4 Trying College - High Level Research

Transcription

The BS years
To go on from here I can’t use words; they don’t mean enough.
— Marty Balin/Paul Kantner, Surrealistic Pillow.
T
he venture to Needles during the summer after my high school graduation ended
with my aunt dropping me off at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, where I spent
the whole day just looking out from one place on the rock railing, following the light shifts
on the magnificent display of naturally cut stone. As sunset approached, I boarded the Santa
Fe train that still ran from the rim to Williams Junction, Arizona, allowing about the most
glorious departure possible, watching the Canyon’s reds change from the open observation
platform as our train pulled slowly away. After a four-hour delay in the packed little transfer
station, the Chief took me on to Denver, along the way having my first ever cup of coffee,
good stuff from Fred Harvey, on a railroad that had not yet lost its classiness.
I had chosen Colorado State U. for college, because I wanted to get fairly far away from
home, preferably in the West, and because my cousin, Marilyn Doig, taught math there,
a subject that I knew was likely to give me grief. Her presence also encouraged my parents
to allow this schooling choice. In retrospect, that was not very profound reasoning, but
my rather arbitrary choice turned out to have some surprising advantages, not least some
genuinely first-class exposures to art, foreign films, music, and the theater. Despite being
a state school, here was even some pretty decent architecture around, with Fort Collins
then being still small enough then to get around within, and out of, easily. As among the
fastest growing cities in the U.S., it has since become a very different place. Having lived
there allowed me to monitor what that growth has meant, not least the differences sharply
divergent topography makes, by limiting almost all of that growth to the original center’s
south and east.
When I started there, my vague goal had been to enter the field of medicine, inspired
in part by Albert Schweitzer. Penn State, my father’s college, had been ready to try out
an accelerated medical program the year following my high school graduation, accepting
just ten students. I had applied, and was ranked number 11, but all ten ahead of me chose
to accept their invitations. Instead, being a pre-med major at CSU did allow for a lot of
flexibility in course choices, which I took full advantage of, harvesting enough chemistry and
physics to keep the core going, but also exploring enlightening alternatives like “Literature
of Social Protest”, whose readings remain important to my thinking, and “History of the
Medieval Church”, along with classes in poetry, art history, and theater.
When I arrived, the school had mishandled my application scores, resulting in them
considering me capable of honors courses only in mathematics. That was a double error,
since, although I’d had a bit of advanced training in high school, formal proofs were both
uninteresting and difficult for me, and not amenable to tutoring, so that I was left far behind
in a group of a dozen or so zealots the first quarter, receiving a generous D for the outing.
However, after two quarters of being so clearly ahead of the rest in classes including several
hundred in history, and smaller but still large groups in literature, I was invited to join
honors groups in both, as well as in chemistry, complete with an apology from the program
head for their initial screw-up.
That freshman year was even more actively formatted around interactions in the all-male
dormitory where I resided. Having been socially isolated in high school, I had resolved that,
to expand my horizons, I would establish as much of a friendship as possible with every
Terence Yorks Trying to Make Sense—in college
single resident on my floor. I was pretty successful at this, eventually being elected to the
dorm council, and gaining a considerable number of useful insights along the way. Besides
the conversation and many evenings at local near-beer establishments, I also occasionally
managed to study, went to some movies and concerts alone, and listened to tapes in the
adjacent library, which had a wonderful reel-to-reel set of all of Samuel Barber’s work.
Jack Knopinski was among the residents of Braiden Hall at CSU during that year of
trying to get to know everyone. Jack had modified a 1959 VW Beetle by replacing its
original engine with one from a Porsche. With this available, three of us hatched the idea
of skiing for a day at Crested Butte, outside Gunnison, where Jack’s sister was at school We
quite memorably did most of Wolf Creek Pass, the one most famous for its truck wrecks,
executing 360s (full circle spins), which, in that car one could enter or exit at will, along the
way. The ski area being quite a long run from Fort Collins, we had to leave at something like
2 AM. That VW still had a six-volt generator, strong enough to run either the headlights
or the radio, but not both. For much of the night, having moonlit snow and little traffic
around, we listened. Earlier in the year, my uncle Jerome had shown me the trick of how
headlights were not always necessary in the desert, allowing me to make that suggestion to
my companions. A couple of years later, I regularly repeated that trick coming back from
Boulder, in my first Volvo, on what was then back road towards Lyons. That eventually
underlined how times change, since what was then a solitary narrow run is now four lanes
wide, on which one could not even imagine being alone, or fail to be blinded by wasteful
artificial lighting, thereby being unable to have time to adapt to seeing the road when the
moon’s glow is naturally available.
Heading back to Fort Collins, though, in early 1966 from Gunnison, after the long
trip to the slopes and a good day’s skiing in intense cold, we found a need for more heat in
the VW, so Jack stuffed a Kleenex box in the dysfunctional flapper valve in the “stale air”
(called that by mechanics because the newer models were touting their “fresh air” system),
which was near the exhaust. Too near it, turned out. About 20 miles past Buena Vista, the
cardboard tissue box, and then the engine’s external fuel supply caught fire. There was no
snow immediately nearby, so we put the flames out with dirt, which kept the engine from
restarting. Someone gave us a lift back to town, in a 1955 Pontiac, which felt amazingly
warm, commodious, and comfortable after the old VW bug. We found a room in a vintage
hotel for the $5 we had left between us. That got us a single twin bed, in which three guys
tried to sleep. The overall space was so narrow that we two outside guys could stay on only
by pressing our arms against the wall, having put the biggest among us in the middle.
The real rub came the next morning, when we tried to hitchhike back to where we had
left the car. After a couple of fruitless hours, we realized that Buena Vista was the site of
Colorado’s maximum security prison, so three now thoroughly scruffy males could forget
thumbing successfully for a ride. We walked back to the nearest gas station, where I talked
someone filling up into giving us a lift, by telling our story in a humorous, but believable,
way. We cleaned out the carburetor, with its paper air cleaner having burned up and the dirt
then filled the openings, by taking it off and pissing through it, not having any other water
available. We finally made it back without further incident.
My grades wallowed the next year, in concert with a bout of mononucleosis, which
thankfully allowed me to drop a woefully taught section of analytical chemistry. The
instructors made it perfectly clear that the weight of a fingerprint would be enough to ruin
the results, while not giving (at least clearly enough for me) the necessary information about
how one could get or keep the glassware sufficiently clean. Whatever value I may have, it is
clearly not in being accurate to the nearest ten-thousandth of a gram. The mono excuse did
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not let me escape a final F in third quarter calculus, however. That instructor was willing to
give me a D, but sufficiently frustrated with the course, I refused to show up for the final,
unwilling even to see him again.
Many years would pass before I was able to appreciate the usefulness of calculus
in problem solving, and I still wonder how the message of its potential usefulness and
techniques could be delivered more effectively. The mono itself did result in the useful
pleasure of being apologized to by the entire health clinic staff, following their set of botched
lab tests, something that has forever made me rightfully doubtful of the accuracy of such
things, even when the testers are trying hard.
A couple more connections from childhood came together during that bout with mono. I
had gotten terrified of needles during the repeated injections for the 1954 Salk polio vaccine
trials, coincidentally making the front page of our local newspaper when a photographer
covering them chose my reaction as the outstanding bad example, to pair with an ever-somuch-more-tolerant young lady. Weekly blood-letting from my narrow and hard-to-find
veins, and a patient health-care staff, got me over that one, though never to the point of
replacing my native distaste for getting “stuck”. That kept another of those sharp intentional
boundaries, this one neatly circumscribing experimentation with outside-of-prescription
drugs. Skin remained a barrier not to be trifled with, since that evolved with a lot of rather
obvious good reasons, interestingly suggesting that medicine was often not itself respectful
enough of it, as later issues have underlined, but remain underappreciated.
That time in the clinic also overlapped with another unusual bit of father-son bonding
During my childhood, Syracuse had a “technology club”, whose meetings my father had
attended for many years. He regularly took me along as soon as I was of sufficient age not
become a disturbance, which, in my case, was pretty young. I particularly remember one
session where its presenter plotted out how the lead in pipes and drinking vessels helped
bring down the Romans. Perhaps the most spectacular meeting, though, was a dramatic
slide projection of “K2, the Savage Mountain”, about an unsuccessful climbing attempt.
That, along with the National Geographic illustrations from the somewhat easier time of
Edmund Hillary and companions on Everest, made me a fantasy climber. At the small
college clinic in 1967 where I was receiving erstwhile treatment for mono was another whom
I spent a bit of time alongside. He was doing therapy as best one could for gangrenous toes,
a consequence of being trapped too long on Mt. McKinley. Further thoughts of climbing
from that point on were always for far more benign circumstances, a good thing given that
once I got glasses, allowing me to see more in 3D, they revealed that my already known
claustrophobia was balanced by a considerable discomfort from immediately visible heights.
Meanwhile, I had done well enough with some of the other chemistry courses, albeit
often by my capabilities in manipulating the instructors to give sufficient clues about what
responses should be, something I had long been able to do for other tests. Getting by
without full comprehension of what was supposed to be known by being able to guess what
the tester is subtly suggesting is most likely to be the wanted answer has been a lifelong
"skill". In organic chemistry, it provided a part-time undergraduate research job, until I
eventually proved that I was hopeless at effectively synthesizing di-tertiary-butyl pyridine.
That attempt did get me thoroughly exposed to yet another lot of hazardous chemicals that
now are required to be handled with a lot more care than anyone used then in that lab. A
summer job was soon to provide much more.
I added to that collected risk in a more strictly parallel way a few years later, during an
abortive follow-up in the lab to a marginally successful idea of mine to destroy naturally
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occurring toxins in foods by exposing them to concentrated sunlight. I messed around a bit
with some concentrated aflatoxins, a common contaminant of peanuts, and a potent creator
of liver cancer long after exposure. Even with such a known danger, I was not as careful as I
should have been, like many others, in our youth considering 25 years ahead too far away to
worry about.
The increasingly poor quality environment from fluorescent lighting in the laboratories
themselves made them ever more uncomfortable places for me, which subtly increased my
haste in what I did there. I suspect it does the same for others, too, decreasing the quality of
all work done within them, or elsewhere under similarly hostile glare.
The deeper problem of labs for me became more slowly apparent. Although I could carry
off particular tasks reasonably well, that was all there was. I was neither especially competent
at their detail, nor could I visualize effectively enough what was happening within what
anyone could see on the surface. I strongly felt, and still feel, a need to be creative, to reach
further than others have, to fit pieces together better, to reveal something new. From what
I could do in the lab, which was just hanging on, simply trying to replicate what someone
else had done, I could not imagine being able to extrapolate a discovery. That might have
happened if I’d kept after it, for I did eventually figure out calculus to a better extent, but
the odds did not feel sufficient then, and they still do not.
Replication, though, with its little hints of retained magic, was sufficient for my father,
as it is for most people. It beat the hell out of subsistence farming, with all its limits and
vagaries. He did make revelations, in the form of solving small mysteries, by working within
a fixed set of rules and seeing what made the most sense among a set of possibilities. There
is nothing inherently wrong with that way of spending one’s days, of course. They are very
much like growing crops, building objects, or fixing things, all of which I do enjoy, so
can readily appreciate how others find complete enough satisfaction from them to make a
life focus. That was rarely enough for me. I had always wanted to see behind the curtain,
whether it is one put up by a human or pre-existing, with an assumption of achieving a
potentially higher value from trying.
M
y own first car came after two years of higher ed, as a tangential, but direct, result
of paired typical youthful errors on my part. At 19, I was working as a watchman
for my father’s company in Solvay during CSU’s summer break. On the night shift, the
watch responsibility was to make rounds, every two hours, of the chlorine/caustic and veryhigh-concentration hydrogen peroxide manufacturing sections of the plant. The photograph
that will follow is of an adjacent area, in another season and a few years later, but it still
gives the general feel of the place. The particular section I worked in eventually became one
of the original Superfund toxic cleanup sites, after the facilities in the picture were replaced
by more cost effective sodium carbonate production, alongside more direct raw material
trona mines in Wyoming. However, beginning far before my time, the Solvay Process used
abundant local brine and limestone resources to synthesize that vital material, and those
supplies concentrated supplies readily suggested their use for related products.
Chlorine was the original poison gas during World War I, and its manufacture most
commonly was by electrolysis of brine. In the Solvay factory, gas leaks were routine, and
they were only one of many physical hazards. One by-product of the basic process was
hydrogen, which can be highly explosive, especially if it perchance met some of the chlorine.
This always intensely flammable gas was piped from the mercury cells to further portion
of the operation, to be distilled into 50 and 70% hydrogen peroxide, which behaves more
interestingly than the still biologically potent 3% stuff found in grocery stores. The guys
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who worked in the peroxide operation joked about converting its maze of all glass piping
to distill whiskey instead. Sometime on my rounds, they could be found asleep late at
night, but according to their bosses, they knew the proper sounds so well that they would
not only waken instantly from any changes, but also know just where to look to deal with
the problems. Nevertheless, a sister plant in Buffalo quite literally vanished one night not
too long afterwards, taking its operators with it, while another in Louisiana similar to the
chlorine portion nearly as spectacularly blew up its building a few years further on, also
taking with it several lives.
Sodium hydroxide was referred to as "caustic" because it was the pre-eminent example
of that class of substances. Its common name, lye, was the other primary product of the
chlorine manufacture, which was hardly a pleasure to work with, or around, in itself. The
local plant’s production was classified as electrolytic grade, extra-purified to etch circuit
boards. I got to know its characteristics in intimate detail when some got by my goggles
and into an eye. Luckily, it happened right next to a washing station set up for just that
emergency.
It was in this plant that am ongoing connection appeared in my life, from my father
bringing home paperback copies of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. There are probably few
better places to fully envision Mordor than reading in the middle of night, surrounded on
three sides by the lights of a steaming chlorine/caustic chemical plant, and then to appreciate
the contrasts that dawn brought, looking out over native vegetation, even rudely treated, on
the other side. Tolkien, for me, has been a companion deserving serious attention, with his
more famous writings read at least 20 times over the years. His support writings, including
all of his son Christopher’s commentaries, have been purchased and consumed in all their
thorough detail. The Peter Jackson movies did not even begin to reveal the books’ depth.
The night’s central assignment during my watchman job involved coded keys that were
chained in various spots around the facility. Each needed to be inserted into a five-pound,
clock driven, paper tape recording device, where they left differently shaped marks to show
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that somebody had checked for anything at least obviously amiss. To speed entries into the
many buildings, I got the bright idea to hanging my master door key on a chain outside my
pants, having noticed someone doing similarly. A problem arose because I had selected an
insufficiently robust set of links, leading to the keychain breaking, just one stop before the
end of a round. With the next round being near dawn, I’d have a better chance to find it
then, without having to confess an error with a master key to the bosses. Employee theft was
a continuing serious issue for the plant supervisors.
That option, though, required getting to the last watch key for the round I was on.
Seeing that there was a likely reachable and open window above where the marking device
was located, I lept up, crawled over the transom, got through, and jumped to the floor.
Unfortunately, the heavy recording clock, on its strap, had caught on the latch at the top of
my arc. Even more unfortunately, when I looked up to see how it was lodged, the assembly
was already on its way down. Since I had begun looking upwards, the clock was able to
neatly miss my hard hat and crash full on into my upturned face. When I groggily woke
up a few minutes later, I instinctively wiped my hand across my nose, thus spreading the
considerable quantity of blood even more widely. When I walked into the office, the poor
night-shift bosses woke from their naps to see me looking seriously injured, which indeed
was the case, but I didn’t know it yet, thinking my problem was just a badly bloodied
schnozz. After telling them about the situation, I sat back with a towel pressed hard against
my face, which did stop the bleeding after a while, so I didn’t seek further help. With the
advancing natural light, we searched together over the gravel grounds, and found the errant
master key.
I went home at the end of my shift, at 7 AM, slept for a few hours, but woke with
bleeding again. This time, I could not get it to stop. My father had taken one of the family
cars to work, and my mother had the other out shopping. I checked with a neighbor, who
gave me a lift to the hospital, where an X-ray quickly revealed my nose and adjacent cheek
to be broken, in 11 places. After a scramble to find my father for permission to operate, since
I wasn’t yet 21, the surgeons crammed my nose full of cocaine, which is the only drug that
worked safely that close to the brain, and reset the bones as best they could.
The following summer, I got about $400 from workmen’s compensation for “permanent
facial disfigurement” for the damage done. The judge had to prod me to ask for any
recompense at the routine inquiry, since I could neither readily see the damage in a mirror,
nor find blame for anyone but myself. Looking back, however, even though the injury was
not obvious from the outside, it created a lifelong problem for me in breathing, especially
when stressed, and in proper sinus drainage. It thereby exacerbated the effect of lung damage
from chemicals on my native claustrophobia, as well as upon allergies. However, everyone
I’ve talked with about trying to right septum damage has argued that further surgery offers
no cure.
More immediately, that seemingly small sum was twice the asking price of a 1960 Volvo
544 on the used car lot of a local dealership. My father had thought seriously about buying
a similar model at the time he acquired the Rambler, but my mother had argued against its
stick shift. A friend in my dorm at college had one, loved it, and I had been impressed. That
machine definitely was to provide an education, and plenty of adventure.
There were yet few Volvos on American roads back then, and the 544 looked like a
narrower version of a pre-war Ford. Folks called it a hunchback. I named it Snoopy, because
I soon painted Charles Schultz’s flying-scarf-clad dog, on his doghouse, on its dark blue
sides. The top and back of this particular Volvo were flat black; the interior had thick red
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and white vinyl. As far as I know, it escaped ever being photographed, since its arrival
followed my father’s loss of the Zeiss camera and his relative disinterest in the Minolta
bought to replace it, while preceding my own entry into serious photography.
The car’s entry into my life was slightly preceded by meeting my eventual wife, which
turned out to be second direct acquaintance for her, but with no memory of our earlier
encounter, the first time for me. Getting together in arose because I had tired of trying to
meet women in bars, by chance in classes, or through similarly random selections, even
though a good many encounters had provided considerable entertainment, and even brief
satisfactions. It seemed time for a more scientific approach. Coming home to work during
the second summer of college, I went through the high school graduation yearbook of my
sister, who is two years younger. Initially, with my hang-ups showing, I looked for my own
criteria of beauty. That selectivity cut roughly 370 possibilities down to just four. Then,
having heard that prospective partners should have an IQ at least somewhat near one’s own,
and by using membership in the National Honor Society as a likely criterion, those four
were halved. One of the remaining two listed among her activities the literary magazine run
by my favorite English teacher. Here is a snapshot, by my father,
of her as Onondaga County’s Junior Miss, from a Fourth of July
parade just after our formal meeting:
Having optimized the possibilities, timorously I rang her
up, being used to rejection by females from my high school. I
did not know that she’d been infatuated with me ever since she
had done my makeup for the General Bullmoose part in Li’ l
Abner two years before. She did coyly reveal that her parents
might allow me to go out with her, since her mother knew
mine, through both of them being Girl Scout leaders, and was
acquainted with my father by working as an executive secretary
for a time in the research laboratory where he did. We still
celebrate the anniversary of that first date, where we cruised
in the VW to Skaneateles, and mostly sat on the steps of my
favorite park at the lake’s edge, chatting. Later, in the Volvo, one
of our latest arrivals back from our early dates followed taking
in the Mormon Pagent in Palmyra, New York. That outing is
amusing in retrospect, given our later residence in Utah and
growing distaste for its dominant church. At the time it was,
as much as anything else, a good excuse for staying out late
together.
A couple of other late-night returns in the Volvo came after trips to Saratoga, New York
for concerts there, the first to hear Tom Paxton performing on a bill with Ian and Sylvia.
The next year’s initial venture was to see Arlo Guthrie with Judy Collins, for which I’d even
sprung for decent seats, instead of out in the grass, then a third back out there for Simon
and Garfunkle. It being 1968, Arlo told a remarkable send-up tale about how concentration
camps were being prepared for people who came to concerts like his, culminating with how
the police had just come through the doors of the concert shell for us. That, of course, made
everyone turn around, giving the poor rent-a-cops doing security at the heads of the aisles a
moment of even greater discomfort than we were feeling. Great job! Collins, following, was
spectacularly dressed in a long, low-cut red velvet dress. After some wonderfully new-to-us
jazzy support for Bob Dylan’s “Tom Thumb Blues” and other familiar covers, she provided
one of the absolute favorites among my concert moments, dropping her backups and their
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complexity to play Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”, already a special song for me, on center
stage alone with a 12-string guitar, gifting us her beautifully simple arrangement.
After puttering around for the summer of 1967, I drove Snoopy back to college in Fort
Collins, taking along a male high school friend who was heading the same way. We got
as far as Goodland, Kansas, before my first significant foray into mechanics was required.
There, I was able to work with locals to find out that the distributor points had broken, to
replace them with ones that conveniently also fit some American-made car, and to set their
gap adequately by using the thickness of a cardboard matchbook cover. When Thanksgiving
approached, I got the bright idea of using my father’s gasoline credit card, which he’d given
me for the end of summer college trip, to head out to visit Kathy, now at New College in
Sarasota, Florida, stopping by to visit my relatives in Independence, Missouri, as travelling
there was a known to be an okay cover possibility.
That venture was only for the young. I didn’t even get out of town on the first day until
it was nearly dark. The Volvo had only an eight-gallon gas tank, and even with its (for the
period) remarkable 25+ mpg, I had my first moments of serious anxiety crossing northern
New Mexico after midnight, where the distance between towns was very close to the car’s
possible range. About the time I was considering knocking on a lighted ranch house door
to try to buy some fuel, an open gas station hove most thankfully into view. I put in 7.8
gallons. A bit later, I was able to sleep for a couple of hours alongside a side road through a
field on the Texas high plains.
Cruising on, I was soon introduced to the glories of seemingly two-dimensional dawns,
passing through their range of most exquisitely soft colors. A full day disappeared across that
great (at least in width) state of Texas, with evening finding me entering among the longleafed pines, and at nightfall, arriving near the Louisiana border. The lights of petroleum
refineries and other chemical industries inside that state appeared genuinely hellish, as they
have whenever encountering them since.
Having recently seen the movie In the Heat of the Night, one scene, with its racially
charged car chase—remembered with thugs driving a white Chevrolet—flamed into mind
later on as I cut across the Spanish-moss-dripping Louisiana bayou country along relatively
back roads. Given my longish hair (for those "clean-cut" days), driving a strange looking
car with its New York license plates, I was not best pleased by encountering a white Chevy
full of yokels coming slowly the other way, observing them staring, and then, in the mirror,
seeing their brake lights come on, with their car turning to follow me. I proceeded to bury
the Volvo’s tape-strip, 100-mph speedometer and was ever so slowly be able to pull away
from them, the Chevy falling a little further behind with each rise and fall in the terrain.
That definitely woke me up again.
I did make a seriously wrong turn after watching dawn come over New Orleans, finding
myself nearly in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, before I discovered the error. I motored back
on along the Gulf Coast, staying as near as I could to the water, until entering Florida on
Sunday afternoon. The exhaust pipe on the Volvo broke soon thereafter, right where it
exited its too-short cast-iron header, only inches from the engine. In Sweden, there is simply
nowhere one can drive more than 24 hours at a stretch, but the too-thin metal that had been
okay for their environment couldn’t take longer-distance American stress. In Tallahassee,
with its remaining blue laws, I could find no one willing to fix the damage. When it
happened again the next summer, I was ready, with an old metal juice can and some baling
wire in the trunk, but not for that first encounter, being too tired at the time to think as
creatively.
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Then, the plot thickened further, from having assumed that once into Florida, I would
be close to my destination, Sarasota. I slowly learned to be even more careful about map
reading, through driving for nearly 500 more miles on the coldest day in years in the
state, while needing to keep my head out the window, to avoid being killed by the fumes,
and bypassing towns so as not get ticketed for the noise from the broken exhaust. Finally
arriving, very late, after 50 hours of driving with, at most, 4 total hours of sleep, I simply
passed out on Kathy’s bed, to the amusement of her roommate.
We nevertheless had the expected wonderful time in that fascinating environment.
New College was then actually very new indeed, with its I. M. Pei designed dorms and
classrooms, situated next to the Ringling Brothers’ circus headquarters and museum, and
having a former Ringling mansion as the college’s library. Students were limited to the
top one percent nationally by testing scores. Mimi Witt, Kathy’s gorgeous and brilliant
roommate, was the daughter of a top Palm Beach physician. She combined majors in
chemistry and dance, writing and performing a thesis describing molecular structures
through physical motion. A few years later, her analyses of my own motion, while visiting
her in New York City, greatly helped me continue developing in a more confident direction.
I headed back towards Colorado with one of their fellow students aboard, who was
bound for his hometown in western Nebraska. Along the way, he taught me how to tune the
SU carburetors by listening to the balance of their sounds with one’s head between them,
thereby raising the trip mileage to nearly 30. On that return journey, I most remember
Birmingham, Alabama glowing, from its steel mills reflected under lowering clouds.
I called my folks from Independence, Missouri, where they had expected to hear from
me, to warn them of the incoming gas credit card bills. I didn’t notice my mother dropping
off from the extension phone as my father and I chatted on. That quiet event became quite
funny a few weeks later. Meanwhile, we soldiered on in the Volvo, until I dropped my
companion off in a particularly empty-seeming location, at a deserted intersection. An
internal image of a young man, clad in the worn tatters popular with students of the era,
leaving a warm car for a snowy roadside, with no other movement in view for dozens of
miles, remains a particular vision of loneliness to me.
The last couple of hundred miles of that trip were on the then further emptiness along
Colorado Highway 14, running across the state’s eastern shortgrass plains. I tried to swerve
around the first jackrabbit that ran in front of me, but it reversed course, followed by a set
of thunks as its body bounced against the underside of the car. For the second rabbit, I just
shrugged and held straight on, but, again, thunks. I was still thoroughly bummed out by
the furry deaths at my hands when Fort Collins finally hove into view, but as I approached
my residence, Noel Harrison’s version of “Suzanne” came onto the radio, the first time I’d
heard the song, and it closed the adventure perfectly. With the trip, the love, and its safe
end for me, hearing that song often still brings tears, of beauty and remembered joy, all as
bittersweet as Cohen would properly have it.
Three weeks later, I took a full load of fellow students back towards Syracuse for our
Christmas break. When I arrived home dropping them off, my father, who was anything but
athletic, came running out of the house, laughing, telling me that since my call, it had been
the first extended period of quiet he’d had since being married. That was because my mother
hadn’t spoken to him in the interim, because he wasn’t upset that I would visit a woman
unsupervised, overnight. The irony was, although the pill was just coming into vogue, that
particular woman was still keeping me at ultimate sexual bay.
Marriage remained for the far future, though its temptations were very much there.
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I soon did apply, and was accepted, for transfer to New College, but no scholarship was
offered, so with my inherited intense dislike of debt, the immediate cost was going to
be too high to finance. Meanwhile, Kathy’s Catholic, recent-immigrant (by my family’s
standards), working class background—her father worked at the same factory as mine, but
as an industrial blacksmith—was considered too different from mine, by my parents. For
her folks, dating was okay, but her mother wanted was looking assuredly higher, wanting
a doctor or similar as a match for her daughter, not a prospective poet or philosopher,
the directions I was thinking of most then, being by no means ready to settle down to a
traditional career. The young engineers I had worked with during summers at Solvay Process
sealed that case, if nothing else managed to, for at age 24, they were effectively already dead.
They would not only be no longer be growing physically, but ever so clearly, they were done
mentally, too.
Meanwhile, skipping through the snow and attending midnight high mass with Kathy in
the downtown cathedral was quite a theatrical thrill, even if I had to repress laughter when
the archbishop used the censer, paralleling closely how I had circled the car with incense in a
very pagan-inspired ritual before leaving Fort Collins.
On that trip back, the Volvo got its chance to shine, when the outside temperature
near Chicago dropped to -24º F. It had a device like a window shade roller, which could
selectively block air to the radiator, and was attached to a chain one could adjust from the
driver’s seat. That arrangement required paying attention to the engine’s temperature gauge,
but it worked wonderfully, so that my sister and I cruised on in shirt sleeves, smiling at
all the folks in their supposedly superior gas hogs who were shivering behind frosted-up
windows. We already had been laughing that evening, because, to get her to the college
destination on time, we had left on New Year’s Eve, and crossed the time-zone line in
Indiana at just the right moment to have two midnights, and we were speculating whether
or not that made us an extra year older.
In Iowa, I dropped off my sister at the church college that she was attending for a couple
of years, which, quite amusingly, had been named Graceland long before Elvis made that
name considerably more famous. There, finally remembering a suggestion about something
to check, I started putting a few drops of oil or automatic transmission fluid more regularly
into the dampers for the carbs. That turned out to be needed every 300 miles, another kind
of brief attention-to-maintenance weirdness that foreign machinery required, but a detail
made that it run ever so much better on less fuel than its competition. A few years later,
when gasoline mileage temporarily became important in America, Ford came out with a
“variable venturi” carburetor setup modelled on the ones in this Volvo, which was the same
as so many British cars had sported since 1925 or so. I suspect Ford couldn’t figure out how
to make them maintenance free, so with fuel injection becoming useful to meet mandated
pollution-control requirements, they, like the old SU carburetors, rather quickly disappeared.
While very efficient overall, they did leave some incompletely burned hydrocarbons
behind under certain situations, especially if not carefully maintained, including regular
readjustments, with occasional bearing replacements.
The next intense memory from that trip was stopping to pick up another of my outbound
passengers at Fort Leavenworth. Her father was a full colonel and the camp commandant,
who invited me to join them for New Year’s dinner, with his huge family, austerely dressed,
sitting around a long table in a surprisingly barren and chilly environment for such a high
rank. In stark contrast to the rest, he was wearing a full dress uniform. I had not realized
that still included not just a broad stripe on the outside of the pants, but also a very bright
metal-sheathed sword, all overlain by an even more brilliant red-satin-lined cape. The Civil
45
War I had so intensely studied returned momentarily to life.
Despite the car’s many adventures, not least exploring many back roads round about
Fort Collins, that Volvo was not especially long lived. One night a lady acquaintance, an
undertaker’s daughter, who apparently had an unrequited crush on me, and her 1958 Dodge
blunderbuss were responsible for a horrifying sound at the place where I was temporarily
living. When those of us remaining from a larger party looked out the door, we found
that the hood of my car had filled the space where the porch had been. She had rammed it
broadside.
That was not its first dent, though, which came late one night, when I had flown back
from Syracuse by student standby, after seeing my love during spring break. That flight
became a complex trip of being bumped in places like Rochester and Buffalo, followed
by stopping by my always highly religious cousins’ house in Denver, where I found these
previously intense teetotalers suddenly mixing daiquiris. On the moonlit trip back up the
freeway to Fort Collins afterwards, I followed my training from driver’s ed., along with the
precepts of New York law, s by keeping to the right lane, even though traffic was light and I
was the fastest vehicle, though never exceeding the posted speed limit. Near Erie, Colorado,
a coal mine slag bank had been burning constantly, which I always looked forward to, as its
glow was framed by the white-coated mountains behind. I glanced down the long downhill
slope on the road, saw only a set of sports car taillights ahead, and then concentrated on the
view of the fire.
What happened next was neatly depicted in the movie Grand Prix (or was it Le Mans?),
when the hero, driving a full-out racing car, with memories of causing the fiery death of
another the previous year, and transfixed from seeing flames at the same corner, tries to
come back to active awareness as he closes in fast, but is inadequately aware of a much slower
car in his immediate path. For me, the practical hazard was a Fiat 850, heading back from
a race, which was following a VW bus support vehicle that was chugging up the next rise
of the routinely varying grade, at what I later found out to be 25 mph. As in the movie,
I almost got by in time, but not quite, in my case clipping his left rear fender, imparting
enough momentum to send him spinning into the bridge abutment at the bottom of the
slope. That contact bent my own tougher fender just enough so that it gripped the right front
tire, thereby negating my ability to steer, and making me head uncontrollably toward the
farther side of the abutment at nearly 65 mph. I locked up the brakes, slowing me enough
to leave only a thin strip of paint on the bridge’s concrete, which was still visible years later.
I thought I’d killed the other driver, because the Fiat was so thoroughly compressed from
its impacts at both ends. Instead, like many other well-designed lightweight cars, it had
sacrificed itself, absorbing the collision energy by folding up sequentially, while protecting
the passengers’ space. As a racer wearing good seatbelts, the Fiat’s driver wound up unhurt,
though quite unhappy. I got a ticket for careless driving; he got one for driving too slowly on
an interstate without using flashers.
At the moment I write this line, it is more than 40 years since that last, even partially-atfault, on-road “accident” involving someone else. I never again drove in the slow lane unless I
was indeed slower than other traffic. Instead, I have religiously watched my mirrors, moving
over if someone coming up even faster wants to go by. That rather serious tangle taught me
absolutely how neither everything taught in driver’s ed., nor what is required by law, will
be appropriate for all drivers, or in all situations. While having to learn this the hard way, I
was indeed thankful that this conclusion was reached without damage to anyone’s health,
because both cars were rationally designed, not deadly heavyweights. It was a vital step
towards realizing how assumptions of equality may apply appropriately to humans at their
46
birth, along with their treatment before the law, but not to them for all subsequent physical
interactions, and not ever to machines. My Volvo did a lot of damage to some metal, but, if
I’d been driving anything much heavier, I would surely have taken a life that night.
However, between some seemingly minor design flaws built into Snoopy and how I was
not yet doing much of the maintenance or repair work, that particular Volvo wasn’t very
economical overall, even if it was notably safer and more fuel-efficient than anything made
in America. At one point I figured I could have driven a new Cadillac for the same per mile
cost, although I had too much respect for many related issues to do so. Besides the problem
with the exhaust, the coolant passages on the Volvo B16 engine weren’t engineered correctly
for extended operation, making that design tend to burn one side of its number two piston.
Mine was among those that did, a fact almost certainly known to those who sold it to me,
but who had not shared it with me. That damage was not cheap to fix. Further, the electrical
system was six volt, with an inadequate generator that quit all too regularly, making learning
to change its brushes one of my earliest forays into mechanics. One failure had me crossing
Wyoming in a heavy rain, having to choose between headlights and windshield wipers,
operating the latter by hand, and still stopping regularly to get a battery charge at gas
stations. Another time, coming in to Syracuse on the last leg of on a 2,000 mile trip, I timed
its decline so that the stored charge faded beyond the point of running the engine just as I
turned into our home street, and coasted the last few feet into the driveway.
There were several Volvo 544s in Fort Collins at the time. We could recognize one
another at night, because our headlights would dip each time we shifted gears. It took
about 100 miles of driving to recharge the battery from each start in cold weather, so for
driving around town one of the winters, I would trade off nights on a plug-in charger with
another roomer, who had an MGA, in the former frat house where we were living. That
car was particularly amusing because George had cut a space in the grill so that he could
alternatively start its engine from the outside with a removable hand crank.
After Snoopy the Volvo got crunched by the big Dodge, its damage led to a moment of
literally flying in it. The car could be driven, but its bent front suspension meant that if one
took one’s hands off the steering wheel, that would immediately spin to the far right. Living
for a while up a canyon above Fort Collins, and coming in one morning after a sleepless,
druggy night watching the stars, I had my skis inside, extending over the passenger seat. At
the first corner, they slid over and clunked me on the side of my head. Groggily, with no
traffic in sight, and having passed the apex of the curve, I instinctively reached over to push
them away. When I turned my attention back to the road, the car had turned itself off of
the pavement and was now airborne, about 10 feet above the paralleling stream. It was quite
fun until we landed, thankfully gently enough, but well out of reach of getting back out
without help. My friend George Post was the first to happen by, asking from his MG what I
was doing down there. Along with the tow truck that followed, a call came for the Highway
Patrol. I was eventually sentenced once again for "careless driving", thereby being required to
take a remedial course. The long-term license-test instructor noted afterwards that I knew at
least as much about how to handle vehicles as anyone he’d examined before.
My father by then had enough of contributing to the Volvo’s upkeep, so he suggested
that I fly home at the end of the school year, take his 40 horsepower VW back in the fall,
and he’d get something newer for himself. That exchange got amusing as I returned through
Western Nebraska on old U.S. Highway 30, since the limited access replacement, I-80, was
yet incomplete. In theory and in practice, the Beetle’s top speed was just over 70 mph, that
road’s speed limit. One semi-truck was cruising at about 65, so when I could see a mile or so
of clear road in the other lane, I’d pull out to pass, getting a good slingshot effect from his
47
draft, but I could not get through the truck’s bow wave, and would have to fall back behind.
He’d get to laughing, making push motions, but he would not lift off his throttle to let me
by.
Later, when I’d take the VW skiing, a routine for the uphill portion of Loveland Pass
became shaking my fist at the 35 mph curve signs, because 30 was its maximum speed in
second gear, and that gear was required for enough power to ascend the steep slope. Once I
pushed faster through the first curve, trying to preserve momentum to use a higher gear, but
the try got the car got well up on 2 wheels, like the stunt drivers do. It was not something
I wished to repeat. At the time, I was concerned about breaking my skis if the car rolled,
which must have given me the right image to get it back down.
VWs were great for teaching one how to drive in snow, when their low power and engine
location in the rear actually added substantial advantages. One could move the wheel just
ever so slightly at routine corners, and then power skid around them. My mother hated that
when I did it with her along. I got so that cornering in town could be done as fast as the
speed limit allowed, in snow or on dry pavement, which was a lot faster than most far more
expensive cars could manage. Forty horsepower also taught me how to calculate passing
distances, since there was no useful reserve acceleration. It took a lot of space to get by
another vehicle, even when getting a running start by dropping a ways behind, braking to
bail out at the last instant before pulling out if necessary. The Beetle being generally less fun
to drive than the Volvo also encouraged me to concentrate more on study and socialization,
rediscovering their virtues at times I might otherwise have been playing on the road.
A
musingly, as I was considering where to go next with this memoir, “California
Dreamin’” by the Mommas and Poppas came onto the background radio. That
happened to be the very first song I heard when I arrived at the CSU campus, emanating
from speakers set on seemingly inaccessible projections on the dorm I would be living in,
and so different from any sounds I had heard before. It provided a premonition for what
often seemed to be a real change for our generation, despite its sadly turning from such
intricately imagined, all-encompassing promise into destructive side alleys like hard drugs,
Charles Manson, and George W. Bush. The better music of the 1960s does remain as
some proof that there was a reason for hope. Listening to the harmonies of Ian and Sylvia
or Richard and Mimi Fariña, among others recently, and at this moment to the extended
version of "Crimson and Clover" underlines how, with its amazing depth of creativity,
nothing like this music existed before or since, along with so many other irreplacables.
Listening to that music was assisted by a focussing filter, at least similar to those applied
during much of its creation. I was turned on to marijuana by a couple of elementary
school teachers in suburban Boulder, in the early spring of 1967, as preparation for a
local "Aquarian festival" to celebrate another anticipated coming of a truly new age. LSD
followed very soon thereafter, being still legal in Colorado at the time, and therefore pure
and open to the religious care suggested by Aldous Huxley in Island. The experience was
both intensely memorable and genuinely magic within that care-filled context. Watching
a drop of water from an icicle catch the new sun at dawn and explode into colors beyond
those previously imaginable remains an unmatchable moment, especially framed as it was
by music created under the same new influence, not least the best of the Rolling Stones, the
Beatles, the Grateful Dead, and so many others. For me, it was not just the new that become
even more special. When my roommate started to get unpleasantly disoriented, I put on
Leonard Bernstein’s rendition of Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring”, and the flow
with it likely will remain as close to heaven as I may ever get. I had always listened to music
more intensely than most, but this added several more dimensions, most still recallable,
48
and augmenting ongoing daily life. One may be able to get to the same place without the
clues that acid and pot gave, but I still believe that my daily attentiveness to fine detail in
the world, like the hawk following the cloud patterns at this moment, was honed to a higher
degree than most ever experience with the ongoing help from memories of possibilities they
provided for seeing and hearing.
Alas, the persecutors of pleasure and genuine (not material) progress, along with
errors by some its proponents, soon led to LSD being associated with a variety of negative
baggage. Bad trips, from many sources, followed. This powerful chemical never was safe or
appropriate to use casually, since it greatly amplifies any incoming presuppositions, along
with disturbances during its presence. Mixing it with other compounds could, and soon did,
become rapidly deadly. For these, controversies that whirl around drugs, like wars, make
either humor or sanity harder to reach.
Assumptions that all drugs needed to be treated equally were part of the problem then,
as they have remained. The vastly more addictive cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines,
inherently so much more destructive when misused, were lumped legally, and by the media
with LSD and marijuana, to absolutely everyone’s detriment. Lysergic acid was something,
at least for me, to be used a few times and then left alone, having learned all it had to say,
not least that it had to be chemically pure and used with extreme care in an at least close-toreligious setting. It was not, and is not, for simple entertainment, with its illegality and bad
press contributing considerably to dangers from its practical use.
The differentially more powerful drugs never held much allure for me, except when the
appropriate portions were needed for serious pain, and then for as short as possible a period.
Their limits were confirmed as some were tried once or twice out of curiosity, to see if lies
about them were not covering some useful potential. Over the years, I have continued to
watch too many people hurt themselves—and others—through the inappropriate use of
methamphetamine, cocaine, and opiates, along with the profitably legal, but as least as
addictive, dangerous, and destructive phony happiness pills like Prosac, as well as tobacco.
The drug use situation is more complex than willfully ignorant legislators, or most of the
public behind them, can effectively understand.
Inherently less dangerous marijuana was eventually set aside in my life, because of
persecution of its users by the ignorant, aided by those who profit from more dangerous
substances, selectively pushing them through association of any "recreational" drugs with
illegality. The combination made pot unsafe, not for reasons of health or addiction, but
because of the threat of literally being put in a cage for using it. My arthritis and creativity
would very much appreciate its occasional return. Those in serious pain, or in need of
surgery, dental or otherwise, would also appreciate a more rational availability of opiates and
cocaine, under a physician’s watch. As with alcohol, balance is so bloody difficult to achieve,
legally and for all too many people, by their own inappropriate choices of how much and
when to use the products.
As a college freshman, I had found out what alcohol can do. At the cast party for
Molière’s The Miser, wherein I had played the servant, Master Jacques, to considerable
satisfaction all around, I mixed too much bourbon and warm sake. It was three days before
I felt human again. I did get sick once again, but from a simple volume effect in a typically
boyish beer-chugging affair not too long afterwards. Those were sufficiently salutary lessons
to never need to be repeated. Marijuana was a lot easier to deal with, except for being illegal,
and only tied thereby so inappropriately to much more dangerous drugs and actions.
Selective persecution observed personally led to appreciating how government was not
49
always the clean and just organization that I had been brought up to believe it was. In that
semi-rural house where Snoopy the Volvo was to so damaged, I shared living quarters for
a couple of months with a changing variety of fringe characters. One was the brother of a
fellow who’d fled town on advance word that a warrant had been issued in response to his
selling LSD. A group of residents and friends were quietly sitting around early one evening
when I saw an unmarked white car drive up, then thought I saw someone run by a window,
but shrugged it off. The doorbell rang, and an older stranger appeared when I responded. I
assumed it was the landlord, whom I’d not met, coming by to collect the rent.
This fellow, dressed as a civilian, instead threw me aside, drew a gun, and barged in,
followed by several others, also most visibly armed, telling us to stand against the wall. No
warrant was shown, nor were badges displayed. It was November, but the door was left open,
and we were told to remove our shoes and sweaters. The two prospective victims who did
possess a bit of pot at that moment were in the kitchen. Dick responded to a photo-based
recognition question of “Are you Passman?” with a “Yes”, even though it was a shared last
name with a brother. The intruders made no effort to find out if they had exactly the right
person, and the two who had entered the kitchen began frisking him against the wall.
Meanwhile, Fred, unnoticed on the floor by their feet, having put the resource baggie in
his pocket, slowly crawled towards the adjacent back door. Seeing his moment and catching
Dick’s eye—who was very strongly athletic and responded by swinging his arms, catching
both friskers in the throat—Fred ran for it. Not far from the door was a deep irrigation
ditch, hidden by shrubbery. One of the un-uniformed, but assumed cops started chasing
Fred, while another stood on the porch with a small revolver, holding it shakily in the air,
and asking, in a Barney Fife voice, “Sh-shall I shoot?” Fred entered the bushes, leapt for
the canal, and his follower, not knowing the water was beyond, ran off the edge, with legs
pumping just like in the cartoons. Fred released the baggie underwater, successfully letting it
drift away unseen.
An agonizingly long time later, after the invading crew had thoroughly torn the contents
of the place apart and widely scattered all of our possessions, the culmination of the
exercise was the break-in’s leader, with only huge, 11x14” manila envelopes for evidence,
holding a single small roach with tweezers, preparing to drop it in, crying, with the voice
of perverted justice, “Well, we didn’t get you guys this time, but we’ll get you yet!” Given
that many visitors had smoked hand-rolled tobacco, and marijuana wasn’t something to
waste, what he carried off was most likely completely legal. No warrant was ever shown,
nor did the invaders ever identify themselves, and they had no legitimate reason to
bother anyone present. Their apparent target had been gone for more than a month, and
successfully escaped, eventually to become a prominent, widely respected, wholly legitimate
businessman.
Still more generally understandably, perhaps, was (and is) my all to justified worry
about cops getting into the wrong room or concentrating on the wrong person. Stories
become much more intense when one actually has been the target of attention of a bunch
of very nervous men with guns, especially when they were barging into one’s home, without
uniforms and without the least proof of why they had the right to be there. More initially
benign circumstances with similar breaches of legal propriety have happened to me twice
since. Once happened when just walking with a student friend, who had been, unknown to
us, mistaken by someone for a multiple murderer known to be on the loose in the general
area. Quite large number of armed cops suddenly appeared, surrounding us, with a whole lot
of black holes (of their guns) waveringly or steadily pointed in our direction. Once IDs were
provided, we could breathe again, understanding their logic, but not without adding another
50
level of appreciation for how less familiar parts of society to suburban life might feel.
The other incident came still later, when I was alone, out walking with my 11 pound
Yorkshire Terrier in a light rain late one night, and was mistaken for a recent, brutal rapist
on the loose. We were suddenly confronted by two newly minted sheriff’s deputies leaping
out of their car, with literally shaking fingers on their triggers. That time, I had just returned
from years away from the town, had no ID with me, and had spent the evening sitting
by myself listening to music, so there was no corroboration possible for how I’d spent the
critical hours. I was not even sure who I might call locally for support. Stories by Kafka and
others of prisoners lost in the system felt all too close, letting go only when I asked the young
officers how many men, having just carried off a violent crime, would be found out walking
a small dog in the rain?
However, despite such close skirting of the possibilities, my situation thankfully
never became as bad as that for the million or so that have been jailed for drugs that
the pharmaceutical establishment doesn’t make enough money from, or otherwise feels
threatened by. The worst case in my direct knowledge occurred for one of the gentlest,
nicest, most concerned for others that I’ve ever met. He ran a coffeehouse in Denver, with
the assistance of a church, and wrote poetry, providing an especially pleasant environment
for urban social interchange, a physically and otherwise lovely place where I spent a
considerable amount of thoroughly enjoyable time. Because he provided a few others some
pot and LSD, the latter just at the time it was being made illegal, all by mutual consent but
not sufficiently secretly, he was busted. As a gentle sort, he well knew that prison would
involve brutal conditions, not least of all almost certain rape for him. In the courtroom, after
his ten year sentence was read out, he pulled out a concealed pistol, and blew his brains out
in front of the judge.
More happily, hearing a Creedence Clearwater song on the radio has brought back
another visionary trip during the same period. It related to how I had, at times, been
discontented during my freshman year, and so had dropped by the campus counseling
center. The reception folks looked at one another, smiled in clear agreement, and said,
“Jackie”. She, a long-term graduate student from California, soon suggested that I try
transferring to her alma mater, Reed College. I was admitted, but would have had to pay
vastly more money, and live off campus as a new student, thus making integration to a
small group even more difficult. I didn’t take up that alternative, but the next year, after
encountering her at a campus showing of the Beatles’ Help, started spending time at Jackie’s
house. There, a semi-communal group lived on five acres of recovering farmland, but still
within town boundaries, with the sprawling, well shaded facilities making it a comfortable
stopping point for passers through. That led to a number of life-long friendships with
continually interesting people: artists, poets, writers, actors, and other creative types.
One February day, I rode with a group from the farm up to a place called Duck Lake,
high in the mountains above Boulder, to a cabin owned by a lady described as a New York
City socialite. Everyone dropped some very high quality acid, and we most memorably
roasted chickens on a huge open fire built on the thick ice in the middle of the lake.
Returning to town, our group stopped by the house of one of the owners of the best local
bookstore, known then as the 'Brillig Works'. There, on an unusually fine stereo system, I
heard Creedence for the first time. What makes that memory so multi-dimensional, beyond
how wonderful that music was in that situation, is how the same house is now owned by
a close friend from graduate school, ever so differently decorated, but still structurally
recognizable. During regular visits there, at odd times one the thinner places between my
brain compartments emerges, as present and old visions fade into one another.
51
It is an ongoing theory of mine that memories are linked not just chronologically, but
also by place, state of mind, and smell, among other categorizations. Drugs (including
alcohol) and pain are among those states where, when under the same general influences,
I’ve found that one can reach situation-related past interactions much more easily.
M
eanwhile during this period, my mother was already beginning to slide into
the decline that may have been initiated by one of the not yet fully tales from
the pharmaceutical industry’s misuse of humans. A hot news issue during the early years
of the second millennium has been abuse of steroids in sports. Overlooked within that is
how, back in the 1950s massive doses of cortisone, a particularly powerful steroid, were
being prescribed for arthritis. My mother had a particularly severe case of the rheumatoid
variety, with all the associated pain. At the time of her death, her hands were twisted into
near uselessness by the disease, so one could readily understand why she would pursue any
treatment recommended by a doctor. The treatment with cortisone, for which there had
been no long-term testing (nor were there ethical ways of doing so readily available, then or
now), did provide a substantial palliative. Unfortunately, quietly posted data in the medical
literature suggests that it could have been an active part of what basically melted her mind,
shrinking her brain, and producing symptoms matching Alzheimer’s, but manifested far
sooner. At the very least, no physician now would even think of prescribing the doses that
she was given.
The time was far less lawsuit-happy than the present, the results were slow to develop,
and those who made the prescriptions and the sales behind them could not have known
those particular consequences. The users did obtain significant relief, at least until more
obvious and immediate symptoms of trouble started appearing, ones that were the reasons
behind original pulling of the drug from routine heavy use. On the other hand, treatments
like those blended into other things overlooked, thought to be safe, later affecting my father
and me. They all should serve as a more of a caution than is routinely given to "advances" of
science. The greater the supposed benefit, the greater the doubt that should accompany it, all
the way up to the oncoming disasters, not yet revealed in their fullness, from nuclear power
and biotechnology in their forefront.
The first associated joker awaiting at the personal level, after the lead assimilated while
removing old paint (with a hot iron device) from our house and Syracuse’s serious air
pollution issues from its many heavy industries, was the mercury I encountered during my
college summer jobs. That liquid metal wasn’t considered to be a fully serious safety threat
at the time. The Solvay Process chlorine/caustic building was about the size of a football
field, with three-foot-wide metal boxes running the structure’s entire width, held on girders
one story up above a mostly bare, slightly sloping concrete floor. Each of these “cells”
contained somewhere near 3 tons of elemental mercury, over which ran brine, while 50,000
amps of electricity (at a small fraction of a volt) coursed through the mercury, which acted
as an electrolytic cathode. The results of the interaction were a very pure form of sodium
hydroxide (a very much stronger version of household oven cleaner, also called caustic
soda), hydrogen, and chlorine gas. The latter two had to be carefully kept apart; when
they got together at one of the company’s other plants one night, the whole place basically
vanished very suddenly. The hydrogen gas was piped to another building, to be distilled in
a fascinating complex of clear glass piping with water into a highly concentrated peroxide
form. Some of this was literally to be used as rocket fuel, manufactured through another
spectacularly dangerous process, one responsible for more than a few deaths and associated
destruction.
The magnetic fields around the cells were incredible, while I once measured the air
52
temperature in the building to be 130° F (50° C). Ferric metal, the cheapest option for
construction, in that awesomely corrosive environment tended to soften with rust and then
break apart, so that all the mercury from a cell would regularly crash down to the open floor
below, where it would form shining pools maybe 30 feet (10 m) in diameter and a couple of
centimeters (an inch) deep. Part of my job as a day laborer that second summer of college
was to use an ordinary water hose, whenever one of those breaks happened, to wash these
toxic pools into channels cut into the floor, where wooden boxes were supposed to separate
the mercury from the washing water, which then ran off into a neighboring creek. Anyone
who knows chemistry can imagine the amount of mercury that sublimated into the air with
a place that hot, and then into the workers, including me, where it was absorbed into our
bones, to keep on poisoning us slowly throughout our lives. At the end of many work days,
my 10-Karat gold high school ring would have amalgamated to a silvery hue from mercury
collected from the air onto its surface. One of mercury’s earliest uses has been to separate
gold from ores, because of that selective absorption, a process which continues even today in
places where laws are lax.
The regular employees in that plant has their urine tested weekly, and they would be
furloughed when the amount of mercury in it rose above a certain level. This was done
not out of charity, but because that threshold amount correlated with getting too crazy
to function properly, even at the low level that they were expected to. Mercury, after all,
is what made the mad hatter(s) so noticeably mad, back when it was used as sizing for felt
and hatters did their work by hand, absorbing it through their fingers and lungs. I have to
shake my head when I see all the worry now over the amount of the pure element in things
like thermometers. Of course I, like so many others, have big mercury amalgam fillings in
my teeth, too, from the same period of “What, me worry?” about chemical toxicities. For
counterpoint, the contemporary extreme paranoia about a spilled few drops of mercury, or
even the presence of a contained ounce, should put workers’ regular exposure to literally tons
of it into perspective.
That Solvay plant was “losing” 160 pounds of mercury a day overall, which pissed me
off at the time, not because it was an environmental or a health threat (since neither factor
was known in sufficient detail at the time), but simply because the stuff cost $500 for an 80
pound “flask”. That which meant that the company were wasting the equivalent of my whole
summer salary every four days, just through their careless dispersals. With that, and the
other stupidities I saw, it amazed me how the chemical industry ever made any money.
There were, nevertheless, minor compensations. Carrying one of those full flasks of
liquid metal, whose containers were steel cylinders just about the size of a 2 liter bottle
of soda, yet weighing a total of 90 pounds (40 kg), along the huge electrical input bars
that ran open alongside the walkway, could be quite entertaining. The mercury would
slosh weirdly inside, while the iron canister would be drawn intensely, but irregularly as
one moved, towards the open air conductor bars with their tremendous electrical current
flows. I weighed all of 125 pounds at the time, so balance became not a trivial issue when
refilling a cell. The effect certainly added to my appreciation of the practical usefulness of
basic physics. One could easily suspend very large hammers in mid air over the anodes, too,
and we did that for entertainment sometimes. Although the amperage was huge, and the
environment damp, the open busses weren’t instantly deadly, because the voltage was so low.
One could actually touch them; they just felt warm and strange. Doing so, though, wasn’t
good for watches (and probably not for nerves or other body cells, either).
The Minimata stories about the catastrophic poisoning of children in Japan by an
industrial plant very similar to the one I worked in started coming out a few years later. W.
53
Eugene Smith’s memorable photographs caught some public attention (especially after his
own brutal beating by company thugs), eventually leading to that part of the Solvay plant
becoming one of the original Superfund sites. No compensation, as far as I know, has ever
been even proposed for any of us who worked there, or in the similar plants, some of which
continue operating outside of the United States. My time at the Solvay Process Company
was only the first of the experiences that have led me to be so doubtful of government or
industry protestations about how safe things are, and so critical of them. I won’t bore readers
with my own symptoms, which differ from those who encountered it as children, but I am
very regularly reminded of this poison in my body, as are those who are around me when the
too commonly intense anger or the thankfully occasional emotional meltdowns it enhances
surface most obviously.
The automatic flipping up of the company-issued gas mask in response to the smell of
chlorine during those summers retains a residual response, too. Learning to do it was a very
immediate matter of life and death, at too many times quite literally. Almost all pesticides
and herbicides are based on adding chlorine to hydrocarbons. Through the inherently
incomplete nature of organic chemical reactions, measurable quantities are left unreacted
in their mixtures, while the completed portions break down over time to free more chlorine
gas. I still react instinctively to very small quantities of chlorine, and for intentionally toxic
compounds that resulting internal warning remains correct. All the closely associated
poisons being used on silly places like lawns, or in massive quantities on our food crops,
may not be as immediately deadly as the undiluted gas, but cumulatively they are very
surely anything but harmless to humans, while even more harmful to other species, and
cumulatively at least as harmful to our planet as a functional system. It takes weeks for any
pesticide or herbicide application to become invisible to my nose, while stores that sell those
common poisons are intolerable places to me—as they should become to all humans.
For my father, a closely related, and very serious, booby prize from industrial ignorance
would be revealed in 1969 in the form of testicular cancer, a disease rare in men over 30.
In retrospect, this was hardly a surprise, given that the longest focus of his employment
was X-ray crystallography, using that radiation-driven tool with protections that were
then thought sufficient, but far less thorough than what is now required. Once again, the
powers that be, and their operational scientists, thought that they had learned enough about
the dangers, but they clearly had not. Ironically, besides the obvious surgery, part of his
treatment was to receive even more intense radiation. Although that helped tame the cancer,
its inadequately focussed exposure severely damaged his pancreas, condemning him to a
form of diabetes, requiring insulin injections several times daily, and contributing further to
his fairly early death. I asked him once if he wished to sue the company, and he said, no, that
they had given him a good life, and provided the care necessary to keep him from dying (for
a few years).
Along with my own experience with mercury, his condition compromised my rosy
childhood view of science and medicine as all knowing, or as ever likely to be near that.
Humans make errors, not least in understanding complex situations, where consequences
may be hidden, especially by time. It remains difficult for me to find humor in these
instances. Cheery proclamations by genetic and nuclear engineers, along with economists,
all predictably fall afoul of my realistically proven doubts, but unfortunately the public
continues to be hoodwinked by the rich corporate lawyers, including the ones in Congress,
who hide such truths.
On the other side, rethinking about working for Solvay Process has made me appreciate
that it wasn’t the other student workers who were memorable, it was the guys we called the
54
“winter help” (since the company called us summer help), the ones who ran the factory year
round. These made up a fascinating bunch of characters, doing classic blue-collar work for
union wages that were anything but munificent, in about as dangerous a set of conditions as
one would (preferably not) like to imagine. Most were far more intelligent than the clichés
would have them be. One of the most basic laborers had been a major player in the building
of the St. Lawrence Seaway, but his business had gone seriously bankrupt for a variety of
very human reasons, so he had said to hell with that kind of responsibility.
He was just one among many whose stories were fascinating, so I shut up and listened
to them. Another had been a semi-pro hockey player after his stint in the Army during the
second World War. His Solvay assignment was refurbishing valves on the chlorine railway
tank cars, which was required after each of their trips. Running a most efficient operation,
which allowed some time for relaxation in that work group’s isolated shed, his favorite
story was about providing a disguised company "efficiency expert" with coffee upon a visit,
thus permanently losing one position on their team. Harmon turned out later to be a close
relative of my eventual wife, so another bit of fun came from knowing her family from a
different angle.
During my second college summer, this time as a day laborer, we students did some work
that the union folks quite rightfully refused to perform. Cleaning the chlorine "cooling
towers" became the championship experience during that time. Very hot gas from the
generating cells was cooled and cleaned with concentrated sulfuric acid as it passed through
two-story tall, roughly four foot diameter metal tubes. These were filled with perforated
ceramic disks, each about three inches in diameter and an inch thick, whose detailed
appearance I remember all too well. Through their years in operation, these disks had gotten
covered and plugged with sticky black gook, making the gas no longer flow easily, and
reducing their cleaning efficiency. Plant engineers got the bright idea for us to dig out the old
disks and replace them.
This meant that, clad in complete rubber suits—the tower walls being covered with
sticky acid goo, too—while wearing gas mask and goggles, we had to climb down a ladder
and then, with a short handled shovel, break the gummed up disks apart and dump them
into a bucket tied to a rope, which would be pulled up by the guys outside. I measured the
temperature once as 130º F inside the column. My goggles would fill up to eye level with
sweat in roughly thirty seconds, requiring me to quickly lift them to let it out. The longest
any of us managed to stay inside a tower was three minutes. At lunch, the regulars would
keep a notable distance away from us, between the smell of our sweat and the coating on
our clothes of foully-chlorinated, spectacularly impure goo that managed to get past our
outer defenses. Only now has it occurred to me that some of my medically noticed lung
scarring may have originated with this task, since the masks we wore were intended only for
emergency escape, not extended use, and they surely were not designed to deal with some of
the more complex compounds we were dealing with, either.
Some of the other tasks from this summer job were actually quite satisfying, however,
particularly the rhythmical two person swinging of the heavy filter frames when working
with one of the regulars to change the ‘Solka Floc’ used in one stage of the peroxide
distillation process. The same stuff provided part of the change away from the wimp that
had been me, since by the end of the summer I could pull and jerk a 55 gallon cardboard
drum of the stuff, which weighed more than I did, from the ground into overhead bins.
Nevertheless, despite all the positive fascinations, I was more than glad for the summers
to be over, and to return to being a college student. Adding to my wonder at how people
55
would be willing to do that kind of work for a lifetime was curiosity about how the company
could make any money with all the colossally expensive mistakes I saw being made by
workers. The most awesome blunder during my summers was the dumping of fully 10,000
gallons of the costly, ready to ship, electrolytic-grade caustic into the neighboring lake by
opening a wrong valve one night. Other significant ones were made by management, not
least by their refusal to put in a decent control system for the mercury, thereby losing $1,000
worth of that liquid metal each week. That immediate cost (in dollars worth much more
then) did not include dealing with larger eventual human and ecosystem impacts from the
180 pounds being dispersed weekly, when now a hazardous materials squad will be called
out if an ounce is spilled anywhere. Above that were the many hundreds of cubic feet of
Freon, a gas eventually to be discovered as ozone destroying, that were released before
the bosses believed me that joints in a new chlorine compressor had been put together
wrongly, without proper seals. Chlorine leaks regularly got large enough to shut down a
nearby restaurant, with local scuttlebutt being that the owner made enough from the legal
settlements for that lost time to balance otherwise hopeless books. The list went on from
there.
A
s a junior back on the education front, medicine as a serious goal evaporated just as
completely, when I took embryology, suddenly amidst a group of intensely serious
types. The instructor believed that no matter how good a group might be, their grades must
fall neatly onto a traditional curve. To separate the lot sufficiently for his tastes, first came
questions about the lectures, then about assigned reading, the optional reading, and finally
research results that could only be discovered by students working independently. The
subject itself was, and remains, interesting stuff, but there must be a balance of inputs to my
life. Getting outdoors, viewing or creating art, and listening to music were all too important
to set aside, so I did not manage to elicit an A from that particular competition.
While still a freshman, the same fellow on my dorm floor who had the Volvo 544 was
also a serious folk music aficionado, with an Ampex tape recorder in the days when such
things were for pros only. I’d heard Pete Seeger perform live the year before as a great
first-hand introduction to serious folk, during a time when he was still being picketed as a
“Communist”. I had begun listening then to recordings of Bob Dylan and a few others who
had some visibility beyond the already familiar Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Doug Raden turned me on to a host of then more obscure performers that I still love, from
a more-or-less local, yet widely unknown Judy Collins to Ian and Sylvia, with hints of so
many more, not least among them Dave van Ronk. These introductions came both from
playing the tapes Doug made at the campus radio station, and from snippets overheard
through the group of acoustic pickers who hung out and played in his room. Doug flunked
out at the end of the year, and disappeared from my life, until I recently tracked him down
through the Internet, made contact, and was told fascinating tales of trying education again,
through junior college and the University of Missouri, and of his going on for a life amidst
the higher technical levels of the audio and film industries.
One fall 1965 evening sucked me in even more to the folk genre, when all eight who
had turned up sat in a circle, at his invitation, on the floor of a huge ballroom while Phil
Ochs went ahead and played us a full-length acoustic concert. Three years later, I saw him
again, performing his quiet favorites and louder anti-war mantras in Boulder, but this time
complete with CBS cameras and their lights overlooking a packed auditorium, with 3,000
plus enthusiasts attending the live concert, being broadcast to a nationwide following.
CSU then had a superb arts program, among so much more, projecting in 35 mm
complete sets of Bergman and Fellini films in the creation sequence. Regularly appearing
56
were travelling groups like the Living Theater and The Committee, along with films from
independent artists. In permanent residence were two of the finest poster artists in the
world. By just passing through the center of the campus, I got to spend parts of afternoons
wandering with Helen Reddy at her time of peak popularity for “I Am Woman”, and talking
at length with Tom Rush when his hit covers of Joni Mitchell compositions were just ready
for release. This happened by noticing these singers in the halls of the student union, when
others did not, and by thereupon applying sufficient friendly chutzpah. The organizer for
those concerts, the various outstanding art displayed around the campus buildings, and the
film series later went on to run all programming for the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C.
All this exposure to the various arts, and their increasingly anti-war content, blended
with introductions to serious philosophy and non-mainstream history through varied classes.
One especially provocative course was called Literature of Social Protest, which began with
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, continued with classics by John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair,
and for me culminated with Sinclair Lewis’ sadly under-appreciated It Can’t Happen Here,
an effective outline of the potential for a rise of internal American despotism. These readings
dovetailed with a series of oriental history courses from the eventual dean of the College of
Liberal Arts, Loren Crabtree, who became a friend as well as a professor. This background
most especially at the time led me into deeply reading works by Ghandhi and other pacifist
philosophers.
Meanwhile, the college poetry program allowed small evening gatherings with luminaries
such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Norman Mailer. The program leader, Nick
Crome, willingly offered his beautifully hand-built house well up Rist Canyon as a party
center for these visitors and their local peers, with a few of us students as happy hangers on.
Nick had been impressed enough with my work to offer me a modest scholarship, which
encouraged publishing a few pieces in the campus literary weekly, and to try for more
from time to time. I didn’t pursue the offered connections as far as I probably should have,
especially the class led by Galway Kinnell while he was in residence one quarter, although he
did intriguingly, and with a targeted smile, inscribe his What a Kingdom It Was for me: “in
the night, to live”.
Very few have had a better autographed book collection than Crome, but one morning
the campus newspaper led with a photograph that has always helped me keep my own
materialism in check. In it, Nick was picking through the ashes of his treasures, from a fire
starting in his poet’s self-wrought wiring job, and then spreading too fast for control in his
home’s too distant location. The tale later reached me that soon thereafter he wound up
joining a Zen monastery in Hokkaido.
Philip Whalen wrote, in a poem that was written for Alan Ginsberg:
“So you’re a poet, hey?
Well if you’re a poet
Tell me a poem.
Come on, tell me one.
Are you a published poet?
Do you know Nick Crome?”
It was all a great privilege.
F
or all the varied failures, and aside from other controversies, our generation did
manage some very notable creativity, and we played a leading role in eventually
57
stopping one major war, even if we sadly failed afterwards to root out its cause, which was an
excessively large professional army. As long as such armies are allowed to exist, they generally
find an outlet wherein to use their tools, a contention playing out once again through
destructive involvement in conflicts in far away Iraq and Afghanistan, as of this writing. I
did manage to make a somewhat visible contribution at times during the slow and painful
rolling back of the hubristic morass in Vietnam, by helping to organize, and marching in the
front row of, the largest protest held between Chicago and San Francisco, and then assisting
in nailing 95 reasons why ROTC no longer deserved to be on campus onto the door of their
building.
Some of the best publicity from our ongoing guerrilla theater came from the 1969
ROTC commissioning ceremony, which was held in the old football stadium. The field was
surrounded by wooden bleachers, so several of us dressed up in Army garb, to noisily march
up and down behind the reviewing stand where the military brass had arrayed themselves.
As we did, several of the ladies in our activist group, who had done themselves up in
imaginative avenging angel outfits, swooped in and around us, making loud airplane noises,
as we had done. They closed in and plastered us with baggies they had filled with ketchup,
whereupon we flopped about and eventually played dead, while they carried out appropriate
looking ceremonies, singing dirges behind us.
As well as being the unnamed center of focus by the crowd in the image above, these got
me into several better pictures on the front and other pages of the Denver Post. Their sum
led to the pleasure of meeting Joan Baez and David Harris on a close up basis, finding that
temporary couple to be not just superb leaders, but gracious individuals. Not unexpectedly,
David, as a voluble draft card burner, appears to have had difficulty in recovering from the
brutal pressure of particularly corrupt portions of the Federal government, after it focused
on breaking him within that especially perverse human environment, prison, just as they did
with Timothy Leary. Jail is a bad enough experience for most, but becomes still worse when
58
one is a concentrated target for administrative viciousness from the highest levels.
The experiences of soldiers in Southeast Asia were often far worse, of course, for so many
were exposed to the combat, other carnage, or the very real threats even from the jungles
themselves, but our protests were not free from fear. Before the biggest march, the local
newspaper did run our full page ad, but their employees printed it on pink paper, with clear
intent to rile a theoretically conservative community. We had no idea how the local cops
might behave, it being the the spring of 1968, but after I quite literally had to push a baby
carriage out of the way of a semi-truck whose driver was attempting to disrupt our progress
in the most physical way, along with several other bits of vicious behavior from the sidelines,
we could see the police coming around to begin actively defending us. Other protestors have
not fared so well.
At Colorado State came another very personally observed introduction to encountering a
higher level of government gone out of control. Some associates had been rather idly tossing
around plans to follow other anti-war publicity gaining efforts by occupying a campus
building. An agent provocateur soon joined into their discussion, with myself observing it
all from within the group. In retrospect, he should have been obviously too old, too welldressed, and too expensively coiffured to be believed. At the time, he spoke persuasively, very
actively urging the group into taking physical action. Having read Tolkien’s classics by then,
this fellow did appear fair enough, but felt somehow foul to me, enough to make my little
internal voice keep me uneasy about my own level of participation.
Several of the others did want to go along with his suggestions, while I, beyond
expressing my unwillingness to either damage property or risk arrest restrained arguing
against them from as yet too subtle suspicions. My compromise was limited to carrying
supplies into the Agriculture Building during the chosen night beforehand, for the 12
who were going to stay on inside. The next morning something on the order of 300 cops
appeared, quite obviously well prepared from all over the state. That suspicious character
was clearly revealed, from where I was standing outside, as being both from the FBI and
the coordinator of the uniformed response. The 12 setup students were given serious felony
raps with maximized sentences, basically destroying the lives of the ones I knew best, even
though precious little damage had been done by them to anyone else. They would not have
acted as they did without the stimulus provided by the twisted government’s setup man.
In the campus newspaper’s weekly literary supplement, I published the following poem
as an open letter at about that time. It ran without attribution, seeming like so much else
to leave me effectively invisible, but rereading it now, additional meaning for the invective
probably makes that just as well, even if I was recognizing links of war to pollution from
unleashed oil and justifiably angry at what was happening so closely around me. Thankfully,
our rebellion remained peaceful, as did my part within it.
In the fall of 1968, it felt like to me that if we could just express some core thoughts
a little more creatively a really different society might be possible, with active protesting
leading the way. After all, we in the midst of what seemed so clearly to be a particularly
foolish war, one that would take us very personally into its maw if it were not stopped very
soon. Music in the air was supporting a contention that dramatic change was possible, that
our generation was somehow very different than what had come before. Hope was great,
even pared by despair, as if often was. Now, these words more clearly cannot be understood
as anything but threatening by too many, since the hoped for change has not followed, and
even I can see that is not likely to ever do so. Peace and deep understanding are not lasting
parts of the shared human condition.
59
M
ore tangently, and much more happily, thoughts while writing elsewhere of
Christmas travel brought back to mind my freshman college year, where, on an
outbound flight from Denver, my randomly airline-assigned seat companion turned out
to be another CSU student from Syracuse, who was a very large, very obviously Jewish
fellow. As we were approaching our intermediate stop in Chicago, the intercom news got
more and more distressing, winding up with our plane having a weather-driven diversion
to Detroit. Approaching final landing, we were informed that there were at least 12 aircraft
ahead of us, all landing in a facility equipped to handle just four, and none were going there
intentionally. As the litany continued, the stewardess passing along the distressing report
wound up with, “Happy holidays, and thank you for flying United”, at which everyone, very
much including her, broke up laughing. Flying was a gentler procedure back then.
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Inside the small terminal was a huge line, but my companion said, “Follow me”, and cut
to the head of it, talking directly to the counterperson, whom he conned into placing us on
an outbound flight to Syracuse immediately, despite the glares of the more than 400 folks
standing somewhat more patiently behind. A rude move, but one for which I was thoroughly
grateful. We got to our home airport before we had been scheduled to.
At the end of that school year, I wound up riding back to Syracuse with him in his big
turquoise Pontiac convertible, towing a motorcycle on a trailer behind. We were amused
and appalled by the still-frozen-in-the-middle french fries served by a greasy spoon in
Atlantic, Iowa, which retains the title for my worst road food experience ever. We got deeply
sunburned passing through all the corn, which grew nearer to the road then than now. There
followed some amusement on the Ohio Turnpike, whose concrete sections were so poorly
laid that we had to slow to 50 mph to keep the motorbike from bouncing off its unsprung
supports.
The parallel? Life observed closely, and with just enough caution.
Sex, and some of its connections
O
kay, I’ve covered at least to some extent drugs, and rock and roll, but what about
sex? It was certainly not far from the center of what mind I had. My as-yetunobtainable ideal female has already been mentioned, but sex seen logically gets more
than a bit silly, beyond its physical messiness. So much time and effort is spent for a rather
brief, and often disappointing, interaction, fraught with possibilities for disease and other
dangers. Nevertheless, I have been among those spending an often inordinate amount of
time questing for it, and even more time thinking about it. One female friend suggested that
most people would find tracking one life’s adventures with it “boring”, but I suspect that
others might instead find the parallels and diversions to retain some fascination for them,
whatever the more serious value, or lack thereof, my stories hold, even without images.
Back in high school, I had assumed like most males, that women needed to be pursued,
and that they would resist that pursuit if physical contact was the price. Literature generally
confirmed that assumption, and I certainly was rejected often enough. I suspect that
understanding what I now do, most women want sex as much as men, albeit when often
being a different story. Retroactively applied, this knowledge might have made for a better
time all around, though it probably would have gotten me in even more trouble. As it was,
there were surely opportunities that I quite overlooked. That situation did not change rapidly
in college, though pointers were offered and some understanding began to shine through.
One of the early examples was CSU’s head cheerleader, who was willing to sit and chat with
a freshman marching band member during practices, although not to date him, and who
emphasized the need for me to relax, then let things develop slowly with women.
I had always pursued the more outstanding examples of beauty, and not just because of
Playboy, although its progenitors in photography and painting quite certainly did contribute
to that focus, beyond those of Y-chromosome genetics. That selectivity didn’t make it
easier for a self-presumed ugly duckling, though it did lead to my father, who was usually
not intrusive, once asking me why I thought beauty so important, and then making the
unexpected, wry observation that “all cats look grey in the dark”.
However, I did manage to grab a seat on my first freshman day next to an especially
promising option in my large-scale "Western Civ" section, who came to dominate a vital
fraction of my thinking during much of my first two college years. Susie Carr was the
daughter of a broken marriage, with a father in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, but based with
61
her mother in Jamaica, a modest section of Queens in New York City. Hanging out with
her taught me some of that relaxation, albeit in unexpected forms, for she enjoyed sitting,
walking, and watching from places and in attitudes that were anything but ordinary. She
told me that she would marry the first man who described a cloud as some kind of animal,
after I had blown it with a scientific commentary when asked what I saw. Many marriages
surely come from a worse start than she envisioned.
She did teach me to kiss much more gently than my literature-driven intensity propelled
me to try before, which found counterpoint in coming across her, late in that year,
thoroughly draped around another man, and clearly not kissing with restraint. That led
to a second episode of too much alcohol, and more profitably, to writing a decent short
story, one earning a special commendation from a rather jaded English instructor. During
the industrial-night-watchman summer that followed, I wrote her weekly, in not-so-shortmanuscript-length letters, which she later said had earned me quite a circle of admirers, since
she circulated them among friends. I visited her twice in New York City, once riding around
asking cab drivers stopped alongside if they had “innie or outie” navels, but we spent the
nights apart, with me in high school friend Paul Henning’s father’s Brooklyn brownstone, or
in cheap hotels.
She did not return to CSU in the fall, for reasons never made clear, but we continued to
write, although with me slowly losing hope and turning to others. At one point, too late, a
visiting friend ran across one of her letters, and asked me, “Don’t you realize that this girl is
in love with you?” Yet the central words were never said directly, so that I only saw her one
more time, with her giving me the most passionate embrace of my life, then asking me to
turn around while she walked away, to vanish down one of the exit tunnels at the American
Museum of Natural History.
However, I did, among all the rest of explorations, manage a few other dates my
freshman year, among them once to a "woodsie", which was a mixed group heading into
the trees with a keg for libation and lubrication. We travelled to it with 14 others in another
dorm resident’s 1949 Packard hearse. Colleen was quite proud of having won the “student
body award” in high school. Her brassiere appeared to be the most complex piece of
clothing I’ve ever seen, offering what may have been a better defensive tool than the body
armor contemporary soldiers wear in Iraq. I only was able to glimpse its outside through
sheer blouses, however, and not allowed to even attempt to disassemble it, so that argument
remains within a theoretical sphere.
T
hrough my theater activity, I was gently exposed to still racier alternatives, beginning
with Terry Zito taking me to his parent’s home in Denver for freshman year spring
break, which became a base while we did backstage work for his high school’s production
of Cinderella. Along the way, he introduced me to a variety of his friends, not least a pair
of apartment-sharing male bartenders who had dyed their hair green for St. Paddy’s day.
Although I had figured out that the rather flaming Charlie Frost, who built sets for our CSU
acting group, had a clearly different orientation, it was a quite a while before I put together
the pieces about the gayness of much of what I had seen with Terry. If passes were made,
they were sufficiently genteel that I didn’t even recognize them.
My upbringing had left me utterly unprepared for the practical existence of
homosexuality, but I had encountered it already, through a most unpleasant pickup attempt
during a Greyhound bus rest stop on my way to Missouri one high school summer. A
similarly negative incident followed at one of the less than first-rate New York hotels. Later
on, however, having quite a number of good lesbian friends in grad school did ease future
62
interactions, so while I consider gay relationships as adding unnecessary additional layers
of complexity to already difficult situations, and have no interest in physical participation
with other males, I have enjoyed good friendships with gays over the years, eventually feeling
honored by encounters where I was found worthy to be flirted with. That level of interaction
has helped, too, with more deeply understanding how women feel, in both pluses and
minuses about traditionally active male roles. It has particularly highlighted the differences
that crudeness of approaches by seekers within any relationships can make.
Back nearer the norm, at the end of the first college interval summer in Syracuse,
heterosexual things got very hot and close, giving me more useful clues that were not to
be interpreted correctly for a while yet. My high school friendships had not extended to
“parties”, but this time I was invited to one by one of my graduated classmates, winding up
having fun making strange noises on a guitar shared with an enticing very much female
cousin of his, Ronnie. When the party was ending, she left with me in my dad’s VW, for a
bar she suggested since I was unfamiliar with such local establishments. Then, after a beer,
we sought out a deserted road by Onondaga Lake, which I did know about. Eschewing what
had been amusingly called "birth control bucket seats" by a quite religious cousin of my
own, instead crawling onto the little car’s fold down back seat, I was thoroughly enjoying
caressing her breasts when she responded to the cramped space by saying first, “Why are we
doing this—”, scaring me, but then adding, “Here. My parents aren’t home tonight.”
Accordingly we repaired to her bedroom. I had long carried a condom in my wallet for
just such an opportunity, but when we reached the moment of need, we could not find that
wallet among our scattered clothing. Having tasted her wanting wetness, with immediate
desire adding to paranoia, while having some doubts about safety anyway, due to the
accumulated wear on the missing item, I came on her belly. We found the wallet shortly
afterwards, but she said it was getting too late, and I had better skedaddle to avoid negative
reports to her parents from the neighbors. The lasting clue was how much she clearly wanted
the sex, psychologically and physiologically. Unfortunately, by choosing the bar that she
knew, someone there had recognized her and told her fiancé, who put the kibosh on my
seeing her again.
Upon returning to CSU for my sophomore year, instead of continuing to live in a dorm,
I joined three other guys in renting a two-bedroom apartment. This base with greater
independence allowed my sexual interactions to continue towards full achievement. I cannot
remember the girl I was with, or just how far we got, but can readily conjure a picture of
my immediate roommate’s surprise and annoyance when he found that I’d locked the
bedroom door while playing fairly seriously on my narrow bed. It may have been the same
girl recollected as being glad about not intensively pursuing further. She had kissed in a
frightening fashion, opening her mouth as far as it would go after making contact. I’d then
backed off, as that aggressiveness made more obvious a general lack of cleanliness. She was
soon revealed by another friend to have been as willing in all ways as anyone might like, but
she left him a dangerous gift of syphilis, for which he was being annoyingly treated, though
as a student of history, quite grateful that a cure had become available.
That second fall quarter at CSU involved sufficiently advanced courses to make it quite
apparent that I had to start paying more attention to studying, but it also did provide an
especially memorable college-sponsored trip. Their football program had been abysmal for
too many years, but in that fall of 1966, a second-string quarterback unexpectedly allowed
the team to catch fire. As the players started winning, our marching band was allowed to
travel with them to provide more cheering support. At the Air Force Academy, we watched
Wolfe hide the ball behind his back as he rambled for a 60+-yard gain, among other effective
63
stunts. We could see what he was doing, but the other teams could not. The corker for us
became an overnight venture to Logan. At that time, Utah State University was considered a
national power, having players like the now-legendary pro tackle Merlin Olsen.
For that adventure, when the buses arrived in the freshening snow on CSU’s oval for us
on a November Friday, we were told that the "Snow Chi Minh Trail", Interstate 80 across
Wyoming, was closed by incoming weather, so we would have to go via Loveland Pass, an
irony given its more than 12,000-foot altitude, and the Eisenhower Tunnel still incomplete.
Where this tied to sex was the much greater travel time involved. It meant that my prettyenough sax-player seatmate, after our bus made an all too exciting run up the slippery road
over the pass, fell asleep on my shoulder, and I followed her into dreamland during the long
ride across western Colorado. I had finally slept with a woman, in very close contact, albeit
not in the sense commonly intended for that phrase!
Waking from that brief cohabitation in space and dreams provided a moment that has
lastingly remained among the funniest in my life. Being raised RLDS included hundreds of
hours of horror stories about how Brigham Young had perverted Joseph Smith Jr.’s religion,
becoming essentially the Antichrist. At the time, I was still pretty much a believer. When
I opened my eyes just before dawn, our bus was stopped directly in front of the brilliantly
illuminated Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, which I had never seen in person, let alone
close up, but which I knew well from images. Emerging from sleep, with that intricately
carved stonework and glittering golden statue of Moroni dominating the view, my thoughts
ran, (1) I am dead, and (2) what I had believed was wrong. Hell must be the next stop.
As more active consciousness returned, more realistic laughter followed, along with a
pleasant resurgence of awareness of contact with my seatmate’s body. Our team did win that
football game that afternoon, so the athletic department, appreciating the band’s support,
treated us to a steak dinner at Little America, a rare treat for students on budgets as small as
mine, while the buses paused in the thick fog covering our return. My earlier companion,
sadly, had a more distant seat.
T
hings did get rapidly more interesting with the new year, after I had returned from
my Christmas visit home. My new digs were a two-bedroom apartment in "Party
Manor", shared with just one guy, H. Russell May. That acquaintanceship was probably less
useful for him than for me by the end of the next five months. As I told his mother after she
accused me of responsibility for his flunking out of school, “Mrs. May, in the second quarter
that we shared the place, I got a 4.0”, albeit without mentioning my lifetime low 1.2 grade
point for the first, or the mono that allowed me to drop the quantitative analysis class that I
was failing in the second. We surely did have a good time (most of the time) along the way,
but I do wish I could have been a more helpful friend. The difference between us may have
been my inherited pinch-pennyness, since I figured that classes cost $3 each, had been paid
for in advance, and, like treating a movie that cost the same amount, I wasn’t about to miss
any, while more generous, free wheeling Russ routinely blew them off.
Among his temptations, Russ had a near-new Comet convertible, used mercilessly, with
him willing, on several occasions, to drive the 190 miles to newly opened Vail so that I could
ski (with lift tickets of all of $7). He would simply hang out in the lodge, ogling the girls.
The car’s top was always down, rain, shine, or snow. Once we found that if the speed was
kept at typical freeway levels, even a heavy thunderstorm would not dampen use directly,
though the rear footwells and seat filled with water, until we had to slow down.
We experimented mildly creatively in other bachelor ways, many ironic in retrospect,
like running both the apartment’s air-conditioner and the heater to see which was more
64
powerful, since unlimited utilities were already included in the rent. We explored what the
water inside a dishwasher looked like by running it with its door open, finding not very
surprisingly that much if it comes out at high speed. We tested a hypothesis we’d heard that
putting a raisin on an electric stove burner turned to full high would cause the raisin to swell
to the size of the original grape, and then explode in an impressive puff of flame. It did,
while leaving a permanent mark upon the burner and a mystery for future tenants, for that
demonstration was repeated many times, for ourselves and to entertain friends.
The worst experiment, though, at least for the stove, was the day we decided to bake
a cake. I had said I’d fairly routinely helped my mother do that, so we got a box of cake
mix and whipped it together according to its instructions. “Hey, Russ, it all fits into one
pan. Why wash two?” The oven had a window in its door, so we merely watched it develop
stalactites (instead of removing it), as the mix irresistibly expanded over the single pan’s
edge. Months later, after considerable ongoing curing from being left undisturbed while
other stuff had baked, those now thoroughly blackened columns proved impossible to fully
remove.
The exterior of our building suffered, too, probably still bearing a chipped brick from
our trials of whether an Elvis record was, as its label had proclaimed, indestructible. Putting
it under the rear wheel of the Comet and popping the clutch was indeed more deadly to
the building than to the record, whose vinyl shape finally gave in to the dry cycle of the
dishwasher, melting into what became a large ashtray after it had draped itself over the dishholding tines.
In between such nonsense, there were a whole lot more girls, with me slowly touching
them more intimately. First in memory comes Yvonne, a sinuous beauty with whom I
danced, in our underwear, to Russ’s fine stereo system. She wore a delightfully transparent
bra, though we went no further, respecting the fine lines of her interpretation of
Catholicism.
In tight rotation on that record player, whether either of us was alone or in company,
were the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the Rolling Stones’ 12x4, with the original “Spider and the
Fly” (which was subtly and amusingly reprised so very much later on Stripped), and the
Velvet Underground and Nico, with its peelable banana cover. With acid then came The Seeds,
which one needs to be thoroughly stoned to appreciate.
Along the way, there followed a classmate already engaged and pregnant, but who
definitely enjoyed pushing limits with me just as far as they could go without genital
penetration. I seem to remember her mouth being quite interestingly employed, among other
active talents. Before dropping out of school, she turned me over to her roommate, another
Deborah, who had professed to believe in free love. With her I had one of the craziest days
ever, skiing in the then utilized area within Rocky Mountain Park, grossing out old friend
Dave Colley, whom we’d conned into taking us up in his drag-racing-championship Dodge
convertible, with her stories. Dave, who was then a supermarket clerk, had turned me on to
the Grateful Dead with their very first commercially released album (on eight track tape),
but he was a gently conservative soul at heart, and she was well beyond his tastes. Back in
the apartment, by the wee hours I was to third base, but she, in her panties alone, abruptly
stood up, said, “You’re not him”, dressed, and left, with the stinging accusation, “You are
mediocre”. I’ve not heard of her, or her distant Navy pilot lover, since. However, the timing
and some other details seem just right enough that this distant competitor might well have
been recent presidential candidate John McCain.
Not too long afterwards, though, my own divide was passed. Plain Joyce came visiting
65
with another girl I had been after, but the target of my original desire spent the night on our
couch, while her friend slipped into my bed. The concluding step was honestly somewhat of
a disappointment, even repeated the full five times like a braggart friend had claimed was
the proper goal for such an evening’s entertainment. Two weeks later came the plaintive
phone call, “I’m late”, followed by considerable worry and ribbing about shotgun weddings.
Eventually nature favored us, as late is all she was.
The mononucleosis episode soon ensued, with sleeping 18 hours a day while attending
some classes leaving little time for feminine adventure. That was followed by discovering
LSD, with its involvements being more internal.
The exception fit Warren Zevon’s classic line, “I went home with the waitress, like I
always do.” Dawna fittingly enough worked at Luby’s (a cafeteria chain primarily located in
Texas), although I had met her when she was literally under another guy on a couch after
I’d entered a friend’s house. Somehow we wound up together, with me fascinated by her
shy unwillingness to be seen naked, even after we had consummated the relationship, for
she had nothing to be ashamed of. Dawna remains the only woman I dated who was taller
than I. While her height itself did not bother me, her hands, which were considerably larger
than mine, for some reason did. Though there were some good times, she was rather scarily
unbalanced inside, which served as the most active impetus to do more careful research
when I got home from college for the summer. That, in turn, led directly to the woman who
never afterwards was too far away from my quieter thoughts, and, much later, became my
lasting wife.
F
inding the right woman for the long term during that following summer didn’t deter
me from further searching when I returned to CSUfor my junior year, though. With
a car of my own at last, I had taken a small basement room in a carved up old mansion,
with a hotplate to cook on and no refrigerator. That helped concentration on my studies, at
least for a while, but before too long I got to move into a more scenic room upstairs. One
night it was shared with an art student, enjoying her breasts and her mind, almost certainly
in that order, but no more. Her best friend was a svelte, team-letter athlete, with whom I
did spend some time skiing, and who, most surprisingly, showed up featured in a full-page
picture in the Tuli Kupferberg (of the Fugs) classic, One Thousand and One Ways to Beat the
Draft, which was a concept of immense importance to males of my vintage at the time. That
particular connection still boggles my mind, for she had not participated in our Vietnam
War protests, as far as I knew, and she was definitely the kind of woman that I tend to
notice, while her all-American appearance hardly fit with the grungy New York City protest/
arts scene. One never knows where even brief connections will lead.
The more immediately classic character among that diverse impromptu household was
Morgan, who turned out to be a just-returned Marine lance corporal from the front lines
in Vietnam. He hung out most often with some heavy motorcycle types, and at first I only
knew him as a fairly small, quiet, but interesting guy to talk with about odd perceptions. The
military part first came out when we were idly chatting with him sitting on the only chair
in my room, away from the door, at the far side of the bed on which I was perched. One of
the big goons yelled for him, cursing at me for some reason, and then started pounding on
the door, which broke under the strain. I half noticed that Morgan had disappeared from his
seat, but he reappeared, surprising all of us. He sprang out of a crouch, swinging a hidden
fist that laid the goon out cold. Morgan then said that surviving the jungle had taught him
to get down and move quickly while low, with traditional Marines teaching him to make
such knuckle work instinctive.
66
On the distaff side, from the lot who flowed into and out of that house, one related
afternoon featured a lass who quite quickly removed her lower accouterments with me, but
would not let me see her top. In those few moments, it is likely that she became the one who
left me with the lifelong, all-too-regularly recurring trial of genital herpes.
On the other hand, that nasty acquisition instead may have followed my move shortly
afterwards to the locally infamous 714 Remington, a converted frat house with individually
rented rooms, the only place I know of that had its street address changed to try to erase
its reputation in later years. My immediate neighbor turned out to be a narc, albeit one
who freely indulged in some of the products he was to bust several others for. Along the
way, I got really tired of Cream’s "Brave Ulysses", heard through the thin walls at 3 AM,
although I did enjoy repetitions of Fever Tree’s "San Francisco Girls". I will give him credit;
his arresting cohorts did differentiate between the few guys who were dealing to high school
kids and/or using needles for their choices, from the simple herbal smokers and occasional
acidheads like me.
At 714, Jeanne Kantor became my most serious involvement in that chapter of my life. It
began with sitting down next to her one March evening in an open aisle seat in the campus
theater, while she was holding another guy’s hand on the far side, just before a master class
being held by the marvelous character actor Roscoe Lee Browne began. By the time he
walked down the aisle toward us, well into his presentation, I was holding her other hand,
a combination which Browne noticed. The closely focused double-take look he gave us—
without letting the other fellow see it—remains absolutely priceless.
Somehow, Jeanne and I managed to communicate where my room was, and that she
would join me there after she dumped the guy she had been with. I really didn’t expect it,
but a knock on the door came shortly after 1 AM. The next morning, she noticed blood on
the sheet and said, “Oh fudge”. I thought that was a pretty interesting way to respond to
losing one’s virginity, but she soon disabused me. It was revealed as just a bit of menstrual
leftover. She congratulated me for being her seventh lover, thereby having made her officially
promiscuous according to Colorado law, of which she was quite clearly proud. Definitely not
my mother’s kind of woman.
Soon enough, these Hollywood-ish plot lines expanded further, on the day after we
saw The Graduate together. As we walked along the tree-lined campus center on a bright
afternoon, her barely-34-year-old mother, whom I had not met before, drove up in a new,
white MG, top down. Although that correlation went nowhere further, it did provide a quite
fascinating train of thoughts, and for more than a few moments.
Jeannie was quite into theoretical witchcraft, which led to another unexplainable
moment when I turned off an annoyingly noisy electric clock by pointing my finger at it,
finding that the gesture coinciding with the device’s plug pulling out of the wall socket.
Pretty strange coincidence, if that. Less esoterically, she led me to taking her back to
Syracuse at the end of the school year, with all her goods and her cat (which we had named
Marat, after the Collins song about the French revolutionary) jammed for a long, hot trip
into fearless Snoopy the Volvo. Within a month after our arrival, my high school best friend
wound up with her, and my father got the cat, while I went back to Kathy, for another yet
temporary while.
That all came about because Jeannie and I had found an inexpensive apartment for her
near Syracuse University. Things had been getting more than a little uneasy between us by
the time we went to visit Paul Henning (not the one who became the Beverly Hillbillies
producer, but one who just shared his name). Almost immediately, seeing those two together,
67
I thought, “What am I doing here?” There was some scattershot interaction between Jeannie
and I during the fadeout, but they shortly thereafter wound up going to Hawaii, where Paul
ran a photography business and they officially married. Jeannie had regularly expressed a
desire to be a Playmate, while Paul had long wanted to work for that magazine, so I was not
surprised, a few years later, to see an image in Playboy that looked an awful lot like her, with
its styling very much like Paul’s work. Ironically for both, whether or not my assumption
was correct, there were no credits given for either the woman or the image maker. About 15
years later, I heard that Paul, living alone in Chicago, had committed suicide. If still alive,
Jeannie has left no readily findable trace. While tragedy sometimes flows in my wake, it was
not intentional.
M
y senior year was yet foggier at times. The month of November became one of my
first serious experiments with getting closer to the mountains, and yet maintaining
unsophisticated simplicity at the same time. I rented a very small trailer well up in Rist
Canyon, where my water source originated by breaking ice in the neighboring stream. Even
with two electric space heaters running full blast, any water left in the inside sink would
be quite frozen in the morning. It was pretty enough up there, especially the stars during
one last acid trip, but living there was not sustainable without a lot more effort than I had
available, mentally or physically. More generally, it also taught, most memorably, how
expensive and at the same time how ineffective trying to heat spaces with electricity was.
The practical limits of the little trailer lead to my finding a house for rent alongside the
main road north to Laramie, Wyoming, across from the dam containing Terry Lake, and
next to the Bottle Shop liquor store that had long defined one of the city limits of Fort
Collins. That city was still officially dry, with "3.2" beer being the exception.
I do clearly remember Terry Zito bringing a circus of actors through that house one
night, and my dancing with great sexual intensity with one of the crew. Not being able to
work out a trade for my evening’s date with the
guy she came in left us unable carry through
the so clearly mutually desired connection. It
remains a most stimulating memory, fitting well
with some of the erotic pre-Columbian pottery
I was being exposed to, from a course taught
by a female historian whose collection extended
that far, and who shared its images with selected
students.
One connection that I did thoroughly
complete, though, was with ranchers’ daughter
Elaine, whom I had met one day while walking
across the campus. Her orgasms were the first
I could readily feel, even through a condom.
Five years later we were still in touch, when
she gave me another incredible evening. One
irreplaceable part came by just sitting and
drinking right at fiddler Peter Knight’s feet
during a Steeleye Span concert, during that
band’s absolute peak, at the erstwhile sports
bar Ebbett’s Field in Denver, though later that
evening was quite nice, too. Bodies and music
were our closest forms of communication,
68
however, which became clear as her mother told stories that finished that relationship off.
Those followed our own realization about how we had seen a variety of events, but our
separate versions of them did not even come close to matching. We had inserted pictures for
each other’s personalities that just did not resemble their relative truth, though we had done
so without malice, and with enough overlap to allow our relationship to grow for a good
long while. Nevertheless, it found a clear dead end, however much pleasure had come at
moments in the interim.
At the end of my senior
school year, the college
newspaper closed with this
poem,
69

4 Trying College - High Level Research

Transcription

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