilderness adventures. The first one we did was to Big Bend national park in Southwest Texas.

I don’t recall if there was a selection process or if I got included just by hanging around the group. However it happened, I was included as instructor/guide in a truly memorable crowd. Among the great people I met there was my eventual roommate, Doug. The first time I met him I’d just yelled ‘Falling’. That is the rock-climbing command you shout to alert the person on the other end of the rope that you’ve seriously blown a move. It is what you yell as you break into a free-fall. In this case, though, I hadn’t ‘blown a move’. I’d just wimped out. I had convinced myself I was too tired to finish up the pitch, or that it was too tough or something.

In my defense, I first asked Doug politely for a little ‘assist’. I asked him to add a little tension to the rope so I wouldn’t fall when attempting a move I doubted I could make. But he refused, insisting that this was so much not the point of rock climbing. So I decided that I’d just let go. I announced it by yelling ‘falling’.

As soon as he lowered me to the ground, he stomped over and ripped my shirt open. When I asked what the fuck that was about, he responded more to our climbing group than to me.  “I’m looking for the holes where they put the filling in, you Twinkie.” Fortunate for me, the nickname didn’t stick – at least beyond the next few weeks.

Then there was Espen, this huge Norwegian friendly giant. As fate would have it, he dated my high school girlfriend immediately after I’d left for college. While I didn’t know he even existed until I met him at Denison, he let me know that he knew me. He’d had to endure his girlfriend telling stories…and I think it may have skewed our relationship a bit. But besides his knowing I am something of a dickhead, we still managed to be friends.

Janny was a pistol…a cigar smoking tough-ass broad who was just the cutest girl. There were a bunch more – Jon, The potter and Jan the dancer, and of course Sue-Sue, who was also a volunteer EMT. A terrific crowd.

When the time came to take the group out to Big Bend for the month, Doug and I got assigned the logistics detail. That meant taking our van into the hiking camps before the groups arrived and prepping the place by dropping off water. Big Bend is a desert and water’s heavy….eight pounds a gallon. So you can’t carry more than about three day’s-worth along with all your other gear.

By design, the program builds leadership skills as much as outdoor proficiency. It ends by having small groups make week long treks through the featureless desert. The pervasive brown sand makes it difficult to ‘orienteer’ or guide yourself by map.

Doug and I were ‘sweepers’ for one of the groups. We were to stay out of sight but ensure the group found their water. And to do that, they needed to follow their maps. A big part of the exercise involved checking each other’s orienteering plan. But our group decided to follow a guy who claimed he knew what he was doing. By the third day, I’d determined that they were an extra day’s walk from their next water stop. That meant they were at risk of running out. I decided to intervene.

Once they settled into camp, I came in and explained their situation. What I said upset everyone, some to the point of tears.  They blamed themselves for letting one person take on all the navigation responsibilities. They acknowledged that the task of orienteering should have been everyone’s job. They decided to go up a nearby bluff the following morning and figure out where they really were.

The next morning they returned to camp and reported. “You taught us a very valuable lesson.  We can’t tell you how much we appreciate that.” I nodded solemnly, though I wasn’t looking for their thanks.

“You told us not to listen to someone just because they convince you that they know what they are talking about.  That we should always assume it’s our responsibility to double check the facts. So we thanks you for that lesson, but there is a little catch. It turns out that the self-proclaimed know-it-all who got it wrong wasn’t who you thought. The person who doesn’t know where he is…is you.” Turns out, I had been doing my triangulation wrong.  The guy they followed had it right.