 
### Bare Naked Wayne

By Wayne Schmidt

Copyright 2013 & 2018 -- Wayne Schmidt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

My ebook is free. Thank you for downloading it. I hope you enjoy it. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This ebook may be reproduced or copied, in full or in part, and distributed for non-commercial purposes only, provided its contents are not altered, authorship is included, and free availability is noted.

WayneASchmidt@aol.com

WayneASchmidt.blogspot.com

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Growing Up with Jesus  
\-----Dr. Dino  
\-----Born on the Fourth of July  
\-----We Eat on Picnic Tables  
\-----The Great Commission  
\-----Victorious Christian Youth  
\-----Schmidt for God  
\-----Sisters in a Nutshell  
\-----My Father's Son

Chapter 2: Roots  
\-----Dad Talked to God  
\-----Mom Married a Guy Who Talked to God  
\-----Happily Ever After  
\-----What War?

Chapter 3: First Love  
\-----Light My Fire  
\-----Summer of Love  
\-----Hippies, Not Communists

Chapter 4: Looking for Wayne  
\-----Goodbye, Vietnam  
\-----Bad Shit  
\-----Living Life My Way  
\-----Summer Days -- 1969  
\-----God Sends Maggots  
\-----California Dreamin'  
\-----My Wheel of Karma Turns  
\-----Epiphany

Chapter 5: Looking for Love

Chapter 6: Looking for Work  
\-----Small World  
\-----Dead Ends  
\-----Thank God for LSD

Chapter 7: Tilting at Windmills  
\-----Tom Washington Shit in My Hat  
\-----The Fij  
\-----Ring-around-the-Collar  
\-----Politicians, Pony Tails, and Liberace Soap  
\-----Purple Paws  
\-----I Burn Miss Utah at the Stake  
\-----Drains  
\-----Freeways and Hanging Ropes  
\-----Saving the Great Lakes  
\-----I Wore Abbie Hoffman's Coat  
\-----Not the Last Rat Off  
\-----Speaking in Tongues

Chapter 8: Just Open a Vein  
\-----Fake Fred, Secret Salaries, and Rat-tailed Maggots  
\-----The Nature of Michigan  
\-----My Writing Life

Chapter 9: Season of the Witch  
\-----Warning Signs  
\-----Compared to Fucking What?  
\-----Fuck Me  
\-----What the Fuck?!  
\-----Why the Fuck Not?  
\-----"I Am Not a Cunt"  
\-----What Was That?

Postscript

### PREFACE

Here is the life of Wayne -- sometime environmentalist and one-time land developer, Jesus freak and atheist, hippie-mailman draft dodger and newspaper reporter, recluse and family guy.

I like to write stories, and these are the best ones I know. All are true, insofar as it's possible to tell the bare naked truth about yourself.

This ebook tells of my miserable, preacher's-kid youth and my search for purpose in life, which turned me into a prominent environmental rabble-rouser in the Great Lakes region in the 1970s and 1980s.

I've chronicled colorful characters I met along the way, such as Michigan's conservation behemoth and my boss for a decade, Tom Washington, and my friend and provocateur extraordinaire, Abbie Hoffman. I describe the karmic price I paid for bad behavior; my retributive tab included being for way too long the sixth husband of a white witch.

My stories are frank, sometimes raw or vulgar, and occasionally embarrassing (e.g., "Fortunately, my horrid taste in clothing took some of the focus off my hideous head."). I cut out only a couple of good stories that I could have told. One was in deference to my parents' memory; another had to do with my uncertainty about the legal statute of limitations in Michigan. You can understand.

I wrote this memoir for myself, first, but I also wrote for my family and friends, letting them in on my perspective of events that may have affected their own lives. Even if you are a total stranger, however, I expect you will find something here to entertain you. Consider, for example, that Uncle Sam once officially diagnosed me as a "non-aggressive sociopathic sex deviant (with a hernia)."

Writing a memoir is a self-indulgent undertaking. After all, everyone has stories; some are interesting, some not. In picking which of mine to tell, I followed the late author Elmore Leonard's rule: "I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

These stories come from the first half of my life; for my next book, I'm working on stories from the second half \-- some painful, some lovely, and filled with surprises, successes and failures, and more characters.

"What mystery lies within." That was the caption on my high school senior yearbook picture. Not a question but a conclusion. All my life I've saved letters, journals, pictures, and memories; always in the back of my mind was the expectation of this moment late in life when I would use them to try to unravel that mystery.

I know that others may remember some of the events here differently. If you don't like the way I've told my stories, then write your own.

\--April 1, 2013 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

Senior Yearbook - 1964  
Bendle High School - Flint, Michigan

► _Return to Table of Contents_

A NOTE ON THIS 2018 UPDATE

Since my memoir was published five years ago, Smashwords increased the maximum file size permitted for ebooks. Therefore, I've been able to add larger pictures in this update. I've also made a few minor edits here and there.

_Bare Naked Wayne_ has been downloaded more than 1,700 times. With this new edition, I hope readers will be even more entertained.

\--January, 2018 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

### CHAPTER 1:  
GROWING UP WITH JESUS

Yes, Jesus loves me!  
Yes, Jesus loves me!  
Yes, Jesus loves me!  
The Bible tells me so.

I've got no excuse for going to Hell. Eternity in Heaven, singing with the angels, streets paved with gold -- it was put right in front of my nose from the time I was a baby. At 30 months old, in the children's Christmas program, I recited for my preacher-father's congregation:

I know I'm just a little man  
But I would do my part;  
I offer praise to Christ this day  
And that with all my heart.  
I tried. I really did.

I saved my pennies in my little brown acorn bank, once a year to be smashed to smithereens with a hammer in front of the church congregation in a "jug-breaking program," us kiddies parading one-by-one to the dais in our Sunday best. Dressed-up children and flying porcelain chips dedicated to saving heathens' souls. That's what the pennies were for -- the missionaries.

Mark 16:15 was taken seriously in our church: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel." My father's denomination was called the Missionary Church Association. Its members collected donations (including from the kiddy acorn banks) to send missionaries -- usually young couples fervid with proselytizing zeal -- to places like Haiti, the Philippines, India, China, and South America. West Africa was big -- Sierra Leone, Belgian Congo, and French Equatorial Africa (as some of these European "possessions" then were called).

Should I one day become a missionary for Jesus and go save native infidels from certain Hell? In bed late at night, I wrestled with that morbid burden, picturing a future that was as realistic as Superman in my comic books. Was God calling me? Tell me, Jesus. How can I know the truth? Look, up in the sky...

On their back-home furloughs, the missionaries would visit our church, hungry for funds for His work in deepest, darkest wherever, and regale parishioners with tales of satanic cultures and miracles of conversions due to their Jesus-directed work. They might don native garb.

Missionaries visit my parents' church (ca. 1940s)

One such visit to my father's Indiana bible college in the 1940s (memorialized in his yearbook) highlighted their desperate, competitive race to save lost souls:

Rev. George Constance, who has spent one term in Colombia, gave the challenge of carrying the gospel to the great unevangelized area of the Amazon, which must be reached before its people become sealed in the ritual of Romanism [Catholicism].

Despite my child-guilt over the natives' eternal damnation, I just couldn't see myself in that Amazon Jungle picture. Real doubt germinated when I was eight years old. We were sitting on little folding chairs in Sunday School class in the church basement and learning how the world had been created in seven days. "What about the dinosaurs?" I asked. I don't remember the teacher's answer, but I do remember hearing the first, faint alarms of my bullshit detector:

That doesn't sound right, I thought, but didn't argue.

Some would consider me lucky to have been raised under the correct religious brand -- evangelical Christianity. All others, of course -- Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Buddhists, maybe even Episcopalians, probably Catholics and Mormons -- are doomed to burn in Hell for all eternity in a lake of sulfurous fire. Whereas me, I got a break. I was born into a family that had the key to eternal life. Talk about luck!

### Dr. Dino

Dr. Dino says the universe was created 6,000 years ago. He's a Bible guy. I watched him the other night on the local access channel. I think he's from Tennessee.

Dr. Dino has it all figured out. What about his namesake, the dinosaurs, you might wonder? Well, obviously, Noah took only baby dinosaurs on the ark. Dr. Dino seemed to have an answer for everything (DVDs available). He was exhausting.

I checked out Dr. Dino's creation research on his website. It reminded me of the time I visited the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico ("The Truth Is Here").

Lots and lots of words. Throw in bits of obscure science. Or pseudo-science, it really doesn't matter because who's going to argue and if someone does there's nothing better to a Creationist than talking and arguing. Dr. Dino has this sly smile, one that tells the believers that they are in on the secret truth and that it's the rest of the world that's nuts.

The Mormons -- that's my wife's side of the family -- they put Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Missouri, 6,000 years ago. They know that is true because the Angel Moroni in the 1820s told their prophet, Joseph Smith, where to find these golden plates buried in upstate New York. Smith translated the plates' secrets from a mysterious Egyptian language and wrote it all down in the Book of Mormon. It reveals the otherwise-unknown history in America of pre-Columbian civilizations of Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites. Plus, Jesus' one-time visit to America after he was resurrected following his crucifixion and trip back to Heaven. Sadly, however, once Smith translated the golden plates, Moroni re-hid them.

I suspect that Dr. Dino thinks this is kooky stuff. Except for the 6,000 years ago part, of course, which he knows is true. When you are sure that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and every syllable is literally true, it really limits your options.

The best that my fundamentalist father ever came up with to explain the mysteries of cosmology was a construct that went something like this: "The first two sentences in the Bible say, 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form and void...' Now, since God could never create anything that wasn't perfect, 'without form and void' tells you that there is a mysterious gap between these first two sentences. This was probably the time when Lucifer was kicked out of Heaven, and this could have been a long, ugly period of the earth's history (way before Adam and Eve) that God chose to not tell us about. If He would have wanted us to know that stuff, He would have included it in the Bible, but He didn't so we don't need to ask questions about it."

Faith makes it possible to believe all kinds of craziness. No doubts allowed.

But nutty as it is, a 6,000-year-old universe can be easier to picture than reality. I struggled through a book, Before the Big Bang, where the author (Brian Clegg) concluded:

Personally, I find myself in a real quandary. I very much like Turok and Steinhardt's bouncing brane theory; it has a feeling of elegance that the much-patched and fudged Big Bang plus inflation theory doesn't. Yet bouncing branes are dependent on the M theory with the baggage and worries about the validity of string theory that it brings with it. It seems whichever way you turn, there is no easy answer when it comes to the earliest moments of the universe.

Unless you go with Doctor Dino's easy answers.

There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches and all the deserts on Earth. Many have planets. Astronomers at NASA estimate that in just our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are more than 100 billion planets. Here's a way to picture that number of planets: shrink them all to the size of tennis balls and line them up; the string of tennis balls would reach from here to the Sun. How many of those planets have ever supported life at some point in the 14 billion-year life of our universe? One planet (i.e., Earth) in 100 billion? One planet in a thousand? Something in between? Whatever the true number, that only takes into account life on planets in our own Milky Way, which is but one of more than 100 billion galaxies in our universe. And that's just what exists in those dimensions of space and time that humans kind of understand.

So now, knowing even this little bit about the size, age, and complexity of the universe, I'm still supposed to believe that there is this silver-haired God-guy somewhere up there, who not only created it all, but keeps His eye on the sparrow and so I know He cares for me?

But wait, there's more! Invisible demons and angels, like Moroni, are all around us. Miracles happen -- the Virgin Mary's apparition in a burrito. And, if we buy the whole Christian package, we get a personal, dedicated, celestial help line connected straight to the Big Guy.

Dear God: Thank you for this food. Help our team win. Send rain. Stop the rain. Take away my sickness. Give me a raise. Don't let the Democrat win. Send me someone to love. Feed the hungry babies. Stop the war. Please don't let me die and I'll do whatever you say. Et cetera.

### Born on the Fourth of July

Notwithstanding what came before the Big Bang, I came along 13.82 billion years afterwards on July 4th, 1946, at 8:29 in the morning, in Room 34 of Emanuel Hospital on Canal Drive in Turlock, California. Seven pounds, 10 ounces; 21½ inches long. I had a "very fair" complexion and "light brown hair on back of head," according to my mother's notes in her blue Our Little Baby album, which includes blond curls from my first haircut at 18 months, preserved in a little cellophane envelope neatly taped on a yellowing page.

I was delivered by Dr. Sidney Olson and assisted by Nurse Strand, who wrote on adhesive tape with her ink pen, "Baby Boy Schmidt," and wrapped it around my wee wrist. The bill for my mother's ten hospital-day stay totaled $93.87, including my circumcision ($2.50).

My mother, Kay, was 24 years old. My father, Arnold, was 28. They had married three years earlier in Michigan, during the middle of World War II, and moved west. He had just been ordained a preacher and landed his first job as pastor of the Missionary Church in the little farm town of Denair, in California's San Joaquin Valley, south of Sacramento.

The newspaper from nearby Turlock reported:

DENAIR—Mrs. Arnold Schmidt was the honor guest at a pink and blue shower given Friday evening in the basement of the Missionary Church. Members of the Hebrews 12:21 Sunday school class were hostesses. After several games, which were led by Mrs. D.W. Herr, Miss Doris Elsner of San Jose gave two viola solos, accompanied by Miss Mary Nolt on the piano.

The gifts were presented in a play pen which was the gift of a group of friends. After the gifts had been unwrapped and admired refreshments in pink and blue were served on individual trays to 48 guests.

I can't claim much of a California heritage, since we moved east when I was just two months old. Notwithstanding Denair's hospitality, after my parents' third summer, my mother couldn't take it anymore. Her hay fever was terrible in that sea of farming dust and pollen from the flowering trees and crops. And, though mostly happy in her marriage, my mother was unspeakably lonely. Never had she been so far from home and family, and certainly never in a place as desolate and foreign as the San Joaquin Valley in the 1940s.

So they packed up, and we headed to the Midwest Bible Belt to minister to another little farm town church, this one in Pandora in northwestern Ohio. My parents were young and full of idealism and energy, but it can't have been easy moving cross-country in 1946 to an unknown town. Yet, they would do again and again throughout their lives. You do what you have to do.

Pandora, where I spent my first five years, was a step up for them (salary: $35 per week), with a nice parsonage, and only 150 miles from my mother's family in Detroit.

I was weaned from nursing at five months and from the bottle at 13 months. My mother recorded that she "started to break Wayne for B.M.'s at 9 months. Started to train him for bladder at 15 months." I've not done a survey, but this seems early for toilet training. I'm hoping that my short time in diapers at the front end of my life predicts a short time in diapers at the back end, as well.

On my first birthday, my mother made a four-layer cake with a big red candle in the center. My baby book records:

Around one year jiggles to music over radio and climbs stairs. Comes down at 14 months. Stands on head and looks thru legs to play peek 13-14 months. Blows kiss 14 months. One year \-- smells things when we tell him to kiss or smell them. 15 months \-- understands most things we say to him. Really gets into things. Likes the bookcase and wastebasket best. Blows nose, kisses us, loves us, pats mama on cheek when I ask where she is, blows on my neck after I blow on his. First words: Daddy, pretty, Pudgie [pet dog], bye-bye.

Outdoors, I was kept in check with a harness and long cord, sometimes looped on the backyard clothesline. I wonder if I ever hopelessly wrapped my leash around the poles like dogs do.

Although my mother never mentioned it, when I was just two years old, she tried to have another child but had a miscarriage. While she visited her folks in Detroit afterwards, my father took care of me at home, professing to her a hard time in explaining to me what was wrong with my mother.

After that year's holidays (1948), she recorded:

Christmas was really fun. Wayne was so excited about everything. He squealed with delight at each gift. Granny & Doctor [grandparents] gave him a nice red tricycle which he was thrilled about. He got so many toys he hardly knew what to play with. Bike, tinker toys, little football, large blocks, aluminum tractor with attachments, Pluto dog which you press on his tail to make him go, several windup toys, rubber airplane, cowboy outfit, records, duck lamp, little truck, some clothes.

I remember virtually nothing from those early years, with one terrifying exception. Just before my third birthday, my father decided to take me on a tractor ride during a summer visit to his parents in Kansas. It scared me to death. I cried uncontrollably even while sensing there was no good reason for it. My father laughed, and my mother took snapshots.

Like most preschoolers, I was happy most of the time, I suppose. What else does a kid that young know? Looking back, however, my childhood doesn't feel happy. I was terribly insecure and had few friends. A prominent mole on my right cheek made me feel like a sissy, until one day I scratched it off and it grew back lighter. Being the preacher's kid set me apart. I was expected to behave better than everyone else, set an example, and all that. It also meant that we always were short-timers in town.

The Pandora church fired my dad shortly after my fifth birthday. The vote to keep him was 33 to 18, one shy of the two-thirds endorsement he needed. (It can't have been a complete surprise; a year earlier, the vote had been nearly as close.) My mother called it "one of the hardest days of the year for a preacher's family."

There my dad was, out of a paycheck, no preaching job in sight, and a growing family to support (my new sister, Karen, was just two years old). They must have pondered how mysterious are the ways of the Lord.

It was their first of many forced moves. Years later, my dad told me that after five years at a church, he usually lost favor. As he explained it, every time he made some decision about managing the church, especially if a church building program was underway (as in Pandora), from the color of the carpet to the length of his sermons, someone took exception and after about five years of that, all the little slights added up to a bloc that wanted to get rid of him. Later, I would learn that his five-year-tenure insight seemed to apply to most leaders, not just preachers.

I think my mother suffered most from their churches' rejections. Thirty years later, my dad fired from yet another church, she penned her private thoughts:

Hurt is the main ingredient. How can some people be so unkind and caustic in their criticisms? If folks really feel certain ways about the pastor that is one thing -- but it becomes a real tool of the devil when these people peddle and infect others. This is the thing that bothers the most...

The pastor [Arnold] has given of himself instinctively and unreservedly. I as the wife have spent many lonely evenings as he has worked at the church till late. Also, there have been more weeks than not when he has worked a full seven days, many of these 16 hour days.

OK, so he doesn't follow everyone's prescribed routine. He doesn't stop preaching on the dot at 12:00 or call on Uncle Louie like some think he should have. Have they ever considered all the positive attributes he has brought to your church? I refuse to elaborate on this point as it would take too long.

What's wrong with that church? Don't they know how hard Arnold has worked for their church and the parsonage? And they are supposed to be Christian people...

In September, 1951, we moved from Pandora to nearby Ottawa, a grimy little Ohio town where my father took a job at the Weather-Seal factory building window frames. The heavy lifting gave him a hernia, and he had to have surgery, so was out of work for a time. We rented half of a house where we lived with its bats. The house was next to a school with a paved playground. I spent a lot of time alone on the monkey bars.

I got a Hopalong Cassidy outfit for Christmas. It's an icon: me standing at the curb in front of the house, all decked out in black denim, black hat, fringed gloves, a pair of six-guns, and silver spurs. Scowling.

It couldn't have been a happy year for us. I don't know what my mother did with her days, whether she was working or staying home with me and my sister. I do know that we were poor. I'm sure my parents felt that God had answered their prayers when in late-1952 the Missionary Church in Woodburn, Indiana, a short way to the west near Ft. Wayne, offered my dad a job and deliverance from their dark time. At only $40 per week, he would have to take a second job driving a school bus to make ends meet, but at least he would be doing what he was supposed to be doing -- preaching and saving souls for Jesus.

Woodburn is where my childhood memories take better form. The patterns of my life, however, already had been molded. They were defined by the Christian culture of my family, by the insecurity of my father's work and our need to move often, and probably by my toilet training. I was blessed, however, that the world my parents created for me included love and honesty. It also was overlaid with a well-intended, but suffocating blanket of religion.

### We Eat on Picnic Tables

I went out of my way to drive through my boyhood town of Woodburn on a lovely fall day in 1989. I was prepared, at 43 years old, to like the charming Midwest village of my memories, but it was smaller than I remembered, run-down and depressing.

Dad's well-tended church was sad and haggard, abandoned for a new one built on the edge of town. The front steps, where my sisters and I had posed for sparkling Easter snapshots from my mother's Brownie camera, were covered with rotting, garish green carpet. The once-lovely slate roof was wrinkled with something cheap and black. Dirty blue paint hung from the doors. The adjacent two-story parsonage where we had lived was long-since demolished.

Gone was the church's belfry of my boyhood. Before services each Sunday morning, I would be sent next door to pull the bell's long, fat rope, clang-clang, a set number of times. I pictured people all over town hearing the sound, going about their getting-ready-for-church affairs. Then I would go home and get dressed up for the weekly routine: Sunday School, morning service, Sunday dinner, evening youth group, evening service.

Rarely did I enjoy myself, though occasionally, the music could be good. I can sing along, even today, to most of the evangelical standards and love traditional gospel music, thanks to my childhood exposure to gospel quartets during annual revival meetings.

Mostly, church was a sentence to thousands of hours of boredom. During one typically interminable Sunday morning church service, I was sitting with a little friend, and while my father droned on from the pulpit, we entertained ourselves by penciling words into titles in the hymnal. Hilarious things like, "Just as I Am Really Fat." We gave ourselves the giggles. That was it for my mother. She marched across the back of the sanctuary, grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the wooden pew, and frog-marched me home, which was literally ten feet from the church.

She lectured me on how embarrassing my behavior was and declared that I had to be punished with a spanking. She took a fly swatter and started whacking my behind. I tried my best to cry, but it turned to laughing, and then my mother laughed, and that was the last time she tried to spank me.

We were still poor, which is probably why we didn't have a TV for a long time, although it may also have had something to do with my father's theology. To watch the Pinky Lee show, I had to visit a friend down the street, whose family had one of those ancient black-and-white jobs. Woodburn's general store got the first color TV around 1955, about the time that Howdy Doody went to color broadcasts. I was surprised, and disappointed, to see that Buffalo Bob's fringed buckskin outfit was baby blue. He looked silly.

On my 1989 visit to Woodburn, my old school's cornerstone still declared: "Grade and High School, A.D. 1913, Maumee Township Dist. No. 5." I wandered over to the next-door park, sitting on an old, but freshly painted green picnic table. Could this be the very same picnic table where I played as a boy, where I had gotten into big trouble in the third grade?

Climbing on the picnic tables during recess had been against the rules. I got caught and my teacher, Miss Klopfenstein, made me write 500 times: "We eat on picnic tables." She told me, "Maybe you will know better than to climb on them again." My mother was outraged with the teacher, but I still had to do it. I numbered and filled in 25 lined, yellow notebook pages, writing each word 20 times down the page: We, We, We... eat, eat, eat... on, on, on..., and so forth to tables., tables., tables. I'm sure Miss Klopfenstein went to her grave never realizing how memorable her punishment was to that eight-year-old kid.

Now an adult, I resisted the urge to do a little jig atop the picnic table. Instead, I tested the ancient teeter-totter. There was a haunting squeak, then a clunk, as I stood away and one end fell back to the ground. A mother with her children eyed me nervously -- a strange sight out here in the otherwise deserted town park on a Monday morning. What must she think of me?

I walked across the empty street and sat in the baseball field's wooden bleachers. For moments, I was a kid again, reliving the horrors of Little League baseball.

I was standing there at second base in my Tigers uniform under the nighttime lights, praying to Jesus, _Please don't let the batter hit it to me, please, Jesus, don't let him hit it to me_.

For once, my usually-church-preoccupied father was watching my game from these very bleachers. I had ached to have him play catch with me, help me get better, the way I imagined other kids did with their dads. Being a father was mostly a concept for him, however, something men just did. Actually having a son was inconvenient, a distraction from his time devoted to God's work. The man was a distant, albeit compassionate presence, working alone in his church study, preparing sermons, ministering to the needy.

Nevertheless, I dreaded embarrassing him, and myself. Hated myself for being so lousy at sports. Moths flared in the lights against the black Indiana night. Here came the pitch. Please, Jesus! An easy grounder bounced right past me into the outfield grass. Maybe Jesus was busy.

Snapping back into the present, I gazed off in the distance where once stood marshy fields and a pond where I had caught my first bullheads and grabbed frogs. It was the place I was happiest in my wretched childhood. Now the pond was gone, having been filled for a second ball field. "Coke is it" brayed from a scoreboard where spring peepers had sung three decades earlier.

That Woodburn mother's children -- are they better off with another ball park than with a muddy pond full of sunfish, carp, and turtles? Is that mowed playing field an improvement over the unkempt glebe of weeds, aspen, and jangling red-winged blackbirds? Where does a kid go now for a bucket brimming with pollywogs?

### The Great Commission

My father's big career break came in 1957 when I was in the sixth grade. He got hired to run the religious Great Commission Schools in Anderson, Indiana (an hour northeast of Indianapolis). The campus consisted of surplus military quonset barracks and a big three-story classroom building, all built on filled swampland and always on the verge of flooding. We lived in a decrepit one-floor apartment with a filthy coal-burning furnace. After spring rains, I collected nightcrawlers from the saturated lawns and filled Mason jars to overflowing, for no particular reason except that I could. The worms always died and stunk something dreadful.

My mother was my school teacher for a class with a handful of children of the faithful. It was an awful year. My only friend was an older boy who lived with his mother in a tiny house trailer on the soggy campus. All I remember about Richard Shannon was that he was a momma's boy with glasses who still sucked his thumb constantly at 12 years of age. I wonder if he ever quit.

I was lonely, lost, and struggling for identity, so decided to get my hair cut in a flat-top, a dubious fashion of the day on even the best of heads. My soft, blond hair, however, wasn't made to stand upright, even with great gobs of gooey, green wax. Fortunately, my horrid taste in clothing took some of the focus off my hideous head.

My father was consumed with making the school and his ministry successful. Immediately after we had arrived, the school's president who had been running things quit unexpectedly. He came back from vacation and just walked out the day before the school year started. He and his wife, a teacher at the school, were supposed to stay another year to help my father in the transition. But "Brother Billheimer" claimed that he was exhausted. I don't doubt it; the place was a run-down rat's nest and a financial mess.

My father had to figure it all out on his own. He was in charge of running the grade school (56 students), high school (22 students), bible institute (18 students, who lived on campus), and an AM radio station, where he produced regular religious programs. He also was starting a church from scratch. He inherited plans to create a Christian television station. He had to figure out how to hire school teachers and a principal, all while meeting state accreditation standards.

His religious faith gave him the self-confidence to take on such impossible challenges, even while getting paid next to nothing. He explained in a "Dear Folks" letter to his parents:

Suddenly, I had become administration head, business manager, and in complete charge of the Schools... I'm sure that I will enjoy and have a great deal of satisfaction if we can see this place streaming with young people who are going to be trained to do a job for the Lord... I do not have a maintenance man now so that falls on my shoulders to get done.

I became so overwhelmed with the new responsibility for a few days that I hardly could get going but the Lord has showed me that if He opens the door that He will give us the help needed to enter it and fulfill His plan for us in this place.

Such career problems seem familiar to me, not unlike times when I took on my own professional challenges, often with no prior experience, just figuring it out as I went along. To the best of my knowledge, however, the Lord didn't give me any help.

Living on our religious island in Anderson, Indiana, I amused myself by riding my red and white Schwinn around town and exploring on foot the remnant swamp behind the campus. I enlarged trails as far as I could into the dense, spongy tangle of cattails, and found a modest happiness in being all alone in nature \-- escaping my social ineptitude, loneliness, and the smothering religion of home.

An ancient, wood-cased, hand-me-down radio was another escape. Some of the radio's dials were supposed to bring in short-wave broadcasts from foreign countries, but nothing except the AM ever worked. I made a list of all the stations I picked up, the farther away from Indiana, the better. Cincinnati and Des Moines were most distant; Chicago's WGN the most exotic.

I got a small telescope for Christmas and spent hours under the night sky learning the constellations from my mother's old college astronomy book. That got me interested in the fledgling space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I took it personally when the Soviet's Sputnik made it first to space. I tried to share my new interest with my father, telling him it was just a matter of time before someone landed on the moon.

"It will never happen," he said, matter-of-factly. "God will never let man do that."

I'm sure he had some scriptural basis for this knowledge, just as he could cite the Bible to explain creation and his certainty that Jesus was about to return due to "wars and rumors of wars," "great earthquakes," etc.

I struggled mightily to understand how my own father could be so ignorant. I read the Bible carefully, making charts in an effort to reconcile the creation story of Genesis with the creation story of science. It was hopeless. The more I tried to find a way to believe, or at least tolerate, what my father believed, the more estranged I felt, and the more argumentative I became.

I don't know how my father coped with the violation of his ecclesiastical worldview when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon barely a decade later. By then, I was long gone from home, and I hope had the good sense to not remind him of his prediction nor rub it in. Thankfully, later in life, we both mellowed. I think he finally accepted that he had done all a person could do to save his only son from Hell. As for me, I grew up and realized that I would never convince him of anything regarding religion, science, or politics and gave up trying.

Even 30 years later, he was still trying to convince me of the Bible's inerrancy, sending me a magazine clipping with a note penned on top: "Wayne, I thought of you when I read this article so I thought I would send it to you to read." There Had to Be a Flood explained "how the Genesis flood and the arguments of modern geology can be reconciled." It was full of the same mumbo-jumbo promoted by Dr. Dino and his ilk.

The Great Commission Schools of Anderson, Indiana, despite my father's unwavering faith and back-breaking efforts, was a loser. A construction worker fell to his death from the 500-foot-tall TV broadcast tower being constructed. Recruitment of new students stalled.

My father explained how he would know when it was time to move on in a 1958 letter to his parents in Kansas:

...I am becoming more wiser and educated as the days go by. I wouldn't trade these experiences for a pastorate. I'm sure that most likely I will be ready to go back full time soon, but I have complete rest of heart that we are in center of the will of God. When the Lord makes me restless, as he did for almost a year at Woodburn, I will know that my time is up and should move on to what the Lord will open up.

Soon after, the Lord apparently made him restless, and he started looking at church openings -- one in Phoenix, Arizona, and another in Flint, Michigan. He got an offer from Flint's First Missionary Church at $75 per week (plus parsonage). Three months after I started seventh grade, away we went to Michigan to start a new life in the big city of "Buick Town." It was our fifth move in twelve years.

### Victorious Christian Youth

Look at me. What chance did I have to fit in to my new rough-and-tumble school in working-class Burton Township?

Edging Flint's south side, it was a poor-but-gritty community, all white, with rows of tiny two-story homes that once must have seemed like palaces to autoworkers raised in the even poorer South. In springtime, the dirt and gravel streets turned to gumbo.

My new teachers treated me differently than the other boys. I was the good kid, the preacher's kid, the one who was not supposed to get in trouble or get paddled.

Teachers all had well-used paddles -- some just boards of scrap wood, but a few lovingly fashioned with routed edges and drilled holes on the business ends to reduce air friction and make their delivered "whacks" more effective.

The offending student (boys only) would be paraded to the front of the classroom, or if the behavior was especially deserving, out to the hallway, and told to "touch your toes." The number of whacks (one to several) and their intensity (mild to tear-inducing) was a function of how pissed off you had made the teacher.

I coasted through seventh grade without once getting paddled, and it had gotten embarrassing. Desperate to fit in as one of the boys, in the eighth grade, I went out of my way to get in trouble. As a measure of my success, I managed to get paddled in at least one class virtually every school day. Unfortunately, it didn't really fix my good-boy reputation or make me any less unhappy or insecure.

The Flint pastorate was the apex of my father's career, though he had no way of knowing it at the time. He created an entire church-based culture for his flock. When he started, his church met in a simple cinder-block building. There was something for everyone -- choir practice, youth meetings, Wednesday night prayer meetings, pot lucks, special revival meetings, camping trips, etc. It never ended. As a result, his congregation outgrew its warehouse-like church.

He inspired and oversaw the building of a new church, with architecture remarkably modern for its conservative membership.

Programs for us teenagers were intense: organized fun every Saturday night -- miniature golf or roller skating; Sunday evening -- special youth Bible classes; a Victorious Christian Youth club in high school; winter sledding parties; summer, week-long camp meetings on Lake Erie. It was their recommended lifestyle alternative to (1) teen parties, (2) dancing, (3) getting drunk, and (4) getting laid.

It worked perfectly on me; I missed out on all four. Eventually, I learned how to get drunk and get laid. But, like flying, I never did learn to dance, except in my dreams. I still dislike parties.

I gave school sports my best macho try, going through baseball, basketball, football, and, finally, settling on wrestling as my athletic specialty. As with my paltry skills in the ball sports, I sucked equally at wrestling. You are out there all by yourself, and when you make a fool out of yourself by getting pinned, it's just you. That happened to me a lot. I starved myself for two wrestling seasons, living days at a time on orange juice slush, in order to make my weight class (138 pounds). On top of having no wrestling skills or self-confidence, I often was so weak from dieting that I didn't have a chance in competitions. At least it got me my varsity letter -- a blue and gold "B" for Bendle High School -- that I coveted. Getting that letter actually did make me feel a little better about myself. But not much.

The time I wasted being unhappy about sucking at sports was matched by the time I wasted being unhappy about sucking at playing the piano.

My mother wanted her children to have some culture. So my parents spent money they couldn't afford on weekly piano lessons I couldn't stand. My father had this fantasy that I would play the piano for church services, be a virtuoso for Jesus like other sons he envied in more-talented families. Eventually, I did play for services, stumbling through the hymns, my playing mostly drowned out by the church's more competent organist. As with sports, I stuck it out with piano lessons year after year because it seemed like the thing to do. The problem, however, was that I had no musical talent. None.

In a last effort to find my hidden prodigy, I switched to a piano teacher who came highly recommended by my mother's best friend, who claimed her son had blossomed under the teacher's tutelage. All I remember about the kid was that his favorite movie was The Sound of Music, which he had seen eight times and cried every time, according to my mother. I realized much later that the creepy old piano teacher that the kid said he loved was a pedophile. The guy never got any farther with me than a lot of touching my hands to place them just right on the keyboard, and smacking them with a wooden rod when I got it wrong. I suspect he got a lot farther with the other kid.

In junior high school, I was shocked to learn that I was smart. For the first time, I had classmates and standards to compare against. In all the intelligence and aptitude tests, I usually was somewhere in the 90th percentile. That defined me with teachers and other students, since everyone seemed to know your scores. I got an award from the National Merit Scholarship for my math results. Good grades came easy; I studied just hard enough to stay in the top ten of my class -- you got to wear special-colored cords with your graduation gown; that was the self-image I insisted that I live up to. Which wasn't all that tough, since there were fewer than 100 in my senior class.

I spent most of my younger years trying out goals that others picked for me. Since I was smart, I was expected to be class president and act in school plays. Since my father was a preacher, I was expected to lead the Victorious Christian Youth meetings on the gym bleachers during lunch once a week. I tried to do all those things and, one-by-one, confirmed my expectation that I stunk at each. As the guy my classmates voted "most likely to succeed," it was baffling that I had no apparent talent except being born bright.

Every parent's nightmare -- their kid starting to drive -- arrived when I turned 16. We had a dark green '54 Ford and my parents were generous about letting me drive it. I tried drag racing away from stoplights on Flint's Dort Highway -- I learned I could squeal the tires by revving up the engine in neutral, then dropping the gearshift into Drive. When the automatic transmission soon died, my only concern was not getting blamed, which I kind of managed, although my father had to know it wasn't mere coincidence that his car blew up right after I started driving it.

Tom Jones signaled the official end of my Jesus-freak days. Not the sexy singer Tom Jones, but the then-presumed-to-be-sexy movie. Theaters were sins forbidden by our church, but toward the end of my high school years, a friend and I sneaked away to a drive-in to see Tom Jones. We hoped for randy but found the movie boring and left early. When I got home my mother confronted me, and I confessed. I told her what I thought about the movie, and she let it go. I think she secretly agreed that the blanket prohibition on going to movies was stupid. (Eventually, my parents found a way to reconcile faith and cinema -- at least the family-friendly kind.)

From that point on, I went through just enough religious motions to survive and get out the door. Once I left for college, I never again attended church by choice. Except one time years later when my girlfriend and I in our leathers rode my Harley to a Billy Graham Crusade in San Francisco's Candlestick Park. I guess that counts.

### Schmidt for God

During the winter of my second year at college, I came home for a break with a freshly sprouted beard -- my first, with no attempt at manicuring. For my father, it was the final straw. Not because it was an ugly beard -- which it was. But, because at that time, a beard was a symbol of youthful rebellion.

He kicked me out of the house with: "Don't come back until you've shaved."

I stayed away quite a while, but eventually shaved. My dad was quite right about what my beard represented, but a clean face didn't change what I believed, which was a weird blend of conservatism and agnosticism. When I had started college, I had joined the Young Republicans. Barry Goldwater was my hero; I had felt hopeless watching election night returns in 1964 as his bid for President crashed.

It was a time for soaking up Ayn Rand's religion of reason at the altar of rational egoism. Reading Nietzsche. Memorizing "Invictus" (Out of the night that covers me,/ Black as the pit from pole to pole,/ I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul. Etc.) Spray painting graffiti -- "Schmidt for God" -- on a campus bridge abutment and sidewalk. It was a time of incredible self-absorption, and my relations with others, unsurprisingly, suffered. None more so than with my father.

I was a jackass for quite a few years (as I relate more fully in chapter four). Here was the moment the paternal conflict, that intellectual competition with my father, peaked for me. When I was about 24 years old, I had ridden my Harley to visit my parents. I roared up their driveway in my black leathers and boots. Affixed to the back of my helmet was one of those bumper stickers you used to see on cars that identify the driver's occupation: CLERGY. To find that sticker, I had to make a point to go to a Christian book store in a shopping mall, that's how cool I thought my idea was.

My father saw the CLERGY sticker and was flabbergasted. "What are you thinking? Do you know how insulting that is?" he asked. It was hard to maintain my Invictus-like steel in the face of his genuine hurt. I was ashamed of myself. At that point, I started working slowly to make it up to him, and over the years, things between us got somewhat better.

Rev. Schmidt & son (sans sticker) - 1970

When I finally got settled in my environmentalist career, he was genuinely proud of me. He always got a kick out of reading about me or seeing me interviewed on TV.

Later, as a newspaper reporter in Lansing (chapter eight), I insisted that the papers use my middle initial ("A." for Arnold, my father's first name) in my byline on stories. I did that with a deliberate intent of honoring him, and I once told him that. Not a big deal, but well-intended. He enjoyed seeing my newspaper stories, especially the ones on the front page.

I think my parents could have stayed forever at their Flint church. The question is whether they should have stayed. The church had loved my parents so much that they gave my father an "indefinite call." Nevertheless, after nine years, he resigned in early-1967. He informed his congregation:

Having been led by the Holy Spirit and a series of circumstances and assured in our inner man of the will of God, we have accepted a unanimous call to pastor the Calvary United Missionary Church, Livonia, Michigan... The verse for my life has directed this decision: "In all thy ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct thy paths."

...You may not understand this decision but trust God and know that being submissive to His will brings greater blessing.

With their move to affluent Livonia (in suburban Detroit), for the first time in their marriage, my parents were financially secure. The church was a big step up from the poor congregation of Burton Township. My father took over just as the congregation of about 150 moved into a new brick, colonial church. My parents bought a brand new house in a brand new subdivision. My mother must have been thrilled to finally have a life as comfortable as she remembered her childhood with her doctor-father and family. She had earned her own "greater blessing" by going to night school at the University of Michigan in Flint to get a Master's degree in teaching, which boosted her fifth-grade teacher's salary.

Their Livonia church, however, never seemed a good fit for my father, even though he lasted there 14 years before they fired him. It always seemed to me like the snooty suburbanites wanted a more sophisticated messenger of God -- one with more polish who wasn't so intense and long-winded on Sunday morning.

After several more moves and churches -- places where my father's old-fashioned religion, including the corny jug-breaking program with the kiddies' little brown acorn banks filled with pennies for the missionaries, was a better fit -- my parents retired to live out their years near the home of my sister, Karen, in Davison, just east of Flint.

### Sisters in a Nutshell

Given the choice among my two sisters and me, my parents definitely picked the right kid to live near. Karen was always the "good one." That's not a put-down; she really was the good one. Always the perfect daughter. Happy. Devoted to them. A genuine Christian all her life. Pretty. Successful, with a nice family. A gem.

Karen married Van, whom she met at Greenville College in Illinois, the same religious school where our parents had met. Like our mother, Karen worked as a school teacher (as did Van).

My parents were blessed to have her. I'm sure they must have -- many times -- said to themselves, "Well, at least we did a good job on one out of three."

The only downside of having a perfect sister was the frequent guilt trips she gave me. Karen was there with our parents to see the times I missed birthdays or other special occasions. Naturally, she would remind me of important upcoming dates and notice the ones I missed. As she should have.

Karen's karmic bank has repaid her goodness with graceful aging and beautiful grandchildren. Karen and Van have visited us in recent years, and we've had wonderful times together.

My younger sister, Sandra, was another story. She came into the world with a screw-you attitude; no one ever understood where it came from, but Sandy was a piece of work from the get-go.

During our years living in Flint, the three of us kids would often be left alone. I must have been the ostensible babysitter. This is what I remember: my little sister, Sandy -- too young to fully understand consequences but old enough to recognize power when she found it -- chasing us around the house with a big carving knife. I locked myself in my bedroom and heard her pounding the blade into my door. That was one scary moment.

Sandra didn't ask for her rebelliousness, any more than Karen asked for her goodness. Nevertheless, it did make for Sandra getting more than her share of family challenges. Despite it all, she survived with a beautiful smile. She and her husband, Sam, retired to a lovely home in central Florida. They are devoted to their dogs and families. I think she is happy a good share of the time.

### My Father's Son

Some 20 years after I had graduated from high school and moved away from my parents, I think they finally had become resigned to my rejection of their religion. I probably should have left well enough alone.

While living in Lansing, I read a newspaper story about a Hare Krishna devotee named Mike Schmidt, who was spreading the good word on the Michigan State University campus. With scissors and a little cut-and-pasting, I changed "Mike" in the article to "Wayne." It then read:

Anyone frequenting the footbridge across the Red Cedar behind the administration building recently would have seen and heard Wayne Schmidt.

Schmidt is a Hare Krishna. He wears a pink cotton skirt, sandals, and a V-neck sweater, but his shaved head and the yellow "tilak" stripe painted on his forehead and nose draw the most comment.

Schmidt said Krishnas believe living a certain lifestyle will foster spiritual rejuvenation. Krishnas are vegetarians and do not use drugs or alcohol. They remain celibate except for reproduction.

"We should use our intelligence for more than animal pleasures like eating and sex," he said. "We must use it to find our spiritual selves." (Lansing State Journal, May 29, 1984)

I mailed a photocopy of my doctored article to my parents, without explanation. My mother told me later that they found it very confusing.

* * *

In retirement, my father offered himself as a free-lance preacher to any church that wanted him to visit -- even if they couldn't pay him. He advertised his ministry specialty as "Prophetic Series on the 1000 Year Reign of Christ." His outline included:

\--When will the Millennium be ushered in here on earth?  
\--The political structure of the reign of Christ.  
\--How peace will cover the whole world.  
\--The physical changes in the geography of the world.  
\--How people will live for 1000 years without dying.  
\--How the world will handle the population explosion...

In 1990, my parents visited me where I then was living in Arizona. I took them to Las Vegas for a day of sightseeing. At one point during the two-hour drive across the barren Mohave Desert, my father seemed lost in thought, viewing the dramatic vistas of desert and mountains. I thought he was enjoying the scenery, but finally, he said, "You know, I've never really understood how God is going to handle the population explosion during the thousand-year reign of Christ. All this empty land -- now I understand how there will be plenty of room."

I think the trip to Arizona was one of the highlights of their lives. I rented them a nice condo with a pool, in the same complex where I lived, for their stay in Lake Havasu City. I gave them the royal tour of our desert land development business, and we went boating on the lake.

I believe my parents' last couple of decades were relatively happy ones. Thanks to my mother's teaching career, frugality, and savings, they were financially comfortable, though never wealthy. They traveled, usually on tour ships -- to Alaska, Europe, and other exotic locales. The pinnacle of their travels must have been their visit to "The Holy Land," a lifelong dream of my father.

Given his travel insecurities -- he never completely lost his complex about being the hick from a Kansas farm \-- I was amazed at the extent of their travels. He dreaded all the mysterious rituals -- tipping, doormen, taxis, and other such esotery. My parents did it, thanks to my mother's initiative and their reliance on "all-included" tour packages. Sometimes they traveled with my mother's brother, my Uncle Paul the dentist, and his wife, Dola. I'm sure that Paul's outgoing personality -- let's just say that he had an abundance of self-confidence -- offset my father's travel insecurities, and that they had good times.

My last get-together with my parents came in 1998, the summer before they both died. They visited my family when we lived in Virginia, driving out from Michigan against our urging that they fly. My father was a stubborn man; he fiercely fought his aging. As a result, he almost got them killed going the wrong way on a freeway off-ramp in Pennsylvania, though no damage was done. We took them to highlights of the Washington, D.C., area, including Mt. Vernon overlooking the Potomac River.

I took them to Sunday church at the National Cathedral. I had no idea what to expect, but figured it would be an experience. Service in the grand edifice was Episcopalian, with formalities reminiscent of the Catholic Church. My parents didn't find it very comfortable, but gamely went along.

They died just four months apart. Not long after that Virginia visit, my father was diagnosed with cancer and hospitalized. It looked bleak; I was distraught at his deterioration. I told Pastor Allen, minister at their Davison church, that if he had any influence upstairs in the matter, it would be better if my father died than continue in that condition.

If that was my prayer, it wasn't answered, and my father rallied a bit. A short time later, back in Virginia, I got the call from my sister. I picked up the phone, prepared for losing my dad.

"It's not what you think," Karen said. "It's Mom."

Just like that, she was gone -- February 19, 1999.

I was sad, of course, but, I confess, there also was some relief. A weight was lifted. When I said my last goodbye coffin-side at my mother's funeral, I whispered silently, I hope you've finally found some peace. Her lifetime of struggling with demons of unhappiness and doubt were over, and no more did I need to feel guilty. About what, I'm not sure. To some extent, I must have felt partly responsible for the lack of peace she found in life. Nutty, huh?

I'm not certain what medical reason was given for her death; probably it was a heart attack. What really killed her, however, was the anxiety of imagining life without her Arnold. They had been a team for 56 years, through good times and bad, complementing each other's lives in imperfect but essential ways.

Karen took the sad task of telling Dad, who was still in poor shape in the hospital. We gathered around his wheelchair. "She's gone. Mom's gone to Heaven," is what I think Karen told him.

The news took a minute to sink in. I don't know what I expected, but his calmness surprised me. We got through all the business of my mother's death, and life went on. My father improved enough to leave the hospital and have a few relatively good weeks living with Karen and Van.

I visited him for the last time that June. I told him it was okay that he couldn't talk, that he need not feel bad about that because I knew what was in his heart. I told him I was proud of the dignity and courage that he had shown through such an ordeal.

"You know what I wish?" I said to him. "I wish we could go for a boat ride together at the cottage, take a cruise around Indian Lake. Wouldn't that be nice? But it doesn't look like that's going to happen."

He smiled at me. He wanted to tell me things, but it was too late. I told him again that it didn't matter because I knew what was in his heart. I knew he loved me. What I didn't say, but knew he was crying inside to tell me, was how much he wanted me to promise him that I would get right with Jesus, and that I would see him again in Heaven.

Instead, I told him I was proud to be his son. I kissed him on the forehead and said, "Bye, for now." Then I left for the airport. Two weeks later, he died. Here's what I said at his funeral:

I am honored to share with you a few words in tribute to my father. The world is an emptier and lonelier place when our parents have left it. Still, it is a natural and inevitable part of life. And with a man of such profound faith, it is the fulfillment of a great promise.

I once lived for many years in Lansing. My favorite place there was the gardens on the Michigan State University campus. No matter what the season, there always are surprises to be found. On one of Michigan's gray, dreary, interminable days of February, I was slogging through those snowy gardens along the Red Cedar River, trying to picture the stirrings of spring beneath the frozen landscape. The world seemed reduced to shades of gray and brown.

Yet there, tucked into a hillside, was a small tree simply covered with tiny yellow flowers in the middle of the winter; they blazed like little neon lights. I marveled at the tree's independent streak, its courage, optimism, and its beauty. I checked the garden name tag of this unusual tree. It was a variety of witch-hazel called "Arnold's Promise."

It seemed so fitting: Arnold's Promise. My father dedicated his life to delivering a promise of renewal in our moments of despair, a promise of springtime in the winters of our lives. My father's lifelong optimism was fueled by his faith. He lived, and died, with great courage and dignity.

I've returned to that tree many times over the passing decades. I collected some of its leaves in summer, which I've always kept with me. I've not been back to those gardens in quite a while since we now live in Northern Virginia. These days, I prowl the gardens on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But guess what? In our very favorite little garden tucked next to one of the Smithsonian buildings, I discovered in my first winter there an Arnold's Promise witch-hazel in full bloom. I had the pleasure of showing that tree to my parents on their last road trip together to see us last fall.

My father wanted to be remembered as a man of courage, like the biblical Daniel, who stood up for his convictions even when it involved sacrifice or unpopularity, who would not compromise his principles. My father was such a man. He was not perfect. He was human. He had his faults. Some people even thought of him as stubborn. (Imagine that!) But he was a man of the Book. He was a man of conviction. He was a man of courage.

I carry my father's name: Wayne Arnold Schmidt. I am proud to be my father's son. Though I will miss him, his promise lingers.

* * *

I grew up with Jesus all around me, but not, as Christians like to put it, with Jesus in my heart. I tried. I really did. It just didn't work for me.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

CHAPTER 2:  
ROOTS

I didn't ask to be born the son of a preacher man -- the "preacher's kid," the "P.K." -- but there you have it. No one gets to pick, and how would you spot good parents ahead of time, anyhow? Given that all families are fucked up in their own ways, I did better than average. I could have been born to a crack-head whore in a ghetto.

Instead, I was born to a nice, white, middle-class woman -- Kathryn, the daughter of a God-fearing Detroit physician who loved his wife, family, dogs, and quail hunting. Kathryn grew up and married Arnold, a Kansas farm boy whom she met at her Christian college in Illinois.

He went on to become an evangelical preacher, moving regularly about the country from church to church. She went on to become a preacher's wife, first, and a fifth-grade teacher, second. Along the way, I showed up. The P.K.

Like every person ever born, I've been defined in large measure by the genetic and cultural history of family. Roots. Some strands we leave behind; others stay with us forever. Our roots are often the source of our best strengths and worst weaknesses. In hopes of understanding my own, I've compiled these stories about what I know of my ancestors, starting with a look at my father's hyper-religious side of my family. He was a P.K., too. As was...

### Dad Talked to God

My father's father, Andrew A. Schmidt, was a full-time farmer and part-time fire-and-brimstone preacher and the severest man I ever knew. Grandpa Andrew and his brethren were but one generation removed from insular Mennonite clans in eastern Europe, still living austere lifestyles akin to the Amish.

We visited my pious grandparents every summer on their farm a few miles outside of the prairie, farming village of Elbing, Kansas. They had a Motorola radio in the living room, a big wooden affair with lots of knobs, the kind you see in old black-and-white photos with people leaning in to hear the latest fireside chat from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As with every other aspect of life on their farm, there were strict rules about using the radio. After attending Sunday church services and finishing the noon dinner, I was fiddling with it and listening to a baseball game. Grandpa came in, heard it, and snapped it off: "We do not listen to such things on the Lord's Day!"

He was particularly offended by beer commercials on any day, a family conviction regarding alcohol which meant that our family never could eat in a restaurant that served booze. One time, when the Devil's brew was discovered on the menu by my parents after we were seated, we all got up and walked out, me staring at the floor in embarrassment.

On our frequent driving trips from our home in Indiana to Kansas, long before the existence of omnipresent fast-food joints, we always bowed our heads for grace before eating our café food, even if it meant the waitress had to wait. Mortified, I imagined her rolling her eyes, pencil tapping impatiently on a lime-green order pad.

The Kansas Schmidt Clan - c. 1922  
Andreas (my great-grandfather) sitting left; Andrew (my grandfather) -- standing tallest center;  
Arnold (my father) -- boy standing front

Grandpa Andrew's father (my great-grandfather), Andreas H. Schmidt, was a 19th century German immigrant and a founding minister of Elbing's First Missionary Church. Though I never met him, I'm certain Andreas was every bit as sober and demanding as my Grandpa Andrew. This preaching tradition by the Schmidt men likely goes back distant generations to ministering in their homelands in eastern Europe -- nearly a century in southern Russia (now Ukraine); more than two centuries in Prussia (now north-central Poland); before that, untold Schmidt generations from Holland; and who knows where before that. My ancestors had the fever for the Lord; many heard God's calling.

I'm the dead-end of that Schmidt branch and I let them down. I never heard the call. I got over the fever. I'll bet all my Schmidt forefathers -- Arnold (1917-1999), Andrew (1884-1960), Andreas (1842-1923), Andreas Heinrich (1818-1888), Heinrich (1784-1856), Jacob Michael (1754-1806), Heinrich Michael (1728-1801), Michael Kasper (1694-1751), Kasper (1664-1718), Peter (1640-1694), and his father, Peter (1624-?) -- would have wanted me to preach the Gospel according to Menno Simons, know no separation between life and religion, and believe that all my dead Christian ancestors are gathered together in Heaven at this very moment. (Except any sinful ones who went to Hell, of course.)

If that's so, are my heavenly fathers sad that I strayed? Are they lobbying God to save me from Hell while there still is time? Or, distracted by Heaven's wonders, have they forgotten all they left behind with no interest in what on Earth happened here after they died?

Lord, is it Be Bop a Lula?  
Or ooh Papa Doo? (Paul Simon - "The Afterlife")

How in Heaven's name did I get like this?

One essential step leading to me was Great-grandfather Andreas and his first wife, Susanna Unruh, who was a baby-making machine (fortunately for me), as was typical for their time. Twelve years before their immigration to America in 1874, they got married in Russia. She was 20 years old; he was 19.

They lived in the little settlement of Michalin, then part of Russia, about 100 miles southwest of Kiev, Ukraine. All their Mennonite communities were of an isolated culture, with their own language, religion, and schools. Marriage to outsiders was forbidden. Unconformity brought shunning by the entire community. On these sere steppes -- similar to the landscape and climate they later would find in Kansas -- the Mennonites learned to grow hard winter wheat and prospered modestly.

Once married, Susanna immediately got pregnant with their first boy. A second son was born 17 months later. Then, their first daughter, 13 months later. Another son, 3 years later. A fourth son, 15 months later. A daughter, 15 months later. Another daughter, 30 months later in 1873.

Then, with their youngest just a year old, my great-grandparents and their six surviving children immigrated to Kansas, among a colony of 302 Mennonites. They were part of a wave of 18,000 Mennonites from southern Russia who relocated to the U.S. and Canadian prairies. The reason for this exodus was the pending loss of their exemption from military service due to a change in Russian law. Pacifism is a basic Mennonite tenet. It was the same reason their entire Mennonite community had moved en masse from Prussia a century earlier. These people took their religious rules seriously.

Kansas for the newly-arrived Mennonites was no Garden of Eden, seeming some years more like the land of Uz -- the home of Job, the man tested by Satan with tortuous trials and tribulations. The Kansas pioneers were tortured with heat, cold, diseases, dust storms, blizzards, droughts, prairie fires, and some years, locusts (a ravenous variety of grasshopper).

Great-grandfather Andreas and his family arrived in Kansas in late-1874 on the heels of a drought and invasion of locusts. From the Dakotas to Texas, billions of insects had materialized, their swarms blocking out the sun. Anything organic was devoured, including crops, wool on the backs of sheep, tree bark, even wooden tool handles. Locomotive wheels spun in place on train tracks greasy in the sea of bugs. A local farmer estimated he had more than two million locusts per acre, based on a sample he counted in his corn field. A traveler recorded:

When I passed through Kansas Territory it was being devastated by a scourge of locusts. In many places they covered the soil with a moving mass, and filled the air like snowflakes on a snowy day. At a roadside station, the train was not able to start till they had been swept from the track. The growing crops were cut off, the trees stripped of their leaves, and the cattle were starving for want of food. (Samuel Manning, American Pictures, 1878.)

My ancestors' first winter in America was the coldest ever recorded in Kansas, with January temperatures dropping to minus 14 degrees. They lived and worshiped with their Mennonite kin in the tiny, raw, new settlement of Peabody. Come spring, the Kansas colonists headed out to plow the virgin prairies and start new lives on land purchased from the Santa Fe Railroad Company for $5-$7 per acre.

A distant relative, H.P. Schmidt, described that life in a family history:

In the spring of 1875 most of the immigrants moved out to settle on the claims they had chosen during the winter. The grass out on the prairie was knee high. Here they started to build their shacks among rattlesnakes and coyotes.

They settled in villages similar to those in the old country. Each village had a common grazing place for the livestock, and for the care of which the settlers hired a herdsman. In this fashion they planned to carry on in this country, and it worked all right for a while. Since there was no barb wire with which to build fences, a herdboy had to be hired to take care of the cattle...

The furniture in our first prairie home was home-made and of rough boards. Kitchen utensils consisted of a cast-iron kettle and a few tin cans; no dishes, no plates. Roasted rye or wheat was used instead of coffee. Rye bread was used exclusively.

Farming started with a yoke of oxen and a breaking plow. Father broke up a patch of ground and we planted some corn in the sod with a hoe. We also planted some watermelon. This was a small beginning. The next year a little more was planted, even a patch of sorghum. In the fall we took this to a press and had our own molasses made, which tasted so very good to everybody. We tried to grow some grain, but since everything had to be done by hand, the acreage was limited.

At harvest time the grain was cut with a scythe on which a kind of frame was fixed so as to lay the grain in a nice swath. This was bound in bundles for stacking. After a few years, reapers came on the market...

Pioneer homes as a rule were small and simply constructed. Some of the immigrants had a little more money than others and of course were able to build larger homes. Many houses were about 36 x 22 feet. The houses usually had two doors, one to the south and one to the north. The main entrance led into a hall and from this hall one could step into the living room -- usually called "the large room." This room was always on the south side. Nearly all these rectangular houses were built with the long way standing east and west. On the north side was "the small room."

Between the small and the large room was the big stove built of stone or brick, about two and one-half feet wide and full six feet long. It almost reached to the ceiling. On each side, about two feet from the floor was a door. Iron rods were fastened across the stove about level with the doors and on these rods iron sheets were placed. The ends were closed so you had a perfect oven inside this monster stove. Its back end being flush with the wall, the stove was fed from the hall and thus kept the whole house warm. Smoke and fire circled around the oven inside, came out through a smaller opening on top and then went into the big chimney which took up a good part of the hall. The chimney was used also to smoke meat and thus substituted for the smokehouse. Fuel for this monster furnace was slough grass and later cornstalks and cobs. Slough grass was used also to build stables and sheds...

Young folks today can hardly believe that things could be as hard as they were then. (Schmidt, J.A. 1948. Schmidt Family Record. Self-published. 35 pp.)

Such hard, primitive, communal living is, indeed, unimaginable to me. But so is that entire Manifest Destiny era. Although the mass slaughter of buffalo was nearly complete by 1875, small herds still roamed the Kansas prairies. America's Indian wars, however, were far from over; Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn was still a year away. The U.S. military's final massacre of Indian families at Wounded Knee, less than 500 miles to the north, was still fifteen years in the future.

The newly-created town of Newton (15 miles southwest of Peabody) would become the spiritual center for America's Mennonites (city's current motto: "Life As It Should Be"). Prior to the Mennonites' arrival, however, this "wickedest city in the West" was known for its lawlessness, cowboy gunfights, and being the railhead for the Chisholm Trail until 1873 (when railroads were extended north and south, thus ending cattle drives to the town's east-west rail access point).

Three years after their Mennonite colony arrived in America, Great-grandparents Andreas and Susanna started having more babies. Helena was first. Maria came 12 months later, and Margaretha, 18 months after that. Issac, the eleventh child, was born 17 months later in 1881.

Tragedy struck their simple Kansas homestead when both parents were nearly 40 years old. During the fall and early winter of 1881, six of their ten surviving children died, including baby Issac. Probably it was influenza, smallpox, or typhoid fever. In the midst of their crisis, Andreas got Susanna pregnant again; daughter Susie was born in July, 1882.

Then, for 18 months, Susanna apparently wasn't pregnant. It was one of those times when my future existence was being determined. What was happening? Was Susanna ill? Was pioneer life even leaner than usual? Just before Christmas in 1883, my great-grandmother got pregnant one final time.

On September 13, 1884, at the age of 42, she gave birth to Andrew -- who would grow up to become my grandfather. Andrew was just two weeks short of his fifth birthday when his mother died at the age of 47; Susanna had borne 13 children in 21 years. Just six were still alive. The oldest, David, was 25, but he had no children. Great-grandmother Susanna never knew the joy of grandchildren.

How could widower Andreas manage a farm and household alone? Who would can food, make soap, quilt blankets, cook meals, wash and mend clothes -- the endless household tasks? He wasted no time; just five months after Susanna died, he married Maria Banman, age 34, on a cold January Monday of 1890. She became step-mother to six children, ages 5 to 25.

Four years later, Maria had her first child, Justine, and two years later her second (and last), Henry, in 1895. At that point, Maria was 39 years old. Great-grandfather Andreas was 52; he went on to live to age 80. He sired 15 children by two wives and produced a bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren (including me and my two sisters). Maria lived to age 86. I never met Andreas or Maria; they died before I was born. Pity that the real lives behind these bare facts are lost; everybody has a story.

The little farm town that would become their hometown of Elbing was created in 1887 along a new railroad branch. The town eventually would have mercantile and hardware stores, a harness shop, blacksmiths, a lumber yard, shoe repair shop, bank, barber shop, woodworking shop, carpenters, hotel, livery stable, restaurant, creamery, and churches. According to Arnold Regier, a friend of my father, it was named after Elbing (Elblag), on the Vistula Delta of northern Prussia (Poland), at the suggestion of his grandfather who sold the land to establish the trading center: "Elbing in Poland gave Mennonites freedom to build a church in 1590. In most other areas Mennonites met secretly for worship in caves, barns, and wooded areas secretly." (Regier, Arnold & Helen. 1994. Elbing -- Next Stop. Graphic Images, Inc., Newton, KS. 126 pp.)

The Mennonites brought to Kansas more than their harsh religious culture from the Old Country. They brought and introduced hard winter wheat to the Americas and with it their secrets of farming the semi-arid Crimean steppes. It changed the face of farming in North America forever and turned Kansas into America's bread basket.

This was the prairie world of boundless horizons, endless travail, and doctrinaire morality in which my grandfather, Andrew, grew up. Tied to his father's farm and church, he didn't finish high school, but eventually was ordained as a minister, among the first to attend his Missionary Church's Bible Institute in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. His classes included: Sin and Salvation, Missions, The Christian Life, The Lord's Return, as well as Grammar, German, Elocution, and Music.

His future wife, my grandmother, Emilie Kliewer, also attended. Emilie was the oldest daughter of Gerhard J. Kliewer, a religious leader of their Mennonite community. He was instrumental in founding the First Missionary Church in Elbing.

Their small church denomination, the Missionary Church Association, was created by Mennonites who were disaffected with certain Mennonite dogma -- theological cabalisms regarding baptism and conversion, reminiscent of medieval arguments over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Five years after Andrew and Emilie were married in 1911, my grandfather, age 32, became the unpaid pastor of Elbing's First Missionary Church, lasting until 1950. He often would work harvesting crops until dark on Saturday night, then be up to preach God's message Sunday morning. All those hours behind the mules and draft horses gave him time to talk to God and compose his sermons.

My grandparents were distant relatives of each other -- third cousins once removed. Put another way, they were four and five generations removed, respectively, from the same parents. Marrying a distant relative must have been common in their cloistered religious world, especially given the large number of children commonly borne by the mothers. Maybe they didn't even know that they were related. My own father barely knew who his grandparents were and seemed to know almost nothing about his family's history beyond that.

* * *

One of the few of these Schmidt ancestors that I ever met was my Uncle Henry, the youngest of Great-grandfather Andreas' children. The bare facts are these: Henry spent 31 years as Elbing's postmaster and married Janie Regier. They adopted a boy, Irvin, who died of disease during World War II. Aunt Janie was locally famous for her accordion accompaniment of her and Henry's gospel duets. I remember them smiling and happy.

Their daughter, Pauline, related the following:

At one time [Henry] was mayor of Elbing, and was active in ridding the town of petty thievery. Becoming aware of hens disappearing in his chicken barn, Henry installed a burglar alarm wired to the house. On one occasion the alarm went off and he put on some clothes and ran out to the thief's car. He stepped on the running board and talked to the man and soon learned that he was a railroad worker in Elbing. He then decided not to call the Butler County Sheriff but to deal with this problem himself. On another occasion the burglar alarm in the Lambert store began to ring. Henry took his shotgun and fired it in the air in front of the store. The thief did not have time to carry anything out to his car. (Regier, op. cit..)

* * *

Grandparents Andrew and Emilie initially rented family land to start their farm and got busy building their own Jesus-centered family, though not at the pace of their parents. (Andrew's father, as I noted, had sired 15 children by two wives. Emilie's father also had 15 children by two wives.) Andrew and Emilie's first child, Dorothy, arrived 13 months after their wedding. Ethel came three years later. Then, my father, Arnold, two years later (1917), and four more girls after that.

My father's boyhood was tough. His life was church, school work, and farming, leaving no time for play. His favorite thing in the world, baseball, was off limits because it took time away from the farm. He was, after all, his father's only son among seven children. It couldn't have been easy supporting such a family, especially during the Great Depression (my father was twelve in 1929) and the years after.

As a kid, my dad lived through locust scourges of the 1920s (similar to those of 1874, described earlier). What nearly killed him, however, was a snake. When he was five, playing in the dirt field being plowed by his father, he surprised a five-foot rattlesnake, which bit his hand. He always credited "God's grace" for surviving. He wrote of his ordeal:

They took me to Axtell Hospital in Newton and lanced my thumb and gave me whiskey. No anti-serum was available. The infection went within one-quarter inch of my heart and stopped. They had an all-night prayer meeting for me. My recovery was considered a miracle of prayer.

My father recalled that he often got to school smelling of skunk from his trap line. He wrote:

When the dust storms hit in the 1930s, we worked all night to stop the erosion on our land. We had as much as 118 degrees of heat that summer. In winter, going to Peabody High School, we had to jack up the Model T Ford hind wheels to get it started in 18 degrees below zero weather. We drove across wheat fields to get to the Butler County road to go to Peabody. In mornings before going to high school, I would run a trap line, milk my cows, and build a fire in the kitchen stove.

* * *

Visiting their Kansas farm in my boyhood, I learned about death and near-death in the great spaces of the prairies covered with endless fields of golden wheat under cloudless skies. Cows were milked by hand every morning; my clumsy efforts to pump the rubbery teats gave just a dribble. The milk room in the farmhouse basement, where cream was separated in stainless steel drums, filled my head with the sour-sweet smell of raw milk. I watched my grandmother chase chickens with a wire hook and chop off their heads on a stump; then, the white birds spraying blood in their headless dances of death in the hot, gray dust. I tagged along with my grandfather to the stinking, crowded stockyards in Wichita to sell cattle for slaughter.

The farm gave me a first glimpse of my own mortality and the limits of what my life could become. After playing in the barn loft, I ended up bed-ridden from breathing in dust and wheat chaff. Lying there in the stifling heat of the darkened bedroom, for the first time in my life, I wondered if I was going to die. One thing I knew for sure: I could never be a farmer. It was the first of many career tracks, theoretical or real, that would shut off over time. My car-sickness and less-than-perfect eyesight would mean I would give up dreams of being an Air Force jet pilot. My severe allergy to poison ivy would mean I couldn't fight forest fires or be a field biologist (which I actually was for a few years, albeit, miserably). All of the talents I would learn I didn't have would mean I'd never be a pianist or artist.

What I always had, however, was love of nature. On the Kansas farm, I watched (and sometimes shot) hawks and other birds in the Osage orange hedgerows, and shot and gutted squirrels that my grandmother cooked. When I shot and wounded a scissor-tailed flycatcher -- a magnificent silver bird with two-foot tail feathers that clack open and shut in flight -- and had to look it in the eyes, I quit killing things I couldn't eat.

In the stagnant waters of my grandparents' brushy, muddy creek, I caught little catfish, then suffered the want-to-die-agony of invisible, brush-borne chiggers biting me head to toe. The grownups soaked me in baking-soda baths, which helped but little.

And then there is this: I'm a bare naked baby in a round wash tub on the Kansas farmhouse's back porch, sunshine streaming through the screened windows. Do I remember the actual happiness of that innocent moment of cool splashing water or merely the memory of the picture?

* * *

When my Grandpa Andrew was in the hospital in 1960, miserable and dying of stomach and esophageal cancer, he told his family, "I probably sinned against the Lord and he is punishing me."

I wonder what sins this devout, seemingly humorless man would even have been capable of. I suspect his only real sin was a lifetime exposed to farm chemicals. No one gave a second thought to any dangers. Flies on cow udders when you milked them? -- pump a spray of bug killer. Grease on your hands and arms? \-- wash up in gasoline. Weeds? -- weed killer. My father committed the same sins, and cancer killed him, too. Like father, like son. I wonder if my own early years with the same naiveté about toxic chemicals have doomed me to their fate.

Although my father, Arnold, didn't experience religious conversion until his late teens, the pressure to conform to a Christian life must have been relentless. His role model was a cousin six years his senior, the kid his family must have adulated: Lee Kliewer, child preacher. Kliewer's 1929 "Community Revival" handbill proclaimed: "the young High School Preacher" had "consecrated his life entirely to the Lord and is being used in a special way." At the 18-year-old's revival services,

[t]he preaching will consist of the good old fashioned gospel. We believe Jesus to be the Savior of our souls and sufficient for our bodies as well. That he sanctifies our lives to pureness and is coming again for the redeemed.

As for Arnold, the fever for the Lord, incubated and nurtured by generations of godly Schmidts, inevitably infected him, too. At some mystical Saul-to-Paul moment -- probably the close of a summer evening tent meeting, the fat ladies sweating and fanning themselves on folding chairs in the dust, bugs flying in the lights, guilt-inducing strains of Just as I Am on the piano, the minister calling on sinners to "come forward" to the make-shift altar to confess their sins and dedicate their life to Christ -- at some moment like that, God saved him from his Hell-bound life.

Dad talked to God and eventually heard the calling to become a minister. After high school, he went to Bethel Bible College, a Mennonite school in nearby Newton. After a year or so of that, he left home for the same Missionary Church college in Indiana that his parents had attended 34 years earlier.

With that move, he left forever his family's traditional farm life that stretched back into the mists beyond memory or records. He kept alive, however, the tradition of Schmidt men serving as ministers for God.

He also left behind his hometown fiancé, (Eva) Mildred ("Minnie") Voth. It was one of those twitches of the cosmos that created me. If Arnold had stayed home in Kansas and married Minnie, I wouldn't exist. As for Minnie, I can find no record that she ever married or had children. Could no one else measure up after Arnold?

At "B.I.," as the Ft. Wayne Bible Institute was called, Arnold threw himself into his classes, gained a reputation for hard work on campus cleanup projects, played tennis, and was known as a quiet but godly young man.

Times were different; here's part of what his college roommate, Bill Whiteman from Cleveland, wrote in my father's 1941 yearbook:

Honey, ...Remember that first walk to town we had together to buy curtains and rugs? You always were a good "wife." I hope and pray it will be in God's will for us to room together next year. You have become the best Christian buddy I ever had...

And the next year, this:

Dear Arnie, Well, after two years of happy married life I guess this is the sad end. These past two years have been the happiest of my life, and I know that living with you has helped to make that so. I had prayed for a good roommate. You were an answer to prayer. I shall never forget the evening devotions we had together. Or the morning I kicked you out of bed. It was too bad that we couldn't get our double bed when we wanted it...

Bill & Arnie (r.)

I'm not suggesting anything kinky; I'm just saying, I don't really know what to make of that.

In his college pictures, Arnie looks happy enough, yet I don't know how anyone, even a born-again, hard-core Evangelical, could stand it. By the same token, however, how can I understand anything, really, about this earnest young man who was "aflame for Christ," as his class motto phrased it?

Among the special speakers at B.I. (as noted in his yearbook) that Arnie would have heard:

Dr. J.C. Massee of Winona Lake, Indiana, spoke on the subjects "Going Forward for Christ" and "Modern Petting Parties." He said that social living standards which we have accepted are those which become the unwritten law of our country. He illustrated the dangers of loose living and then gave the challenge of a return to "Victorian" standards.

So, was Arnie happy? There's no way to know. A friend wrote in his yearbook:

I always thot [sic] Arnie, that you were a little dissatisfied at B.I. and would rather be somewhere else, but perhaps that isn't so.

His road to ordination required Arnie to go out and preach in real churches. After his second year at B.I., he went twice to the Ozark Hills the summer of 1942, where he first experienced the heady thrill of saving souls for Jesus. This report from Bug Scuffle, Arkansas:

Blessings in the Ozarks: The Lord gave us a gracious revival, July 22-31, with Brother Arnold Schmidt as evangelist. There were seven converted and the entire group of Christians revived in a large measure.

We closed this meeting in order to begin at Strickler the evening of August 1st. The Lord blessed Brother Arnold in preaching the Word which resulted in the salvation of ten souls. This meeting closed the evening of August 9th with the Christians on the mountain top... We feel that Brother Arnold coming to us was in answer to prayer and the Lord used this dear boy in a wonderful way to bless hungry hearts.

Then, from Winslow, Arkansas:

Aug. 13-23, at the Bethel Missionary Church near Winslow. Bro. Arnold Schmidt from Elbing, Kansas, was the evangelist. Nine were at the altar at different times, most of whom prayed through to definite victory. Bro. Arnold is a sweet spirited and deeply spiritual young worker, and the Lord made him a great blessing in our midst.

Whether or not Bro. Arnold was happy at B.I., God told him, as He would repeatedly throughout his career, that it was time to move on. That fall, for reasons now known only to God, he transferred from B.I. to the Free Methodist Church's college in Illinois. Most important for my story, at Greenville College he met my mother.

### Mom Married a Guy Who Talked to God

My mother, Kathryn -- Kay, as she was known after childhood to most -- was an unhappy victim of her time. She was trapped by circumstances of her birth. She never had a real choice, or a chance to escape her fate (not unlike Arnold). Church and family were paramount. She fulfilled a Christian woman's ideal calling as a preacher's wife. Her lot was to serve in the shadow of God's messenger, a guy who claimed a personal line to Him. She found some independence in her career as a fifth-grade teacher, though I often felt my mother's life had been someone else's choice, not hers. That it was someone else's religion she wore.

Some of their church's self-righteous criticized her when she wore rouge; taboo was the most insignificant attempt at heightened sexuality, no matter how modest. She wore a bit of makeup, anyhow. She and her husband mulled the proper Christian limits of jewelry. What will people say? So she served and did her duty to husband and God, while deep in her gut, part of her grew to hate it. All the pettiness. The meanness. The gossip. And their relative poverty. She deserved better; she had lived a whole lot better before she got married. Why can't God's work be easier, more comfortable?

When she was young, she was aware of her uncommon intelligence. She had a sharpness that most lacked. But what good was it? In the patriarchy of her church, women's opinions were muted. She never truly grasped her innate worth.

Kathryn was raised in Michigan in the home of a family doctor, Walter K. Vaught. A maid did most domestic chores, like ironing and house cleaning, in part because Walter's wife, Florena, had poor health, but mostly because they could afford it.

I've not been able to pull back the curtain on my mother's childhood. Based on her pictures, though, it looks to have been a happy one.

Religion was central in the Vaught family, and Kathryn's father wrote in a letter (Jan. 20, 1939) of her salvation at age 15: "Kathryn was wonderfully converted and gloriously sanctified last night. It is wonderful to hear her testify."

She had two younger brothers and an older sister, Dorothy Jean, who was a true "flapper" of her era and a general hellion. When I was a kid, we would visit Aunt Dorothy and her husband, Cecil, at their miniscule lakeside cottage in central Michigan. Their refrigerator always was packed with long-necked, brown bottles of beer, something I'd never seen before. They smoked nonstop, which, of course, killed them both relatively young.

As the "good daughter," Kathryn was pampered by her father. In a typical letter he wrote her in her first year at college, he joked about her requests for money and her "destitution":

I sure feel badly, in fact I feel almost like Little Abner's mother, great drops of sweat break out on me in this cold weather when I think of my little girl going hungry and wandering from door to door to get something to eat... I can just see you now shivering like a piece of jello... Oh, it isn't all joy, being a father... I'm enclosing a check of $100 that will undoubtedly tide you over for a day or two... Love, Father Vaught

That $100 was equivalent to about $1,500 today.

Kathryn started school at Greenville College in 1939 (three years before my father transferred there), leaving behind in Michigan her boyfriend, Larry Burr, who wrote sappy letters to his "Kitty Dear." She confided to her diary that her grand plan was to go to college for two years, then take time off to marry Larry in the spring of 1942.

While she played poor Larry along, her college life was filled with fantasy and flirtations. Life was just swell, as in (from her letters): "It was swell of you to write me." "The beans were swell." "The girls all thought Mother was so swell." "We had a swell train to St. Louis." "That was a swell girdle, Mother, but it was too big. Size 28 would have been swell."

And: "Oh, Kleis is so swell." That's as in the church college's Professor Kleis. She crowed of her date with Kleis in an eleven-page letter to her folks: "I'm just about ready to bust I have so much to tell you." She was the "talk of the campus" and loved the attention. "I've never had so much fun in all my life... I felt so free and silly. I understand from various sources that he turned down about 16 girls."

By the end of her first year of college, her infatuation with Larry (who ran a lunch stand back in Michigan) died; she burned Larry's letters.

Kathryn was a proper Christian co-ed, dutifully taking her Bible classes and saying her prayers. What really excited her, however, was a young girl's fun and foolishness, like the cremation of a pet goldfish, dating, excursions to nearby St. Louis, and train trips home to Detroit and back:

Dear Folks, Our train was swell. I sat with a very interesting man -- a lawyer. Practically the same as an atheist.

* * *

St. Louis is where Kathryn's folks (my grandparents) had met in 1914. It was during her father's medical training at a St. Louis hospital, when he was 28 years old, that Walter Kelly Vaught met his future wife, Florena Swaney. While attending Greenville College in the fall of 1914, Florena fell off a horse and broke her leg and was sent for treatment to the St. Louis hospital where Walter was an intern. It was love at first sight.

Back on his parents' east-central Illinois farm for Christmas, Walter sent Florena, still in the hospital, his first love letter. After a detailed description of his mother's welcome-home dinner, he tells of going out hunting with his "faithful dog," Jack, and shooting a rabbit with "my trusty gun." "Pa" wants him to help kill hogs on Saturday. He describes at length his horses, cattle, and other pets.

Now I wonder how my real Pet did today. I thought a whole lot about you today... I'll bet one thing, you don't miss me like I do you. I am soon to tell my parents all about you...

Remember to take good care of those lips. Doctor them well! I think mine will be well by Sunday. And by that time I'll be wanting to see you much worse than you will me. I wish you were here. I love you more today than ever... Loving yours, Kelly

How odd that Florena, this 20-year-old girl from the mountains of Pennsylvania, crossed paths in a St. Louis hospital with the future doctor and love of her life from a farm in Illinois. What was it about her that so captivated the budding young doctor? Life vibrates with the unknowable.

There are trillions of events that lead to each of our existences. Events' alternative consequences are vapors. If my grandmother hadn't fallen off that horse, I wouldn't exist. If she had fallen off that horse but not broken her leg, I wouldn't exist.

Florena's roots were probably mostly Irish going back several generations in Blair County, Pennsylvania. It was a coal and iron mining region of central Pennsylvania, first opened by the British to European settlement in 1754. Florena's maternal grandfather (my great-great grandfather), James Frederick Martin, born in 1844, was son of an Irish immigrant. James fought for the Union in the Civil War, including at Gettysburg. One of James' daughters, Emma Edith Martin, was Florena's mother.

So, Emma was my great-grandmother. However, my great-grandfather is a mystery. That's because Florena was Emma's illegitimate daughter. All I know about Emma's lover is that his last name apparently was Sherman. Did Emma love him? What happened to keep them from getting married? Was it just a crazy fling? Emma, at age 22, was pregnant with Florena, who was born in 1894, three years before Emma wedded another man, George Hartman Sweeney.

Florena was a smart girl, graduating in 1913 as valedictorian from her high school class of 19 students in Blairsville, Pennsylvania, 40 miles east of Pittsburgh. I know nothing of her childhood, but believe I see sadness in her eyes in pictures from that time.

Florena's illegitimate birth must have had something to do with why Florena spelled her last name "Swaney," even after her new step-father, George, changed his and the family's last name spelling to "Sweeney." And, maybe it had something to do with the sadness in her eyes. And, with some of her perennial health problems -- I can never know what genetic issues her unidentified biological father passed to her (and to me).

George and Emma went on to have six children of their own, which must have made Florena feel like an outsider. Florena was raised mostly by her Aunt Kathrine (Emma's sister). She was close to the religious family of Arthur D. Zahniser, who probably was a minister in the local Blairsville Free Methodist Church (he later became a church bishop). Florena's connection with the Free Methodist Zahnisers likely explains how Florena happened to attend the Free Methodist college in Greenville, Illinois. And broke her leg. And met Walter Kelly Vaught, her soon-to-be husband. And the two of them eventually became my grandparents. God's will, I'm sure they all believed.

Florena's broken leg and poor health forced her to drop out of college, and she went home to Pennsylvania in February 1915. Walter, crazy in love, wrote her windy, passionate letters every day. He never had been so in love, and now was smitten, lonely, and pining for Florena -- already writing her of marriage: "I never expected to get a wife without faults and Lord knows my wife will find a package of them when she gets me." This was, of course, in an era when long-distance communication was impossible except by mail -- no phones, no email, no texting.

"I want a real girl, one that I can love and understand me, so I am coming dear, after you," he wrote. And that's just what he did.

Florena's health deteriorated, possibly due to pneumonia, and she was back in the St. Louis hospital the next month. Walter wrote to her family in Pennsylvania, worried that he might lose Florena before their lives together had even started: "I thought she was going to die this afternoon." She didn't, of course, and returned again to Pennsylvania to recover, with her future doctor-husband urging her not to work and worrying constantly about her fragile health. By Thanksgiving, she was back in St. Louis once again (living a block from the hospital so apparently still getting medical care there), and Walter wrote her from his family's Illinois farm:

It is a lovely evening, the sleet beating on the windows. It's an evening that one likes to sit around a great fire with lights turned low and listen to soft music and hold the girl in his arms that he loves. They say this is the kind of night that doctors are called out in the country, but when that time comes, I'll know I'll have a fine lovely little girl waiting for me.

Walter's home looks as if it would have been a pleasant, prosperous place to grow up at the turn of the 20th century. The family raised "Buff Orpingtons [chickens] and White Holland Turkeys," according to the farm's letterhead stationery.

My maternal grandfather, Walter Kelly Vaught (with dog), and family - c. 1892.

As a kid and for all his life, Walter loved pointing dogs, shotguns, and small game hunting -- pheasants, rabbits, and quail. He wrote Florena a nine-page report of his hunting day:

If your sense of smell is real good you can no doubt smell fresh milk on these pages, and if you will just smell a little keener you can smell rabbit blood. And then if you can just smell still keener you can certainly smell the blood of quail. How is my little girl today?

And in another:

I am dog tired. Jack [his dog] wore me out and did not hunt this afternoon worth a ___ but did very well this morning. Got up lots of birds and rabbits. Carter [his friend] could not hit a barn. Gave him all the rabbits and quail we killed up to 4 pm and he left. After he left Albert [another friend] killed 2 quail and 2 rabbits and I got 4 quail and 6 rabbits, but I shot wild all day. My legs are so sore that it hurts to touch them and I have blisters on my feet. And the gun has kicked me till blood oozes out.

One time when I was young, maybe five or six, Grandpa Walter Vaught took me pheasant hunting in Michigan. We drove out in the country and walked a short fence row of weeds and shrubs that divided two farm fields. We saw nothing and the experience was uneventful. Yet, if not that, something made me love hunting (especially when I was younger). Maybe it's in my genes, just like it was in Grandpa Vaught's.

Walter's ancestor (his 4th great-grandfather), John Paul Vaught (1680-1761), a miller, came to America from Germany in 1733. John Paul's descendants settled on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains in southwest Virginia, after the British opened the area for settlement in 1769. During the Revolutionary War, the Vaughts were Loyalist sympathizers; nearly every Vaught family had a "George," presumably, homage to their British kings.

At least one of John Paul's grandsons, George (1745-1835), fought in the 1774 Shawnee Indian War (41 days in Captain Daniel Smith's militia company). Also known as Dunmore's War, it crushed resistance by Indians who were fighting the flood of colonist settlements into their lands in western Virginia.

The Vaughts became patriots after American independence. George and three of his brothers served in 1781 in a Virginia militia company fighting the British. George named one of his thirteen children Jefferson (b. 1806). Another of George's ten sons, Peter, had eleven children but only two sons. One, he named after himself; the other, he also named Jefferson (1819-1889).

This Jefferson Vaught had itchy feet; he married in 1843, and the couple left their families in Virginia and moved to Illinois to farm and raise their own family -- eleven children (six sons), including John Washington Vaught, James Madison Vaught, and Andrew Jackson Vaught -- who became Walter's father, and my great-grandfather. Andrew Jackson Vaught married a woman with the beautiful name of Mary Isadora Allison Lackey.

Their son, Walter, must have been pretty smart. He found a way to escape the farm and attend Illinois College's Whipple Academy, becoming an all-state right tackle in 1907 and graduating with honors in 1908. He went to Illinois College for four years, and then the St. Louis University Medical School, all the while playing college football and working as an athletic director to pay for his education.

Walter carried himself with a soon-to-be-doctor's self-confidence. His letters of reference note his sterling qualities: vigorous, industrious, persevering, good student, moral in habits, thoroughly reliable, good athlete. Walter was a devoutly religious person, as was his family; he was, in fact, named after a missionary to Africa, Walter Kelly, who visited his parents' church.

I don't remember my Grandpa Vaught well, but he must have had a wonderful sense of humor, judging by this letter he sent to my mother during her last year in college, shortly after she had met my father.

Dear Kathryn,

Now, I thought it would help you out a whole lot in your love affair if I would explain to you a little so it wouldn't be so hard for you to tell us about it.

I knew about Arnold losing a tooth. He shouldn't have been going with that other girl, and besides he shouldn't go with a girl that wears high-heeled shoes; but he was fortunate this time for if she had hit him in the mouth (or did she kick him?), he might have had all his teeth knocked out if it had been a flat heel. I think a gold tooth would be the right thing for him to put in. That way the people will look at the gold tooth and won't notice that he is so cross-eyed...

I realize that the reason he couldn't talk to us was because of his hair lip and cleft palate. Of course, that doesn't affect his intellect any. If he would wear false teeth I believe he could talk better.

Of course, we will not mention his club foot and web toes, for you know I never say anything that would hurt anyone's feelings. Your mother, at times, might say something, but I have her well trained.

Now you can feel a little relieved and not so embarrassed about being frank with us.

Lovingly, WK Vaught

His letter's envelope, which the post office actually delivered in 1943 for the price of a three-cent "Win the War" postage stamp, was addressed:

To the girlfriend  
Of the cross-eyed boy  
With the gold tooth  
Care of Greenville College  
Greenville, Illinois  
Girls' Dormitory

I suspect my own style of humor traces to Walter, through my mother. During a rare visit to Detroit from his daughter, Kathryn, married just six months and living in California, Walter wrote to Arnold, the lonely husband:

I have felt a little guilt and my conscience has been hurting me ever since my daughter arrived without you. You have my sympathy. For I can remember when a woman went off and left me for one month and it still sticks in my memory...

She has been a blessing to us, so as to show our appreciation for her, we both got sick. Just think what if we had to come to see you -- then that will make you feel good -- if it doesn't, it should. (Mar. 7, 1944)

* * *

Walter passed that teasing habit on to his daughter. I think my mother's best, most unexpected trait was her sense of humor, often at my expense. En route to Kansas one summer, when I was around seven years old, we visited Hannibal, Missouri, to see Mark Twain's birthplace. Walking uphill along the picket fence the young Twain (Samuel Clemons) supposedly had white-washed, a seagull flew over our heads.

"Oh, Wayne, that bird dropped stuff in your hair," my mother said in mock surprise, and made a face. I tried to wipe away the bird poop in my hair. She stopped me.

"You're just making it worse. This is awful." We walked along, me thoroughly humiliated by the imaginary bird poop. Then she started laughing, confessed to making it all up, and everyone except me thought it very funny.

One day after we got to the Kansas farmstead, where the whole Schmidt clan had gathered, my cousin, Patty, and I got the idea to spend the night in the barn's hayloft. Our parents agreed, and we bedded down in blankets. Their last instructions were to watch out for roaming, murderous coyotes.

In the darkness of the cavernous loft, humid hay scent filling us, we huddled under our sheets and tried to remember why we had wanted to do this. Then the noises outside started. First, it was a herd of galloping horses. Next, the yipping of hungry coyotes. We peeked out through cracks in the barn siding, but even with the moonlight, we couldn't see all the grownups hiding in the shadows, having the time of their lives, led, I'm now certain, by my mother.

We lay there in terror until all was quiet, then fled to the safety of the house, rushing in to share our dangerous escape. The grownups all seemed oddly amused, not concerned, and dismissive of the frightening noises we knew we had heard. Only much later did I learn the truth.

* * *

On Dec. 20, 1915 (with six months of medical school and a year's internship still ahead), my grandparents, Walter and Florena, were married in St. Louis (by Bishop Zahniser). Once Walter was finally out of medical school, they set up his practice in a suburb of St. Louis. Within months (Nov. 1917), they had their first child, Dorothy Jean.

After three years, they moved his practice to Freeport, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, and that's where their second daughter was born, Anna Katherine, destined to be my mother. (She was named after Florena's Aunt Kathrine, her mother's sister. My mother never liked the spelling and legally changed her name to Kathryn Ann. I don't know the source of "Anna.")

In 1924, now with the addition of a son, Paul, the Vaught family moved to Detroit. They settled in a nice, then safe working-class neighborhood near the Michigan State Fair Grounds. Walter built his own medical office, the "Vaught Building" (where they lived upstairs, with a butcher shop and drug store on the first floor). I believe that building where my mother grew up is still standing on State Fair Avenue.

The evangelical Free Methodist Church was prominent in the Vaughts' lives. Yet, I'm unsure how devoted my grandmother, Florena, felt early on, even while she went along with it. I don't know if her religious lackluster, suggested in this sentence written by Walter to her during their courtship, was real:

I wonder why you did not have religion -- you believe in it, or let on as if you do.

It certainly became real, as Florena was devoted to her religion and her church as long as I knew her. Florena would be of fragile health all her long life (1894-1976), and Walter would dote on her always, even while having his own health issues (1886-1959). They spent their last years in a comfortable red brick home they built in Spring Arbor, Michigan, directly across the street from Spring Arbor Junior College, a Free Methodist Church school, where Walter served as campus doctor. He called his wife "Mother," and she referred to him as "The Doctor."

Their home's upstairs was one big dormitory-style room, with honey-colored, knotty-pine walls, designed for frequent visits to Grandpa and Granny by their children and grandchildren. Today, when I watch the robins splash and fluff and preen in my front yard birdbath, I can be transported back to that warm brick house in Spring Arbor with the birdbath outside the dining room window -- my first up-close encounter with a red robin bathing.

* * *

These, then, were my Vaught mother's roots -- privileged, carefree, and religious. Into her uncomplicated, 21-year-old world in January 1943 stepped an unsophisticated Kansas farm boy, the quietly-passionate future preacher who had just returned from his student preaching in Bug Scuffle, Arkansas, and now was attending her Illinois Christian college and nearly ready to take on this sinful world for Jesus' sake.

### Happily Ever After

Arnold is so swell, mother! Real good looking and everything. We had a good time Friday night. After the game we sat in the Vista office [Greenville College yearbook -- she was editor], and both of us kept thinking the other was bored. We had a swell time the first part of the evening, but the latter part fell sort of flat. He showed me his album (was he ever a darling baby), and then we didn't have a whole lot to say. When he brought me in, he said, "And I wasn't bored." We're going to church tonight. (Kathryn letter to her mother - Jan. 24, 1943)

Kathryn got her dream -- a good looking Christian sweetheart. I don't know what Arnold wanted, but he was definitely under pressure by his church elders to find a wife. At the time, he was trying to land his first job as pastor of a hard-scrabble church in Chino, California. The church's district superintendent wrote him:

I understand that you are not (as yet) married. One of our Brethren made the suggestion that maybe you had "some good prospects" and would welcome an excuse of this kind to hasten the "eventful day"... p.s. The reason I mention the matter of being married is because it does seem that it would definitely have its advantages here.

The job would pay $10 per week, along with free milk, fruit, and vegetables that the church's farmers would donate. He was advised that there was "farm labor to be had," since he would need a second job to survive. He was warned about frequent dust storms in Chino.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, another church leader opined in a letter to Arnold's sister, Evelyne, that any minister should insist on a wife who could sing and play the piano, "or they shouldn't marry them." Evelyne agreed.

Religion defined the Schmidts' lives and dominated their correspondence. Evelyne wrote Arnold:

I am suppose [sic] to lead prayer meeting tomorrow night. It's a big task for me but by God's help will do my best. It's wonderful to know that we have one upon whom we can lean and trust and know that He never fails but will help us and strengthen us for all He asks us to do. Hope to hear from you soon.

Another sister, Thelma, wrote Arnold:

Thanks for the phamplets [sic]. That is what I need, because I am so green about a lot of these things. But I will learn in God's time. Some of the girls here think I am going to the extreme but I know better because all I care is that I am a shining light for him and that I am in his will...

A cousin answered in her letter a question that Arnold must have asked:

Yes, I am satisfied with the Lord! Arnold, the experience[s] I've had with Christ in the last few months are worth millions to me. I could never exchange them for anything this sinful world has to offer.

That prior fall of 1942, as Arnold thought he was being called by God to the dusty farmlands of Chino, Kathryn was gadding about St. Louis and Kansas City with her best friend, seeing the sights, shopping, and visiting relatives. She gushed to her parents: "Kansas City is sure swell. I wouldn't mind living here. First city besides Detroit that I've ever liked."

Then Kathryn and Arnold met, fell in love, and within months were engaged. Arnold's future wife (known to most from then on as "Kay"), despite only modest singing and piano-playing skills, would prove to "definitely have advantages" for Arnold, as his church's California elder predicted. The Chino job, however, fell through.

How could two such different people make a match? Arnold's letters to his family are sodden with religion. Kay's letters prattle about clothes, boys, weather, parties, exams, and milkshakes.

But whatever their differences, Kay was crazy about Arnold. He was a handsome, fervent, somewhat brooding catch. She later admitted that she was the aggressor in their courtship.

In June, both graduated from Greenville College, although Arnold had to stay for summer classes. After a week of working together in the school cafeteria (35 cents per hour, Kay's first-ever job), she returned to her parents in Detroit. It would be the last time it would be her home, and the last time she could ever again be so carefree. She reported to Arnold, her "beloved," on a trip to Port Huron:

Loretta, Dola, and I had more fun. We just cut up and acted goofy and had just gobs of fun.

Nevertheless, her thoughts were mainly of her future with Arnold, and she wrote him long, passionate letters nearly every day, closing one of her first with:

So with this goodnight I'll whisper so no one else can hear except you that I love you.

Most of Arnold's letters to Kay haven't survived, but I doubt they were romantic odes. After all, this is the guy who wrote to his sister that his future wife "is on the plump side." And, I doubt his writing could match Kay's occasional flourishes, as her recounting to Arnold her emotions when she tried on her wedding dress:

It gave me such a sweet, warm feeling inside as I thought of being so arrayed for you in the not too distant future. It thrills me so when I think of being your bride and wife.

I'm trying to be just like you would want me to be if you were here. I love you too much to bring reproach upon our love -- or suspicion of any kind from other people. You mean everything to me, Arnold, and I love only you.

She assumed the planning of every detail of their wedding, from picking the date (September 2) to addressing the invitations. All Arnold had to do was show up. That was just as well, since the farm boy knew nothing about weddings and was worried about "how to act." Evelyne, his unhelpful sister and future spinster, advised him to go to the library and "see if you can find any pointers."

Arnold wanted the wedding in a church from his denomination and secured an invitation to hold it in the Royal Oak Missionary Church (in suburban Detroit). He hoped his Kansas father would handle the ceremony. Kathryn's parents, however, expected them to get married in their Free Methodist Church.

The fight wasn't trivial. Evangelical dogma was at stake: Free Methodist churches didn't allow instrumental music; Missionary Church churches did. Virtually all of the guests would be from Kathryn's family; many wouldn't be comfortable with a doctrinaire-busting piano and organ.

The Vaughts got their way in the church conflict. After all, Kathryn's wedding reception invitation list had 131 names; Arnold's list had just 23. Moreover, Kathryn's father, "The Doctor," was paying all the wedding bills, which must have been considerable. They even hired a wedding consultant.

The Vaught parents sincerely embraced Arnold, however, and their generosity would continue years into the marriage of their favorite daughter and her new beau. Kay's letters are filled with tales of shopping sprees (a habit she never lost): "Mother and I got six Pequot sheets -- all Hudson's had and 3 pair of pillow cases which were all one customer could buy [due to war-time rationing]. Those are the best kind of sheet made..."

Arnold's Kansas parents, on the other hand, couldn't even afford to send him a college graduation present, let alone a gift for their only son's wedding. His mother promised him money to buy a white shirt.

Over the summer months, Kay -- she in Detroit and Arnold still in Illinois -- poured out her dreams in letters to him. "I want romance in my married life -- always." Referring to "very wealthy" friends of her parents: "They are my idea of a perfect couple. They are middle aged but he still treats her like his sweetheart and calls her endearing names." She fantasized about "that most important moment when I become Mrs. Arnold Schmidt."

They had known each other only months. Neither had met the other's family. Kay realized just weeks before their wedding that she wasn't sure of Arnold's middle name (Louis). She worried about being a good enough housekeeper and cook, and not doing things like his mother did them. She confessed doubts to her parents:

Life is pretty complicated for me these days. Sometimes I wonder if I know what the score is. Arnold and I seem quite different at times.

Occasionally in her letters, Kay mentioned attending church and prayer meetings and told Arnold of her trust in the Lord: "If I live in close harmony with God as I intend on always doing, I will love serving as your helpmate in the great work you have before you." I don't doubt her sincerity; yet, most of the religious references in her letters seem like afterthoughts.

A letter from Arnold to his sweetheart in Detroit that summer shows the contrast with Kay's breezy style of writing -- and thinking. Written just two weeks before their wedding, on stationary with a bible verse on each page, he informs her for the first time of where they will be living after their wedding:

Oh, Kay, I'm so thrilled and full of praise for the way God has been working and is working. I'm ashamed at the weakness of my faith and trust. A wire is on the way to Denair, Calif. [Missionary Church] that we will accept if they will give us a call... Bless the Lord, the opening presents a big challenge in many ways. I feel so unworthy to take such a fine work, but praises be to God, he has opened it and it must be his will to go on and do the best that is in us. It will mean some sacrifices but God and His work first for the salvation of souls. (Aug. 14, 1943)

He closed with a line that must have made her swoon:

O Kay, my love for you is as sweet as honey to me and you make my joy complete.

Kay was on board with all of it. She testified to her church that very weekend (not having gotten the news from Arnold's letter en route):

We don't know where we're going as yet, but we don't care as long as we are serving the Lord and doing our best to prosper the winning of souls. I feel so unworthy to fill the place the Lord has given me, but I hope and pray I will make the best minister's wife I am capable of being.

Both recited the same Christian mantra, "I feel so unworthy..."

She ended her last letter to Arnold before their wedding:

I love you, my darling, with a love that goes so deep there is none other to compare with it. Our letter writing period is about over for this time anyway, and of course we don't ever foresee such a lengthy one again, so I think it would be quite fitting to close with -- and they lived happily ever after. - Forever your sweetheart, Kay

Nine months after her wedding, Kay reminisced about that day in a letter to her parents:

Daddy tucking me in bed the night before and then the next morning I woke up early and watched the sun come up, and daddy came in, and we thought what a beautiful day it was going to be.

And off Kay and Arnold drove, over the rainbow, California bound, where skies are blue and the dreams that you dare to dream really can come true. What actually awaited them was -- well, a pregnancy with me, of course, but certainly no paradise where troubles melt like lemon drops.

In the pollen-laden San Joaquin Valley where God had sent them, it was hot, humid, and dusty, and there was no such thing as air conditioning. They had ants. There was never enough money to pay their bills. They tried to sell olives and walnuts from their trees. Arnold took a second job driving a school bus.

Everything had changed. Kay had to learn how to cook and bake, can jelly and fruit, do her own housecleaning and laundry on a scrub board and clothes line in the backyard, and iron Arnold's dress shirts. They were dirt poor and Kay, for the first time in her life, had to watch every dollar -- a trait that never went away, even years later when she was financially comfortable. They planted a garden and were given eggs and produce from church members. They had a cranky car.

What did Arnold think of his new wife? He wrote her parents:

She has been all that I thought she was capable of being and doing and more than I fancied she would be. Her companionship has been complete and keeps her love warm. Her cooking and baking is of the best. Kay is the all-around house-wife.

Now and then she wishes she were home and among old friends to talk to them. That is natural but as long as you know God's will is this, his presence is a comfort I'm sure. I don't know whether she mentions about it to you. If she doesn't maybe better not say that I did. Last night, she was little lonesome which was partly result of not feeling too good.

Our circumstances are as favorable as we could desire and the Lord helps working out our difficulties as they arise... (Nov. 20, 1943)

Kay did miss her family, and wrote letters home weekly. Just six months after they arrived in California, she took a train back to cold, snowy Detroit (with a stop-over at her Kansas in-laws) in time for her daddy's 58th birthday and stayed a month. "Wifey" and her new "Hubby" exchanged letters nearly every day. They include a lovely, erotic frankness that belies the image of a staid minister and wife. Arnold concluded one of his sexy letters:

Better not let anyone get hold of this letter. Be good to burn it soon. Goodnight sweet and be praying for you.

After both my parents died in their eighties, we found little blue pills in their effects. I thought it was a good sign that maybe they still had fun in bed, even after all the hard years of work and disappointments that followed their brief, newly-wedded euphoria in California.

Kay's early rapture embraced everything about the new man of her dreams. She wrote to Arnold:

Some girls are glad their husbands don't have hair on them, but I'm glad mine does. Makes you look so strong and masculine looking. I just love you from head to toe, my darling.

His masculine hairiness lost its initial allure. When I was about eight years old, she said to me, "I sure hope you don't have a hairy back like your father when you grow up." If only.

But in 1944, she still was enchanted with her new husband in all his furriness. She told her parents:

We have more fun, us two. When he's leading service I like to look at him and think how cute he is and how lucky I am that he is mine. He's always so sweet to me.

During her visit to her parents in Detroit, Kay felt she had the "time of my life." She returned home via Phoenix, where she met Arnold at a church conference, then they went on to Los Angeles to visit relatives on their way back to Denair. Kay loved Phoenix and everything about the desert, but wasn't much impressed with her first view of the Pacific Ocean: "Not much different than a lake."

Home in Denair looked good to both of them. They settled into life as newlyweds. Arnold was prescient in his note to Kay's parents:

Time is slipping by fast... First thing we know years will have gone by and we will wonder where they have disappeared.

Kay got a job as a fifth-grade school teacher in nearby Empire. Apparently, the war-time shortage of teachers and her "War Emergency Certificate" made up for her lack of teacher training. They needed more money, as she wrote her parents in June 1944, because "we don't want to wait forever to have a family." (That would be the future me, she would be working to afford.)

In my parents' voluminous correspondence, politics is rarely mentioned, unless it had a religious connection, as in this report from Kay to her parents:

We just returned from a "big" political campaign speech, and are now drinking cocoa and eating fresh cookies. We heard Dr. Claude Watson who is running for President on the Prohibition Ticket. He is quite a dynamic and dramatic speaker and would hold his own with Roosevelt any day. I enjoyed hearing him. The rally was in the large Beulah Church in Turlock.

"Any day" did not, however, include Election Day, 1944. Prohibitionist Watson got fewer than 75,000 votes for President, compared to Roosevelt's 25 million.

Kay's newlywed bliss lasted just a year. They started arguing over things like the correct way to cut up a chicken. Kay insisted that her "daddy's way" was correct; after all, he had gone to medical school. They would "tell each other off" now and then. Arnold called them "bumps in the road." By their first anniversary in September 1944, Kay was complaining to her parents:

Things aren't running as smoothly in our household as they use to. Wish I lived closer to home so I could get away from here once in awhile. But as it is there's just no place to go for a little change. I get so tired of things in general I could scream and I guess I do once in awhile. Honest, I feel so blue and Arnold doesn't seem as understanding or something. It's probably just me but I sure would like to have someone to talk to and there's not a soul.

As for their first anniversary, she added, "Arnold didn't get me anything." Plus, her hay fever was awful, and she started using nose drops constantly. She promised her parents that if it didn't get better in the next year, "I'm thru with California."

Kay's parents sent gifts constantly and sometimes money. Kay threw herself into her new life as minister's wife and school teacher. They got a dog -- Pudgie, a little black mutt.

In July 1945, Kay took the long train ride back to Michigan for a vacation and for surgery on her nasal passages (which didn't help). Domestically, Arnold was hopeless alone. It took him two hours to iron five white shirts, in the process knocking over the iron and burning his hand badly. He was working non-stop, sometimes from early morning to late night, preparing sermons, visiting parishioners, cleaning the church, helping with Boy Scouts, doing the Lord's work.

Arnold followed Kay east a month later for his first vacation ever. Before he left for Detroit, his last Sunday night sermon was entitled, "What is Truth?" Unfortunately, Pastor Schmidt's answer isn't recorded.

What is printed on the back of that Sunday's church bulletin, however, is an un-attributed quotation, which I can only assume must have been something close to the dream he had about his future son, "little Junior," a fantasy I came not even close to filling:

I go to church because I have a son. When his fresh young voice is lifted in the grand old hymns; when he hears the beautiful scripture message which he has been taught is the voice of God; when his head is bowed in reverence as we partake of the communion, I have faith to believe that his life will be different because he has caught a glimpse of something greater than himself.

They had decided it was time to have a baby, as Arnold mentioned in this letter to Kay, written in Yosemite National Park where he and friends were waiting for the evening's firefall show (hot embers dropped 3,000 feet from the top of Glacier Point):

I sure would like to come up here with my honey to enjoy this. Especially, if little Junior is to be started now would be the time [to travel] before complications of a baby come.

On Kay and Arnold's 1945 return trip home from Detroit, they stopped in Kansas to see his parents, and he preached sermons in a week of special services at the Elbing First Missionary Church. How satisfying that must have been, returning with his pretty young wife to the church of his somewhat-wayward youth, and now an up-and-coming preacher from exotic California.

No sooner had they returned to Denair, than Kay became pregnant (with me) in October. The next spring, her hay fever was worse than ever. On June 3, 1946, citing Kay's suffering as the reason, Arnold resigned, even before he found a job with another church, and even though his wife was eight months pregnant. He told his congregation:

In fairness to the one God has given me to love and care for, I know that you will understand my resignation.

On Sunday, June 30, the tiny Missionary Church in the 800-resident, proudly-religious farming town of Pandora, Ohio, voted "almost unanimously" to hire Arnold as their pastor. He immediately replied to their telegram:

Accept call to serve as pastor. Letter follows. Praying that we may be a blessing in your midst.

Four days later, I was born. Two months later, we moved to Ohio.

* * *

Over the coming decades, the joyousness of Kay's first years with Arnold slipped away. Something in her life became stifling, and, eventually, she lost hope of finding the contentment that her husband's religion promised. It always seemed to me that her restlessness and frequent nagging of her husband were symptoms of her unhappiness with life.

Her husband, the long-suffering minister, went along with it because that's what men do. Maybe any resentment was tempered by knowing how much his wife had given up to marry him; he was so unworthy. She was the refined daughter of a doctor from Detroit; he, a hayseed farm boy from the Kansas sticks.

Yet, there was his calling, always God's calling to carry him through whatever blues his wife brought. He gave her what she needed and what he thought he also wanted -- a family.

It's all God's will, he knew. Prayer, meditation, and, rarely, fasting brought my father through the worst times and confirmed to him the correctness of his life's choices in a way that my mother could never know for herself.

In a faded snapshot from 1947, the spring jonquils are in bloom behind my highchair, and my father poses next to me. No gray in his hair yet; he looks even younger than his 29 years. His white shirt is freshly starched and ironed. Perhaps it's after he just preached the Easter Sunday church service. Was he happy? What were his hopes for his baby boy? For himself?

What War?

In reading hundreds of pages from dozens of letters that my family exchanged in the first half of the 1940s, you find barely a hint that the world was aflame in World War II. Even those mentions are mostly of personal inconveniences caused by the war, such as in this letter from my mother to her parents in 1943:

We're having a weenie roast next Thursday. We have to crowd everything in before meat rationing.

And this one:

It sort of looks like we won't get home for Thanksgiving, if they ration gas Nov. 22.

And another:

Saturday I bought what I've wanted for ages -- a 2 lb box of Velveeta pimento cheese. I figured it was now or never... I heard you won't have to declare what you have on hand.

Except for passing mentions of friends or their husbands getting inducted, wounded, or killed, the war seems to have been an abstraction having no influence on thoughts or actions of any of my family. The war was -- well, just there.

Only when the war's impacts landed on their doorstep did my mother take notice, as in this June 22, 1943, letter. (The booming defense industry had brought to Detroit hundreds of thousands of poor, white Southerners looking for work.):

The race riot has subsided somewhat. It was certainly a serious affair. During the night the mob came pretty close to us. The folks heard the guns. The city was sure full of police and soldiers that came from Fort Custer to help. We've had a regular internal war here. Hundreds of people have been hurt and much property damaged.

Given my father's Mennonite roots and opposition to war (foreshadowing my own faked pacifism 25 years later to avoid the Vietnam War), it's not surprising that he didn't get drafted. He was exempt as a college divinity student, so he never had to seriously face the prospect of being a soldier.

In fact, the only Schmidt relative to see military service, to my knowledge, was a Kansas cousin of my father, Irvin Schmidt, who died of spinal meningitis on an Army base in the U.S. during the war (Dec. 1942).

I don't know what to make of my parents' (and their families') apparent indifference to the war. Despite the appalling slaughter and genocide underway at the time (poorly understood by most Americans at the time), they seem obsessed only with each other and saving souls for the Lord.

Aren't we lucky that you aren't in the army and that we would have to be separated all the time? The Lord has surely blessed us in this and in giving us such a cute little home and all. (Kay to Arnold letter, Mar. 6, 1944)

In one of my father's first sermons in California, he compared the life of a soldier with "a soldier of Christ." I know the hymn says onward Christian soldiers, but how could he have pretended he knew what war was really like?

Those, then, were my roots -- the unique history, genetics, and infinity of chance events that led to the creation of me. Every person who ever lived has their own. It's the miracle of life. And of love.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

### CHAPTER 3:  
FIRST LOVE

Diane was my first love, the girlfriend I grew up with during the most turbulent years of my life. That's why we could never last.

We met the summer after my freshman year in college, 1965. Gas cost 31 cents a gallon. Miniskirts were just introduced. The first draft cards were burned at UC Berkeley to protest the Vietnam War; President Johnson signed a law penalizing such action by up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine. Bob Dylan released Highway 61:

How does it feel  
To be on your own  
With no direction home  
Like a complete unknown  
Like a rolling stone

I ran into Diane's mother, Verna, at the wedding of my ex-girlfriend from high school in Flint. Verna had been my math teacher. I looked up to her, and she liked me because I was smart. After the wedding she invited me and a friend out to her house, a modest Cape Cod on a gravel road in flat farming country, outlined by brushy fence lines and dotted by woodlots. Verna was the first liberal intellectual I had ever met, although neither of us would have thought of her in those terms at the time. She served us snacks and pop and we listened to 33 rpm hi-fi records with Leonard Bernstein conducting George Gershwin -- beautiful music like nothing I'd ever heard.

Nor had I ever met such a beauty as her daughter, Diane. Fifteen years old. Vivacious. Blond. Smart. A dancer, cheerleader, and gymnast. Plus, she had been raised by Verna, which I figured had to make her an interesting person.

Shortly before heading back to college, I asked Diane out. Like a scene from a bad teen movie, I first rehearsed my lines over and over, picking up the rotary phone to call, dialing part way, hanging up, repeating. When I finally screwed up my courage, "I was wondering if you would like to...," she made it easy.

For our first date, we drove out to a secluded field in the Hadley Hills near Flint, where I had previously made a campfire ring of rocks and gathered wood. I started the fire, wizard-like, with gasoline from a hidden jar, and we huddled in the moonlight next to the campfire with a blanket wrapped around us and talked until it was past time for her to be home. Driving back, the Beatles sang Yesterday from the AM radio of my parents' big blue Oldsmobile.

Then I went back to college -- Michigan Tech, 530 miles away in Houghton in the western end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula (the "U.P.") -- and Diane went back to her Swartz Creek high school as a junior. The first letter I sent her I signed "Love, Wayne."

I told her about finding a special place along Lake Superior, a half-hour bike ride from campus:

Atop a sand hill there are two pines right on the edge to lean back against and look out over the lake down to the shore and see the spray crashing about 20 feet high in the wind, and then north up the shore as it curves out with the trees in full autumn color -- no houses, no people, no trash, just white sand. I'll save that place; maybe sometime you can share it.

And five days later:

I'm sitting on that cliff I told you about with the North Star straight over the lake. There is a brisk wind coming off the water so the waves are really crashing into the sand. It's just too beautiful to imagine. I wish I could remember that poem by Emily Dickinson that starts out "Wild night, wild nights..."

I'm lying under those beautiful old pine trees with a fire burning in a little hollow. The full moon has risen back in the woods, burning so brightly it almost hurts to look at it. It reminds me of once atop a hill in Hadley. You can watch the rollers coming onto the beach on a little angle and breaking in a continuous line, like falling dominoes, all the way out of sight. The moonlight strikes the white water and lights it as luminous paint.

From my solitary night perch over Lake Superior, I confessed that I really didn't like college: "I am fast coming to realize that only at times like this, right now, am I ever going to be, I can't say happy, but I guess contented would be the right word."

My purple prose sounds, in distant retrospect, remarkable similar to words my Grandfather Vaught wrote to his first love, back in 1915, telling her proud tales of rabbit hunting and dogs. Is it a genetic thing?

That fall and winter I regularly bummed rides or hitchhiked the thousand-mile round trip between Houghton and Flint, often to see Diane for just a few hours. I would leave school on Friday afternoon, sometimes in snow storms (Houghton got more than 300 inches of snow that winter), and hitchhike all night across the U.P.'s desolation, then south on I-75, and then reverse the trip on Sunday. Is there a lonelier scene than standing alone in the dark with your thumb out on a deserted intersection on US-2, snow howling sideways across the U.P. swamps, a car passing every 15 minutes or so?

Diane had the starring role in The Nutcracker ballet, being performed at Flint's Whiting Auditorium during my Christmas break. She was beautiful on stage, but it was a place where she seemed out of my reach. It was very confusing for me. I became jealous of the adoration my girlfriend was getting from strangers. It was threatening; I pouted and acted peevishly, plagued by insecurities and churlish possessiveness.

Maybe that's why our long-distant romance cooled; we didn't see each other for much of a year. After two years at Michigan Tech, I transferred in the fall of 1966 to Michigan State University in East Lansing and started hanging out with her brother, Al, who was in school there. (Al and I discovered marijuana at about this same time. The three of us became lifelong friends.) Before long, Diane was back in my life.

### Light My Fire

Diane's home in Swartz Creek was less than an hour from MSU. By winter, we were in love. I would hitchhike to visit her. I wrote her sappy letters:

All that matters in the world to me, like completely, is that it is spring, I'm in love with you, and I am loved in return. I'm not sure that anything could ever become more important than that. With you by my side there is reason to open my eyes in the morning, however empty the day may appear.

That's what getting laid for the first time will do to you. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but it was classic '60s. We were in a single bed in a hippie house with lava lamps and psychedelic lights flowing over the walls, The Doors played on a stereo in the next room:

You know that it would be untrue  
You know that I would be a liar  
If I was to say to you  
Girl, we couldn't get much higher  
Come on baby, light my fire  
Come on baby, light my fire  
Try to set the night on fire

I opened my first-ever condom pack in the dim bedroom and fumbled with it, worried that my fingernail may have ripped the latex. What did I know? To be safe, I threw it out and gingerly opened a second. Life as I knew it would never be the same.

I was still a virgin at age 20 because until then I hadn't known how to get any rubbers. That sounds silly, but it wasn't like now when you can go into any Walmart and buy condoms right off the shelf. Back then, they were only sold behind the counter, so you had to ask the pharmacist. Seems easy enough, but not for an ignorant teenager. What kind do you ask for? Brand? Variety? Are there sizes? I didn't have anyone I could ask such questions. There was no Google. But it turns out, it was as simple as "a pack of Trojans, please."

* * *

My prophylactic predicament was mainly why my high school girlfriend, Karen, and I never "went all the way." Lots of dry humping out behind our parsonage in the dark, inside the church bus. And late-night, lights out, heavy petting sessions on the couch after her parents, Manley and Anita, went upstairs. I suspected that they would have been just fine with their daughter getting knocked up by the son of their preacher man.

Karen and I met at church, which was omnipresent in both our lives, so it was natural for us to go steady (as was the teen romance norm). She was cute, a cheerleader, and bright. Mostly, though, she was available and liked me. How did I manage to check myself, a horny teenage boy, from screwing her? Lord knows, Karen seemed willing, good Christian girl though she was.

I just knew, however, that getting her pregnant would ruin my life. I didn't know where I was heading, but I sure didn't want life to dead-end with Karen in Flint, Michigan. So, I took no chances, even if it meant extended bouts of blue balls.

It's not like I had a lot of other options for romance.

I was so shy, so inept socially that most girls I was attracted to were unapproachable. A few dates, a few kisses -- that had been about it.

My ineptitude started early. In third grade, a friend and I had crushes on our classmate, Patty. To win her attention, we rode our bikes down the gravel road in front of her house and staged spectacular crashes. To my knowledge, our little heartthrob never noticed.

During one term in college, I was infatuated with a cute little blond coed who lived in the women's side of my dorm. In the dining room, I would smile at her, and she would smile back. I would sit in my second-floor window above the dorm's entrance and wait for her to walk by just to exchange waves. Not once did I get up the nerve to actually talk to her.

Where would I have learned how to approach girls? I grew up in a church-centered family just one generation removed from insular Mennonite sects homesteading the prairies of Kansas. No dancing. No rock and roll. No movies. No alcohol. Nothing remotely sexual allowed.

While I was in high school, against my father's better judgment, he agreed to let my mother have a subscription to Life magazine. That subscription, however, would start and then be cancelled periodically by my father, depending on how racy he judged its recent content. As Christ's censor, he religiously snagged each week's edition from our mailbox before I got home from school. Anything he judged sexy -- bikinis or skin-baring fashion were taboo -- would be scissored into the trash. That only whetted my interest, of course, and missing pages always sent me straight to the library to check out the sinful photos.

The early era of television in our home was a spiritual challenge. Usually, The Ed Sullivan Show was safe. The first few minutes of The Jackie Gleason Show definitely were not. Ralph and Alice were okay, but that weekly opening display by the June Taylor Dancers was too racy. All those exposed Rockettish legs kicking and luring.

Har har, hardee har har! (Ralph Kramden)

One thing I never understood about my Mennonite ancestors: On the one hand, sexual pleasure was repressed. On the other hand, they sure managed to do it a lot, judging by their proliferation, as I noted in chapter two.

I've done some dumb things in my life, but keeping my dick dry with my high school sweetheart wasn't one of them. Karen ended up marrying a young hillbilly preacher named Floyd, Jr. They moved some place remote and cold in New England where people were so desperate to hear about God that they would support Floyd, Jr. and his growing family.

I ran into Karen at my ten-year high school reunion in 1974. She fancied herself a gospel singer, and she and Floyd had found some way to cut record albums of her singing. Along a wall of the high school gymnasium, Karen had set up a card table with a stack of her records that she was trying to sell. It was very hard to keep a straight face when she flashed her toothy smile and asked me to buy one. "You'll really like it, I think, Wayne." Her big brown eyes, attractive in a teenager, now bugged out with the love of Jesus.

"Thanks, but no, I wouldn't listen to it," I said, and made my escape.

### Summer of Love

I planned to spend the Summer of Love (1967) hitchhiking around the country. Diane would have graduated from high school, and I saw no reason why she shouldn't come with me. Her mother had a different opinion, pointing out that such travel with a 17-year-old girl wasn't even legal.

On a Saturday morning in June, Diane dropped me on I-75 near Flint. I thumbed away, alone and pining for her the entire journey. From Glacier National Park in Montana, I wrote her:

I'm cold and damp from taking pictures in the rain, I haven't eaten yet today, most of my food is gone, I am completely alone, the park trails I came to climb are impassable from snow, and yet my spirits are 10,000 feet high, strangely enough. If nothing else were changed except that you were here beside me in the tent, listing to the hammering of the rain and hail, huddled together munching on my last chocolate bars, I should rather think I would explode with ecstasy.

Two weeks later in California, writing the day before my 21st birthday from the back of a van full of hippies heading to Big Sur, I told her about my new idea to return to Michigan, pick her up, and go back to California before school started in the fall:

The details aren't too important. We could make them up as we go. What would we do out here? I don't know, just live, I guess. Exist. Money will be a problem but not that much of one.

I told her the San Francisco Bay area was "heaven." The return address I put on the envelope was: "Flowers-in-Hair Land, U.S.A."

Hitchhiking through Reno

We didn't get to heaven that summer, nor did I explode in ecstasy. Instead, back in Michigan, I hitchhiked with her brother, Al, from East Lansing to the world's fair in Montreal, Expo '67, a pathetic tale for a later telling.

The month I graduated from MSU, December 1967, Al, Crazy Rick (a friend from high school), and I bought a house in Lansing: 226 South Hayford Ave. It cost $13,500; the "Hayford House" would be my anchor for good and ill for the next two decades. Diane's mother loaned each of us enough to make the down payment.

While Al and I had gone to college after high school, Rick had joined the Navy. He quickly discovered his mistake and spent the next year convincing them he was crazy and got himself a general discharge. That's how he came to be known as "Crazy Rick." Turned out, though, he really was crazy.

Once done with college, I got a job as an animal caretaker in an MSU epidemiology research lab, dodged the draft, and rode my bicycle to work all winter and through the spring of 1968. Meanwhile, Diane had started college with a dance major at MSU. I planned my next odyssey for the coming summer, this time with Diane. This time, her mother couldn't stop us. We would get a "drive-away" car to the West Coast (a service where a company pays your gas expenses to drive someone's car one-way). Then, we would hitchhike north to Vancouver and east across Canada to get home. Piece of cake!

### Hippies, Not Communists

I moaned into the night. Lightning continuously lit the girders of the power line tower above. Otherwise, nothing but Saskatchewan wheat fields cloaked waterlogged black muck to the horizon in every direction.

The torrent of rain soaked me. I was up to my ankles in mud, trying to find a way to secure our pup tent's stakes. Diane was huddled inside, wrapped in soggy sleeping bags as the tent collapsed about her in the wind. Lightning flashed. I howled at the rain-clogged sky, hoping she couldn't hear my crazed panic.

All day, we had ridden through summer storms, hitchhiking east across the Trans-Canada Highway. At sunset, a trucker had dropped us at an empty crossroads. On the plains' horizon, the next round of thunderstorms was moving in on us. We hiked off the highway up a power line road cutting through the wheat fields, set up camp, and tried to sleep. By midnight the thunderstorm swept over us, pounding our meager tent into submission.

That dreadful night did end. We packed our sodden gear and caught a fresh ride, which carried us out of the rain and prairies and into the welcoming cover of Ontario's forests. By the time we hit the U.S. border crossing station at Sault Ste. Marie, we felt human again, but must have looked shady to authorities.

"Unpack it all," the border guard said, pointing to our muddy backpacks. I gave him my best sympathy-seeking smile and said, "It is such a job re-packing everything." That was true, but what really worried me was that he would find my stash of six .22 bullets, which would lead him to ask whether I had a gun, which would lead to a strip search, which would uncover the tiny snub-nosed revolver (serial numbers filed off) stuffed uncomfortably down my underwear, which would send me to jail. He looked at us, sighed, then smacked the packs with his hand and dismissed us with a "go ahead."

Back in the USA, we no sooner got dropped at an I-75 exit when a border patrol car with two intensely suspicious cops pulled up. Damn, I thought, here we've safely hitchhiked from Seattle, crossed the Canadian border four times and now 200 miles from home we've got to deal with these guys? The one in the passenger seat leaned out his window.

"What are you? One of them hippie-Yippies?"

No, just students seeing the country for the summer, I professed.

"Are you a Communist?" he asked.

"Of course not. Why would you ask that?"

He pointed at my mid-section. "Where'd you get that?"

I looked down at my belt buckle. Ouch! A big bronze star with a hammer and sickle. A genuine USSR Army belt buckle, given to me by Charlie Cranmore, a vet friend from high school who had swapped it from a Soviet soldier on a train in West Germany, I explained. Finally, the cops let us go on our way.

Hippies, sure. But Communists? No way.

I shift my course along the breeze;  
Won't sail upwind on memories.  
The empty sky is my best friend,  
And I just cast my fate to the wind. (Carel Werber)

While not exactly casting our fate to the wind, our hitchhiking trip had been about as close as we could get. It hadn't been all mud and surly cops. We had picked up our Buick sedan from the drive-away company in Detroit, and headed west on I-94. We splashed naked in a South Dakota reservoir and hiked in the Badlands.

We backpacked in the wilds of Yellowstone National Park. I wore a red bandana headband and Levis with a needlepoint hummingbird that Diane had sewn on one leg. She wore her blond hair long under a flowery scarf.

We dropped our car in Seattle and bought bus tickets to Vancouver. Just over the border the Canadian customs men told us (politely) that we couldn't come into their country because we didn't have enough money. We headed back south on secondary roads because they told us not to hitchhike on the freeway. A nice old lady picked us up, heading to her cottage in the San Juan Islands for the weekend. She invited us along, taking the car ferry to her island. We set up our tent in her yard. She fixed us meals, and we walked around the island picking and eating thimbleberries. For the long life to come for that cheap little tent, it carried purple berry stains marking that idyllic weekend.

After leaving the island, we spent a nervous Sunday night camped in a scruffy vacant lot on the outskirts of Everett, Washington. In the morning, we headed east on US-2. Rides took us to Glacier National Park, a return for me that realized my prior summer's dream of being there with my love. We hiked into Canada, over the sheer mountain trail crossing snow fields and cliffs along the Continental Divide, and were waved through customs in Waterton, Alberta. From there we thumbed east into that awful rain and mud of Saskatchewan.

Before we left Canada, we camped on a cobble beach on the eastern edge of Lake Superior. We got clean in its icy water, and toasted marshmallows over our lakeside campfire.

As a couple, we had survived our dangerous travels of first love, and now were poised between romantic fantasy and reality.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

CHAPTER 4:  
LOOKING FOR WAYNE

I began the year of 1968 with no more student draft deferment and with a useless college degree in geology. "Ripping holes in the earth," as I saw the role of a geologist, wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. At age 21, I had no job, no prospects, and no future. I did have a plan for what mattered most -- staying out of the Army and the killing jungles of Vietnam. Later, I would blame the war for my bad behavior during those painful years.

### Goodbye, Vietnam

The Vietnam War affected everything for my generation. When I hit the draftable age of 18, what was going on in Southeast Asia and Washington, D.C., suddenly was of mortal interest. I didn't want to get shot, especially for no good reason. I could find no justification for that war; everything about it was obscene.

To actually commit to that belief, though -- to act on it -- meant defying parents, society, government, and laws in life-altering ways. My college student draft deferment expired when I graduated from Michigan State University at the end of 1967, a time when the war was killing guys just like me at the rate of 1,000 every month. Thousands more maimed for life. I was prime cannon fodder. What to do?

I had seen first-hand the growing anti-war sentiment when I hitchhiked the prior year through San Francisco during the Summer of Love of 1967. That fall in Washington, D.C., at the March on the Pentagon, I resolved that I would never let myself get drafted.

Four of us had driven to D.C. from Lansing -- me with Al, Rob, and Crazy Rick (l. to r.):

We gathered on the National Mall, at least 50,000 of us (mythology says 100,000), and listened to long-since-forgotten speeches and music from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Overhead, noisy jets came and went from the airport, just as they do today. The air was electrified -- October 21, 1967.

We marched two miles across the Potomac River to the Pentagon, crossing the Memorial Bridge, behind a banner -- SUPPORT OUR G.I.s . . . BRING THEM HOME NOW! -- and chanting: Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?

When our march reached the Pentagon, an exorcism was performed, conceived in part by master, hippie, performance-art showman Abbie Hoffman. I climbed a tree, watching demonstrators led by acid-tripping Abbie in an Uncle Sam outfit, who were chanting ancient Aramaic exorcism rites to make the Pentagon levitate 300 feet in the air and turn orange and vibrate, thereby driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Vietnam. The fortress was ringed with helmeted U.S. marshals and soldiers with bayonet-spiked rifles. None of them smiled even when hippies stuck flowers in their gun barrels.

At dusk, little fires started -- flares in the up-raised hands of boys who in ones and twos and threes lit their draft cards. Instant felons. I didn't burn my draft card then, but after that day, I never could let myself get sent to kill people in Vietnam. I experienced in that march the collective power of a rightness that eventually would force an end to that insane war. It was more than just an issue of fairness or patriotism or legality or even morality. It was common sense. I knew that getting maimed or killed in that war would have been stupid.

Abbie's exorcism of the Pentagon didn't work, a bunch of protestors got beat up and arrested, and eventually everyone else got cold and left.

Years later, I would meet Abbie and conspire with him, using his skills and infamy to help protect the Great Lakes from some major government mischief. Decades later, a plane would crash into the Pentagon not far from where those boys burned their draft cards; I would be living with my family and working just 20 miles away. One summer day, the war long past, sun sparkling in my boat's wake, I would pull my kids waterskiing under that same Potomac River bridge that we marched across in my lost, turbulent youth.

Back on that chilly day in 1967, everything looked bleak, including my own future. My first draft-dodging step was to ask the federal government to declare me a conscientious objector. C.O.'s could still get drafted, but they didn't have to fight. Some didn't even have to go into the Army for their two years. I figured being the son of a preacher man gave my plan an edge: pacifism was in my Mennonite roots. I did the research, wrote a paper, submitted the forms, and exploited the hell out of my otherwise-ignored family religion.

The local draft board didn't buy it, as I expected, and turned down my C.O. application. I appealed to the state draft board. They called me for a personal interview in Flint, where three retired military white men with crew cuts grilled me on the ethics of refusing to serve my country. No, I would not fight back if Hitler was raping my sister, I said, knowing from my research all the trick questions and all the correct answers. No, I wouldn't fight in any war; it wasn't just about this one in Vietnam.

It was easy to lie to people who wanted to send me to Southeast Asia to kill and maim people. I agreed with Muhammad Ali: "I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong." I felt deep in my bones that the war was abominable, abhorrent. I could never let myself be connected with it.

The state draft board's vote was 2-1. I got my C.O. status.

Uncle Sam still wanted me, however, even if now he couldn't make me carry a gun and kill "gooks." A notice to report for my Army draft physical came in early 1968. I went down to the induction center at Fort Wayne in Detroit, where I was poked, prodded, and measured, "leaving no part untouched," as Arlo Guthrie sang in Alice's Restaurant. I had a letter from a doctor documenting my genuine hernia so they sent me on my way with a temporary medical deferment. Three months later, I got called back for another physical. The Army knew that eventually I would have to get my hernia repaired, then, Hello, Vietnam!

That's what led me to concoct (so to speak) Plan B. In those years, the Army wouldn't draft homosexuals, so I decided to convince them I was gay. Which was ironic since I had no gay friends and, shamefully, had pretty much been a "queer" bigot up until then. My dodge-the-draft strategy was prompted by meeting some gays that Crazy Rick had starting hanging with at the college Union Building. I tagged along, and from the uncomfortable fringes, picked up as much as I could about gay life in East Lansing. I watched, read, listened, and for the first time learned a lot.

For my return trip to the Army's Fort Wayne, I borrowed black, pointy-toed zipper boots; tight-fitting black polyester pants; and a flowery fake-silk shirt. This time, they skipped the naked poking, prodding, and measuring and sent me straight to see a doctor. He asked me if I had gotten my hernia fixed ("no"), then quickly filled out papers and started to send me back out the door when I stopped him.

"Are you going to just keep bringing me back here every three months, waiting for me to fix this hernia?" I asked.

"Yep, and letting that go is pretty dangerous," he said, dismissively.

Compared to Vietnam? I thought.

"Then there's something else I've got to tell you. You don't want me anyway."

"Why's that?"

I hemmed and hawed and finally confessed, "Well, I'm gay."

He actually rolled his eyes. But whether skeptical or disgusted, he wrote me an order to see an Army shrink the next day.

Show time! Sashaying in my gay clothes down the long hallway leading to the reception area, taps in my boot heels clicking on the polished tile, I passed an endless line of future draftees, naked but for their socks and skivvies. Whistles and cat-calls followed me, echoing down the hall. Sweat rolled down my forehead and back. Whistle all you want you poor stupid fucks, I said to myself. Your sorry asses are headed to Vietnam to get shot off, and my pretty ass is out of here.

Assuming I could convince the shrink the next day. The Army bused me and a handful of other nut cases to a seedy hotel in downtown Detroit for the night. My cuckoo roommate and I went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the big-screen Cinerama. As if life at that moment wasn't surreal enough.

Back on the Army base the next morning, I killed the hours fretting in my now-stinky, wrinkled, uncomfortable gay clothes (I hadn't expected an overnight trip), waiting for my 12:30 appointment to see the shrink. A half-hour before the appointed time, I crossed the lawn and ducked behind a barracks. I needed a private moment to psych myself up for the performance of my life. Reminding myself what was at stake, I embraced my gayness. I went over again what I would say and tried to put myself in character, to feel gay, to be gay. This performance would determine what I would do for at least two years of my life. The stakes could have been, literally, life or death. How many amateur actors get to perform under that kind of pressure?

The shrink asked me a bunch of questions that I no longer recall, except for one that I was ready for: "Tell me what a typical day is like for you as a homosexual." I yammered on about hanging out with friends, trying to feign vague embarrassment at my lifestyle. I underplayed my gayness, remembering a cardinal gay rule: A person isn't defined by their sexual orientation. I figured it wasn't necessary to demonstrate overt, swishy gayness. When I walked out of the shrink's office, I had no idea if he had believed me or not.

Late in the day at my final processing table, an Army guy was scanning my medical report. Reading it upside-down, I saw the shrink's diagnosis: "Non-aggressive sociopathic sex deviant." Hey, don't forget the hernia.

I thought I detected a look of revulsion as the guy stamped "I-Y" (draftable only in case of declared wartime emergency) on my forms. Bam! Goodbye, Vietnam! A year later in an unexpected surprise, a new draft card stamped "4-F" came in the mail. Like winning the lottery, I was non-draftable under any circumstances.

Forty years later, the brilliant Robert McNamara, architect of that damned war as U.S. Defense Secretary, died at 93. He had long ago concluded that he had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war. That was, of course, after 58,236 guys like the ones lined up in their skivvies in Fort Wayne, plus several million Vietnamese, were killed for nothing. A generation scarred forever. Fuck McNamara.

During that long, ugly year of 1968 that I dodged the draft, I had a short, ugly job caring for research animals at a lab in the MSU Department of Epidemiology. Unlike draftees, all the animals were white. White rats, white mice, white rabbits, white ducks, and white chickens. White professors. We wore white lab coats. It made all the blood so obvious.

The animals were injected with diseases for experiments seeking a cure for malaria. When the animals were used up, we took out their blood to infect new animals. The trick was to keep the animal alive as long as possible, while slowly sucking out its blood with a long hypodermic needle. I would hold the animal upside down on its back while one of the scientists would poke the needle through its chest directly into its heart. There's an art to finding such little hearts with the end of a big needle, while not killing the poor creatures in the process. As long as the heart beats, it spurts blood into the hypo. Once it stops, blood quits moving and is wasted.

Rabbits were the hardest. They couldn't know what was coming, but they knew it was nothing good. They always screamed wildly the last time you took them from their cage. If you were in the next room and didn't know better, you would swear a baby was being beaten. How strange, watching something die in your hands as you deliberately drain its blood. That's what I was doing while other guys just like me were bathed in their own blood in Vietnam's jungles.

Every guy I knew back then, however, managed to dodge the draft and the killing one way or another. Phil (one of my roommates) simply went to his draft physical after eating massive quantities of psychedelic mushrooms, and let nature take its deranged, hallucinogenic course. One night after the war was over, the draft ended, and the killing mostly stopped, Phil and I were working together quietly in his garage-wood shop in East Lansing. Without fanfare, we took out our draft cards with our bogus deferments and burned them on the concrete floor. Like so many of our decisions in those days, it just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

### Bad Shit

Our Hayford House, the place that Al, Crazy Rick, and I bought in December 1967, got real crowded. It had three tiny bedrooms upstairs, plus one over the garage -- an add-on to the 1912-era, cheaply-built house. We needed roommates to help pay the mortgage of $90 a month.

For a while, there were a dozen people living together. In the upstairs bedrooms: me and Diane, Al and June, and Crazy Rick and his teenybopper girlfriend. Gene and Annie lived in the back bedroom that in winter never got above freezing. They made candles for a living in the garage below using two huge galvanized tanks full of melted wax, heated nonstop by propane burners. Phil built pull-down stairs to the house's unfinished attic, laid boards over the rafters, and lived up there with Lori. John and Cheri slept on the living room couch. Plus, there were Al and June's two constantly shedding malamutes and assorted other pets.

We smoked weed every day. Hash was plentiful. We took LSD and ate mushrooms.

We stole a lot of stuff, including much of our food. Diane went along with the shoplifting but wasn't very good at it. The local market banned her after she got caught with purloined hot dogs in her purse, when she opened it in the checkout lane to pay for a can of soup.

We stole for the thrill of it; the risk of getting caught was a rush. It was a shortcut to get things we thought we needed (and deserved). I had a contest with Al to see who could steal the most books from the stores in East Lansing in one afternoon. I won with a big stack of paperbacks. It was easy. I stole lots of poetry books -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and other voices of the '60s like Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut.

My future friend, Abbie Hoffman, wrote a book in 1970 called Steal This Book (which I never did steal).

The book advocates rebelling against authority in all forms, governmental and corporate. Hoffman referred to the American Empire as the 'Pig Empire,' saying that it was not immoral to steal from the 'Pig Empire'; in fact, Hoffman wrote, it was immoral not to do so. (Wikipedia)

Whether or not Abbie was serious (which I doubt), it's exactly what we did and why we did it. We were opportunists. If we saw an unlocked window on a campus building, we would climb in to see what we could steal. We stole a mountain of vinyl record albums from an unlocked campus radio station. One night, Crazy Rick rushed home to report that he had spotted A/V equipment waiting to be picked up outside a classroom building. We drove there in Phil's van, grabbed three slide projectors and two huge projector screens, and drove away. Later, I gave one of the screens to my dad for his church. I wonder if Jesus appreciated the irony.

At the time, it was hard to feel too guilty about my sins. If every institution supported the immoral Vietnam War where innocent people were being slaughtered every day, then why should any of society's rules or mores be respected?

"Fuck 'em all," was my answer.

With that attitude, I was managing to get through life, but not happily. The draft was out of the way. I had gotten my hernia fixed. I had a college degree. I had a nice girlfriend. But what was I going to do with my life? I hadn't a clue and felt like I was running out of time to figure it out. Nothing seemed to go right. I worried about going to jail for all the bad shit I was doing. Yet, those troubled years eventually taught me a most important life lesson. I learned about karma: What goes around comes around.

At the time, my dream was to get on a motorcycle and just ride away from my empty life in Michigan. Oh, oh...

### Living Life My Way

Going down that long lonesome highway  
Gonna live life my way.

That TV theme song was where I wanted to be in 1969 when Then Came Bronson aired. For 26 episodes, cool Jim Bronson rode his Harley Sportster from one adventure to the next. In the opening sequence each week, Bronson pulled up to a red light in San Francisco next to a tired commuter in a pork pie hat.

Driver: "Taking a trip?"  
Bronson, leaning over to the car window: "What's that?"  
Driver: "Taking a trip?"  
Bronson: "Yeah."  
Driver: "Where to?"  
Bronson: "Oh, I don't know. Wherever I end up, I guess."  
Driver: "Man, I wish I was you."  
Bronson: "Really?"  
Driver: "Yeah."  
Bronson: "Well, hang in there."

And off Bronson roars, across the beach, through the surf, and down the California coast highway. Salt and sand are never a problem for his motorcycle. His gas tank is never empty. His back never hurts. When his bike accidentally rolls into a lake, he can take it apart and have it running by morning with only the tools in his bedroll. Best of all, his Harley never breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

There is a fine line between dreams and nightmares, a truth that I would be years learning. All my motorcycles were nightmares.

Take my first one, a red and silver Honda 305cc dirt bike. In the spring of 1967, my college roommate had a brother at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who had a motorcycle that he wanted to get home. He said if I would drive it to Michigan, I could keep it until summer. Spring break, I hitchhiked east to Georgetown. Late that first evening, he unlocked the Honda in a parking lot. It was dark and raining. I had never been on a motorcycle. I had never been in Washington, D.C. With a couple of instructions, off I went on my maiden motorcycle ride.

A few blocks later, a D.C. police car pulled me over. After checking my Michigan driver's license and hearing my tale, he informed me that it wasn't legal for me to be driving a bike in D.C. with a Pennsylvania license plate and a Michigan driver's license. Luckily, he just sent me on my way. Obviously, he hadn't noticed (nor had I at the time) that the license plate was expired. And, as I learned months later, stolen. I never knew if the Honda was hot, too, but it probably was.

In the morning, I saddled up for my 600-mile ride to Michigan. The rain had stopped, a relief since the bike had no front fender. Once I hit the mountains, it turned cold. I had a helmet with a visor, but no motorcycle clothes, just my down jacket, cotton long underwear, and hiking boots. I took the scenic route through Pennsylvania. It was slower than the turnpike, but I figured the views would be better.

Coming down the west slope of the mountains, I noticed a scraping noise under the bike. I tried to lean into a long gentle curve and realized that the kickstand had come down and was sticking out, preventing me from leaning left to steer left. I hit the shoulder at 70 mph. Soaked from the earlier rain, the mud slowed me quickly as I fishtailed down the bank, finally falling over. I checked for damages. The air filter cover had been torn off, but otherwise no apparent damage.

I seemed okay, too. I kept thinking of the drop-offs on the mountain switchbacks just a few miles past and got flutters in my stomach imagining myself flying into space. I pushed the bike back to the pavement, wired the kickstand to stay up, and headed west into the quickly disappearing sun. By the time I reached Toledo, it was pitch dark and light snow was falling on I-75. I don't know how I made the last hundred miles to Flint that night. Never before or since have I been so cold for so long.

Budding "Bronson" & sister Karen

The next year I bought my own black, 250cc Harley-Davidson. I tried to take trips on it in Michigan, but it was uncomfortable, underpowered, and never ran well. By the spring of 1969, I had saved enough money to buy a real motorcycle. I debated long between practical and cool, between a dependable BMW road bike and a Harley Sportster (like Bronson's). Why settle for practical, I reasoned. I went with cool. So I thought.

To Grandma, Love -- Wayne '69 reads the note on the corner of the 8x10 black & white photo. I got it back after she died. Lord knows why I had sent it to her, that frail white-haired Kansas farm widow of my fire-and-brimstone preacher-grandfather. I stare out unsmiling from behind Woody Allen glasses, bare-faced, short hair -- I was a school teacher at the time. That clean-cut image is jarred by my leather jacket and the glistening motorcycle I'm leaning against -- my brand-new, ocean-blue Harley-Davidson Sportster.

Michigan's late-winter snow covered the ground. My first trip would be somewhere warm, traveling like Bronson with bedroll and saddlebags. Easter break, I headed south for the Texas coast.

I suspected right off that my Harley was a lemon but couldn't bear to admit it. I figured its oil-burning would go away after it got broken in properly. But it got so bad that I had to add a quart of oil every time I stopped for gas, which was at least every 90 miles since that was far as the Harley's 2.2-gallon teardrop gas tank would take me.

It rained hard. A lot. I was wet and cold. The first night I camped under a freeway overpass, sleeping on the flat concrete up under the bridge. Eventually, I saw some of Texas \-- actually, it's so damned flat you can see all you need to see from just about any spot in that butt-ugly state. Worried about my bike, I gave up trying to reach the Gulf of Mexico and turned east for New Orleans.

Intending to camp for the night, I drove down a two-track path that ran under a high-voltage power line. As I bounced along, the mud got worse. Ahead was a puddle about 20 feet across. I decided (like Bronson would have done) to run it. Half-way across, the bottom dropped out and I stalled in muck and two feet of water. There I was, alone, soaked with mud, miles from the highway in who-knows-where Texas, the sun dropping fast, swarms of mosquitoes attacking me, and my motorcycle dead.

I could stand the Harley up, but the mud was too deep for me to push its 450-pound hulk forward or backward. I laid the bike on its side in the water and started cutting branches with my hatchet. I would jam them underwater into the mud under the tires, stand the bike upright and then lay it down on its other side. Next, I would bring in more branches, and repeat. Eventually, I inched the bike high enough out of the mud that I was able to wrestle it out of the quagmire.

I, the bike, and all my gear were caked in Texas mud with no way of getting clean. I kicked down on the Harley's starter. Nothing. I pulled out my pup tent and went to sleep.

In the morning, miraculously, the bike did start and I went on to New Orleans for a quick tour and then east across Louisiana's swamps into Mississippi. The bike was drinking oil faster than ever, however, until finally it was clear that I had to get it fixed. I found an old Harley shop in Meridian, Mississippi, and told the mechanic my plight. He was certain that new piston rings would set me straight, and, yes, they would do it on warrantee, but, no, they didn't have the parts in stock. He figured he could get them by bus from Jackson, Alabama, the next day.

That night, I slept in a ramshackle, grease-caked tool shed out back of the shop, rain dripping on my head, with my pretty blue motorcycle inside in pieces. Late the next day, I was on my way with newly-installed piston rings. The oil problem was worse than ever. Within the first hundred miles, I knew that my motorcycle was dying and would never make it north to Michigan. Die it did, just as the sun set over the Mississippi countryside. I pushed the motorcycle up to the nearest house and talked the family into letting me set up my tent in their yard. In the morning, I left the bike in their garage and hitchhiked 900 miles home to Lansing.

Roommate Phil drove his van and a trailer that I rented ("for local hauling only") nonstop back to Mississippi, and we carted the bike home. That Harley never did get fixed right, despite endless weeks at the dealer where I had bought it. By fall, I had had enough. I found a junky friend of a friend willing to "take it off my hands." I turned the bike over to him in East Lansing, and my friend, Dennis, and I got on his motorcycle and rode to Detroit. We spent a morning at a park, then reported my motorcycle stolen to the police. Eventually, my insurance company paid me $1,750.

While I suffered through motorcycle woes, my girlfriend, Diane, went west for the summer to stay with her brother, Charles, in Palo Alto. I intended to ride a motorcycle out to see her. I wrote her:

So with only $200 more I can buy a new Harley Sportster. Maybe I am really stupid to be buying another Sportster, but I will most likely do it anyway. The only other bike I would be thinking of would be a BMW, but I looked at one up close the other day and they are SO ugly.

There was no "maybe" about it; I was really stupid. I went to the Harley dealer in Flint and bought a new blue Sportster identical to the one that had been "stolen." I hoped my first Harley lemon had just been a fluke.

No such luck. This time, it was the transmission. Gears kept breaking and shredding inside the transmission cover. More trips back to the shop for more months of repairs.

Finally fixed, that Harley caught up with me the next year living in San Francisco. From that point on, it ran fairly reliably, breaking down again just one time. Not counting (as I'll describe more fully later in this chapter) when I slid it off the road with Diane on the back, racing a sports car north on the Pacific Coast Highway. Or when I rear-ended a car stopped in a freeway backup in San Francisco and caved in my front forks. Ah, yes: going down that long lonesome highway, gonna live life my way.

### Summer Days -- 1969

There's some truth to the saying, "Anyone who says they remember the '60s wasn't really there." The following bulleted gems, however, are genuine -- from letters that I wrote to Diane:

* Last night Al and I went into campus and picked him up a ten-speed bike. After that we went riding around the campus and city. We rode around Frandor shopping center and climbed the fence to slide on the super-slide there. Riding through Brody dorm complex there was one fantastic falling star that slowly moved all the way across the sky. Then we ripped off a watermelon from in front of Packer's and went back to Hayford for a feast.

* Tonight I broiled five dollars of steak that Rick had lifted sometime back. All I had eaten in the last two days had been watermelon and Frito's.

* Getting high, watching cartoons and movies. We went shoplifting again, and I got another four books. My bicycle tire blew out. That is two tubes this week. I got African Genesis, Poems of Robison Jeffers, another Gary Snyder book, and San Francisco at Your Feet.

* Spent day at cottage "talking" to my parents. Such ignorance, such lackluster approach to the business of living, such stifled mores. This stifling atmosphere. Being here is like someone has a vise clamped to my brain, squeezing out its vitals to tromp them into the sewer. So much sadness, so many rules, so much bullshit, so much worry, so much anxiety.

* Time goes by so slowly when you are just sitting around waiting for something with nothing to fill in the space in between. My big moment for today was stealing a bottle of sun tan lotion from Cunningham's in Frandor.

* Al and I rode our bicycles out to gravel pits. Sat up on the store roofs on Grand River Ave. at sunset and watched the action. Today was book stealing day again and that was about it.

### God Sends Maggots

Well you might be deaf or you might be dumb  
You'll get the answer when the answer comes...  
It might be God trying to get your attention. (Keb' Mo')

Why was I on top of a darkened church in East Lansing on a hot, muggy July night anyway? Better to ask, why do you do anything when you are young, single, and stupid? Probably as simple as being bored and looking for kicks. I suppose I deserved what I got.

The church was pyramid-shaped, with four steel beams sweeping from the corners on the ground up to the steeple. It was easy enough to climb one of the beams. So, I did. At the top, I stepped off the beam to the small flat roof under the steeple. Unfortunately, the "roof" was a stained-glass skylight. My step went straight through the glass to nothing. I grabbed framing in time to catch my fall. Broken glass tinkled onto the pews far below. A sickening feeling of dangling into space swept over me.

I knew I was cut as soon as I pulled myself back onto the beam. Even in the dark the growing wetness on my left ankle was apparent. With hands on each side of the beam, I slid backwards toward the ground. The urban glow was enough to illuminate the bloody trail streaming past my face.

A three-inch gash on my shin was deep and ugly. I took a bandana from my shorts and tied it tightly around the wound to shut off most of the bleeding. My shoe was mushy with blood. I walked two miles home. No way could I go to the hospital. No money. No insurance.

At home, I pulled off the bandana. The bleeding had stopped. The flesh was cleanly sliced nearly to my shinbone. No question that stitches were needed. What to do?

Lacking previous experience in suturing, I could not be certain if two-pound test or four-pound test was the better medical choice. To be safe, I took the stronger monofilament fishing line, threaded it on a needle, and sewed up the gash. It took about a half-dozen stitches to close the biggest gape. The stitches might have been a bit wide, but you probably can appreciate my interest in keeping down the number of times I poked the sewing needle through my skin. You'd think sewing up your leg would be like slipping a needle through a banana skin, but it was more like stitching leather.

I put band-aides over the cut and went on with my life, which took an even loonier turn. With little more thought and planning than it takes to say it, three roommates (Crazy Rick, Phil, and John) and I decided to ride our bicycles to California. We figured 20-30 days to get there (2,400 miles). That's where Diane was for the summer; my motorcycle was broken; I was motivated.

We didn't even have bicycles, but that was no problem given our thieving lifestyles. Which is to say, we just went into the MSU campus at night and stole some from students. Mine was a big, blue, clunky, ten-speed Schwinn "Continental." Late one Thursday afternoon, the same day Apollo 11 returned from the first moon landing, we aimed our bikes southwest from Lansing for the Pacific Ocean, riding all night in the dark. I had promised Diane: "I will break my back to get there by the 14th of August." To make that, we would have had to average 120 miles per day for 20 straight days, riding with lousy bikes and gear and almost no money.

We didn't make it. Phil's knee gave out in northern Indiana the first day, so he turned around and rode home. John gave up the second day. Crazy Rick and I kept going. We had no decent maps, no tent. Rick used a sheet for a sleeping bag, and I had a mummy bag that was way too hot for summer. We had not nearly enough food, but lots of bugs, rain, and headwinds. We made it to the outskirts of Kansas City -- 700 miles in seven days -- and found ourselves burned out and nearly broke. There we sat on a bench outside a gas station at sunset, beaten and dejected.

The young guys closing up the station rescued us. They invited us to a party where we spent the night drinking cheap wine, smoking really bad Missouri pot from giant wine-bottle bongs, and agreeing that our bike trip was over.

The next morning, we talked one of the guys into driving us to the bus station in Kansas City. Rick took his last few dollars and boarded a bus for home with his bike. I sold my bike to someone at the party for $25, which got me a bus ticket as far west as Cheyenne, Wyoming. From there, I hitchhiked to Palo Alto. My final ride dumped me a few miles from Diane's apartment; I discovered that my last two twenties that had been tucked in my pocket had disappeared, and I didn't even have a dime for a phone call. I walked.

By the time I'd gotten to California, my wound from the church skylight incident finally had started to heal. My homeopathic sewing of my shin, however, had led to minor complications earlier in the trip. By day five of our bike ride I had started to worry. The wound wasn't closing at all. It itched a lot. Maybe it was the sweat and dirt from bicycling every day and never getting washed? Maybe it was that fishing line? Maybe it needed exposure to air?

Sitting with my bike at a picnic table in a roadside park somewhere in Illinois, I rinsed away the grime and using the scissors on my Swiss army knife, clipped the fishing line stitches and pulled them out. As the last of the monofilament line came free, the wound stretched open wide. Squirming in the sun-lit gash on my shin was a mass of small white maggots.

### California Dreamin'

In February 1970, I fled my deranged life in Michigan like a man chased by a tsunami. I still didn't fully understand karma, but I knew enough. I'd felt the tremors. Although nothing really bad had happened to me yet, my instincts told me to get to higher ground before that one big wave caught me.

I moved to San Francisco. I had saved only a little money, knew no one in California, had no job, no place to live, and no real plan except to get out of my winter.

I got a drive-away car (where you get paid expenses to drive someone's car one-way) only as far as Utah. The drive-away guy in Detroit assured me they would have cars in Utah to drive to California. I was so desperate to escape my life in Michigan that I believed him. Hardly the last time I would be snookered by a sincere liar.

Leaving Lansing, I pulled onto the freeway, tears streaming down my face. I was driving away from my house, girlfriend, motorcycle (still broken in the Harley shop), family, and everyone I knew. Five miles south, blubbering barely in check, I stopped and picked up a hitchhiker. He said his name was Gary Brown, and he was heading back east to college, but he figured he could just as easily go west with me first to San Francisco, and so he did. At first, Gary helped with the driving, but in Nebraska he got stopped for speeding and discovered he had left his wallet in Michigan. I drove the rest of the way. After 1,800 nonstop miles, we made it to Utah, found a motel for $11, got high, had dinner, and went to a movie. Because Gary didn't have his wallet, I paid, and he promised to repay me his share of our expenses when his girlfriend in Boston wired him money along the way.

Of course, they didn't have any drive-away cars going from Utah to California in mid-winter, so I had to rent a car from Hertz. It added $140 to my expenses. We drove west across deserts and snowy mountains, smoking dope all the way. We saw coyotes and a golden eagle. We picked up an old miner hitchhiking to Reno, who was just out of the hospital. I gave him $4 of my dwindling cash when we dropped him off. For all my self-centeredness, I was still a soft touch.

We blew out one of the rental's studded snow tires at 90 mph but arrived in one piece in San Francisco at 8:30 on a Tuesday morning. The city's hills were luscious green in 65-degree winter sunshine. It felt good, and a long way from snowy Michigan.

I got us a room overlooking Market Street on the sixth floor of the fleabag Hotel Federal across from the Greyhound Station for $11 a night. We dropped my carful of stuff at a storage locker and went to the City-Wide rental agency to look for an apartment. I found one quickly at 150 Haight Street, two blocks up the hill from Market Street -- $100 a month. It was essentially one big room with a bed that pulled down from the wall and some ratty furniture. Included was a tiny kitchen, a walk-in closet, and garage parking for my motorcycle (once it got fixed and shipped out from Michigan). My fifth-floor windows looked north over the fire escape and apartment building roofs. All night, muffled fog horns hooted on distant San Francisco Bay.

By Friday, I was settled. Gary and I walked to the Fillmore District, where we bought a hit of acid and split it. "Really sweet," I reported afterwards. We smoked pot, drank cold duck, and said "groovy" a lot.

Gary still hadn't gotten his money through Western Union, but he said that I shouldn't worry. He sounded and acted like he was rich, although on our first morning in the city, he had said something odd. Pointing to my camera, he had said, "You know, I could so easily have just ripped you off and disappeared last night." Then he laughed, and I felt my trust was vindicated, since he hadn't done that.

I met my apartment building's janitor-old-man-in-residence, Archie. He asked me if I was a hippie because I slept on the floor. He said some hippies lived there once, and he walked in on them and one couple was sleeping on the bed, and when the girl got up her whole dress was unzipped. Gary said, "out-a-sight." Archie said: "Made me want to vomit."

I felt lucky to have Gary's company my first days in the big, lonely city. We explored Seal Rocks, Ghiradelli Square, the beach, and Chinatown. Everything about the place tickled me. I heard a wino say to a woman: "Honey, can I jump on it sometime? I just want to see if it's the expensive kind."

After a few days, Gary informed me that his girlfriend had wired just enough cash for a plane ticket back to Boston, and he was leaving. He wrote me a $300 check for his expenses. As he was leaving I gave him $50 for spending money for his trip back.

"Don't do it," he said. "You'll regret it."

I insisted.

He was right. I still regret it.

His check was bogus, of course. It took me a couple of weeks of trying with no success to track down fictional "Gary Brown" in Boston before I finally accepted what a naïve sap I had been.

I was almost broke but was starting to understand karma. I wrote to Diane:

I think it will work out in the end that all the shit I rip off will just about balance all the money and shit I give away.

I took the federal civil service exam to qualify for a job as a mailman or a park ranger. While I waited to hear back, my money ran out. Diane, and sometimes my parents, sent me enough to pay bills. I lived on meager rations -- American cheese and bologna on white bread, peanut butter, a few eggs, cheap hamburger, canned fruit cocktail, lots of Spam. I rationed my milk to a half gallon per week. To splurge, I would buy 99-cent wine from Safeway.

For a bookcase, I bought 50 bricks and eight pine boards. It took me four trips pushing a shopping cart uphill five blocks to save the $3.50 delivery charge. I ended up with bruises, sore muscles, and "groovy book shelves" for $15. No TV or radio, just a portable record player. I smoked hash and listened endlessly to Santana and Bob Dylan:

And you say, "Oh my God  
Am I here all alone?"  
Because something is happening here  
But you don't know what it is  
Do you, Mister Jones?

Nothing prepared me for the loneliness of living alone with virtually no money in San Francisco. I cheered myself up by going to see W.C. Field's My Little Chickadee and the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. I saw Savoy Brown at the Fillmore Theater and twice, my favorite, the Butterfield Blues Band, standing "close enough to get spit off the harp as Paul Butterfield made love to his harmonica right in front of me":

Yeah, walking by myself I hope you'll understand,  
Yeah, I just want to be your loving man.

"I hope you find what you're looking for," Diane's mother, Verna, had said to me the last time I saw her before I left Michigan.

What was I was looking for? Life's meaning? Fulfillment? Purpose? God? I felt like I was chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.

While I awaited a job and my epiphany, I filled empty days getting high and wandering the city's neighborhoods. I watched birds in the parks. I walked; bicycled; hitchhiked; rode buses, trolleys and cable cars. I regularly visited the city's library and art museums; a magnificent Van Gogh exhibit at the de Young Museum imprinted on me. I loved the chaos of Chinatown, the serenity of the Japanese gardens in Golden Gate Park, the sourdough-ocean smells of Fisherman's Wharf. Some nights, I wandered the topless district on Broadway watching the strip club hawkers at work: Right a-bove your chair on a sol-id glass cage... My favorite I called "The Bullfrog"; his croaking voice, inviting sailors to "step right in," was even lower than a bullfrog's. He got upset if you giggled when you walked past.

For the first time, I experienced the anonymity of a big city. I could gawk at will, as if invisible. Roaming the city's streets clogged with all varieties of humanity, I talked to winos, panhandlers, and prostitutes. Gays hustled me. Cops sometimes spit as I walked by. I witnessed a crazy old black preacher in flowing robes, a cut-out Clorox bottle for a hat, on sideways with scripture verses on it, loudly talking to God on a pink plastic phone. On street corners you could pick your brand of salvation: Jesus, help the Indian children, Hari-Krishna, LSD, you name it.

I picked LSD. Tripping, I drifted through the city or just lay on the mattress on my apartment's floor and watched the show behind my eyelids. Most afternoons, fog rolled over the city, just like Carl Sandburg pictured: The fog creeps in on little cat feet.

San Francisco can be a cold, depressing place when you are broke and alone. You can only feed the ducks and walk down the beach so many times. Though picturesque, the fog shrouded me in deepening gloom.

Five weeks into my lonely, horny life, I got a reprieve when Diane flew out for ten days during her spring break at MSU. Also, she had sent me enough money to get my motorcycle, now fixed and shipped from Flint, out of hock from the Harley dealer down the street. My dream was coming true: me, my girlfriend, and my motorcycle together in sunny California at last.

We were headed up the coast highway to camp at Point Reyes. A little convertible sports car closely tailed us. I sped off in a cat-and-mouse game, leaning into narrow mountain switchbacks. We hit a curve too fast and the Harley went down on its side, sliding into the mountainside and not off a cliff, thankfully. The fiberglass saddlebags saved Diane's legs from more serious damage, but she did hurt a knee and was shaken up. The couple in the sports car stopped and gave her a ride to the next town, where I retrieved her and we resumed, more sanely, our motorcycle trip.

And then she was gone -- back to Michigan -- and my emptiness was bleaker than ever.

I came down with a horrid case of poison oak, probably from our crash into the brushy mountainside. It was the first of many such encounters in California, leading to huge patches of oozing rashes covering varying percentages of my body for weeks at a time. In due course, I realized that the plant was so ubiquitous, and I was so allergic to it, that I never could live in California, given my outdoors fervor. At the time, however, poison oak was just one more bad thing in my life. I told Diane:

It has been a year now since things turned really rotten for me. I keep asking, how can so little go right for me? I get so stir crazy just sitting around. What am I going to do? I look for ways to make the time pass. But I can't hike without boots, I can't cycle far without money. I feel so asinine in a way about coming out here. It was so important for me to do it, important enough to spend a ridiculous amount of money to get here, and now what have I got to show? Absolutely nothing. I couldn't have done any worse by staying in Michigan, that is for certain. It is so depressing not to be able to be happy in such ideal settings. How did I get so fucked up?

How, indeed? On April 9, 1970, 23 years old, I had one dollar in my pocket, $14 in my checking account, no job, and no prospects.

I took a break and hitchhiked back to Michigan for a week. Coincidentally, it was during the first Earth Day, and there were anti-Vietnam War demonstrations on the MSU campus that week. Now a successful draft dodger, I crossed paths with a young Air Force pilot in uniform and asked him how he could bomb women and children from high in the sky. You can imagine how well that went.

Diane bought me a plane ticket to get home -- my first jet ride. Departing from Lansing, I savored every moment of the new experience -- the way takeoff slams you back in your seat, the rocketing off the runway, the views from 30,000 feet. On hundreds of flights that followed, a bit of that same thrill stayed with me on every takeoff.

Back in San Francisco, anti-war demonstrations were common. On May 4, walking to the library, I stumbled into one and joined several thousand people outside the Federal Building. Lots of "right-on" and "power to the people." Country Joe sang the call-and-response Fuck Song, rolling straight into my favorite, the anti-war Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag, which concludes:

Be the first one on your block  
To have your boy come home in a box.

After speeches, the demonstrators marched across the concrete mall to City Hall to present an anti-war resolution to the Board of Supervisors. Everyone tried to crowd inside; Viet Cong flags waved and chants of Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn echoed off the rotunda. Finally convinced to go back outside, the crowd clogged the sidewalks and street. That's when dozens of "blue meanies" (city police) arrived and started sweeping up the area. I watched kids get clubbed on the steps. From there, it turned into an off-and-on skirmish for the rest of the afternoon. The cops formed lines to keep the street and front of the building clear, so the jeering crowd gathered across the street in an open mall area. Rocks and bottles flew; one took out a window of a passing patrol wagon.

The cops carried three-foot clubs scarred with cuts and nicks. If they thought they saw someone throw anything, a squad would give chase, and people would scatter. Guys got hauled down and beaten. One was caught and clubbed by a cop, who found himself alone and surrounded by a lot of pissed off people; he pulled his gun and started waving it at our faces.

Personally, I never saw the point in throwing things or being ugly about it all. Nonetheless, I was there because I wanted the war to end, which was the real point.

Everyone knew by then that there were demonstrations going on that same day across the country. In Lansing, more than 25,000 people marched on the state capitol building, and 25 were hurt when a pro-war supporter drove a car into the march. Eastern Michigan University was under a state of emergency and dawn-to-dusk curfew.

That day at Kent State University in Ohio, four students were shot dead and nine injured by National Guard troops. In my account that evening to Diane I wrote:

That Ohio bullshit gets pretty close when you have a gun aimed at you.

After things petered out I walked home and ate some supper and later walked back to the library again. It was all so peaceful then. Nothing left but discarded pickets and broken glass... The rhododendrons are in full bloom. I brought home one big pink blossom tonight. It smells really nice.

Good news arrived in the mail. I had scored 97.0 on my federal civil service entrance exam; only veterans with their bonus points were ahead of me for hiring. A post office job seemed a sure thing. In the meantime, however, I still was broke, living off Diane's charity, eating little and cheaply, and wearing shoes I had found:

I went to the store and spent my last $2.50 on food. I had to put in 50 cents in gas to get home. Now I am down to 25 cents plus a bunch of pennies. So the panhandlers are pissing me off again. I bought some good wheat bread instead of that airy shit I usually get cheaper, some cheese, olive loaf, and Jell-O for supper.

Yet, life was starting to look brighter, and my spirits improved:

This big fat colored lady came out of a building while I was walking down Market Street yesterday, and she stopped me. She was laughing and she looked at me and she said, "You live and learn, you know that? Yep, you live and learn." Then she walked off laughing.

In desperation for a job of any kind, I got up at 4 a.m. to answer a want ad at a seedy downtown office. They stuffed me into a van with a bunch of street people and drove us to Sacramento, where for ten hours we walked house-to-house distributing advertising circulars, baking in 95-degree sunshine. I got paid 75 cents an hour. They gave me $1 at noon for lunch, $5 at the end of the day, and the remainder, $3.50, at the end of the week. I spent my $5 on food and a cheap bottle of cold duck that night to celebrate my first earned income in months.

The next morning, I could barely walk, but change definitely was coming. I wrote Diane:

I don't think you have to worry about me going into a dishonest bag again. I've gone full circle and am back almost to the kind of morality regarding crime as I grew up with. I've had to live with some of the stuff I've done too closely, and the kind of person I was disgusts me.

I went back to deliver circulars and didn't get picked to work, but that's when I met Weird Wally. He was about my age, recently out of prison "on a drug thing," and one step up from a homeless person. He knew where to find free food and shit jobs. We went together to a farm labor office; they were hiring for fruit picking, but it was too late in the morning. There, we met "a couple of freaks," and the four of us went to all the temporary work offices in town and any other places anyone knew of. Nothing.

Wally had once worked for a bicycle messenger service, so he and I went there. Wally left, but I sat for an hour, and a man came out and hired me. For once, maybe the first time in years, I was in the right place at the right time. I felt the worst of my troubles were over. I had an every-day job at Allen's Delivery Service paying $1.65 an hour. I pedaled a clunky, green, balloon-tired bike with a big wire basket on the front up and down the city's hills, carrying packages and messages between plush executive offices with their busy little matters of importance. I called myself "one of the establishment's messenger boys." After my first three days, I got a check for $34 and felt rich.

I let Weird Wally stay with me for a couple of weeks. At first, the company was nice, but he quickly became a pain in the ass. He complained about everything, and it seemed I never could share with him enough of my food, my dope, my company: "You're not much of a buddy. I ask you for one lousy joint, and you get all uptight." He left shortly before Diane arrived to spend the summer. Which was about the same time my real job started as a mailman.

I drove a U.S. Postal Service parcel truck, many days in Chinatown, where I navigated its confusing jangle of back alleys and labyrinth balconies, delivering packages to old Chinese who seldom spoke English.

I frequently delivered in North Beach -- birthplace of the beatniks and the neighborhood where author Richard Brautigan (A Confederate General from Big Sur and Trout Fishing in America) lived. I delivered packages to City Lights Bookstore, founded in the '50s by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind), and to all the other famous tourist spots -- Telegraph Hill, Lombard Street ("the crookedest street in the world"), and topless/bottomless joints on Broadway Street. My favorite delivery was to The Condor where Carol Doda and her "twin 44s" danced. If I was lucky, a bare-breasted dancer would answer the bell and sign for the package.

* * *

One sunny morning more than 40 years later, I returned to San Francisco and walked those same streets. The park where once I had seen Richard Brautigan sitting alone on a bench was filled with flocks of t'ai chi-ing Chinese women.

Broadway's licentiousness had withered; a shabby Larry Flynt's Hustler Club echoed by-gone color. Chinatown was vibrant as I remembered, clogged with locals shopping for food. Primary-colored boxes of fresh produce and seafood clogged early-morning sidewalks. Chinese voices chattered like wind chimes in the cool breeze. A bent, toothless woman with a bag of fresh, silvery smelt haggled price with five customers surrounding her.

On Grant Street, a window display of ivory netsuke caught my eye. Netsuke -- invented by Japanese more than 300 years ago -- were used to cinch to sashes the cords that hung pouches (kimonos lacked pockets).

I first fell for the miniature carvings when I had lived in the city, often visiting the netsuke collection at the de Young art museum in Golden Gate Park. In fact, that moment in Chinatown, I was heading to the Asian Art Museum to see them once again. (That museum, recently created from the old city library, now displays the Asian art once held by the de Young.)

The netsuke in the Chinatown shop window, however, were not limited to traditional depictions of monks and animals. Many were X-rated, carved, oriental Kama Sutra -- all acrobatic positions finely rendered in ivory. I needed a closer look.

The shop was empty of customers but jammed wall-to-wall with high-end Asian arts and crafts, including exquisite jade and wood carvings. The really good stuff was upstairs on a balcony, the steps blocked by a velvet cord.

I asked Carlos, the young salesman, the range of prices for the netsuke in his front window. He said one to several hundred dollars each, then escorted me upstairs to see more netsuke and other fine art.

I stopped cold at the head of the stairs. "This is incredible," I mumbled. My delight at his sculptures inspired Carlos, and he showed me his favorites -- two-foot-long ivory tusks with dozens of tiny figures incised in their curves. "These are museum-quality," I raved, and told him how I was heading for the Asian Art Museum that very morning.

"But you can't touch them in a museum," he smiled, and caressed the un-carved, ocher end of a tusk. "Here."

The ivory felt alive, smooth and cool on my fingertips. It was like sneaking a touch in a museum, but without the guilt.

Carlos showed me a brilliantly-lit display case crammed with netsuke. "Any chickens?" I asked. He opened drawers and boxes, but found only one tiny rooster that didn't impress me. Carlos wanted to sell me something, and I wanted to buy something. He showed me ducks and other miniature creatures, but nothing I liked. I focused, one-by-one, on the hundred or so netsuke (the majority in frozen stages of fornication) in the display case. I asked to see an R-rated one, a naked geisha sitting on her haunches. Ivory, probably from an ice-age Russian mammoth tusk. She was the one. Sold, I thought. I threw out a number. "Would that do it?" I guessed. I was $30 too low.

"But would you do it anyway?" I replied in my sternest tone. "That's my limit." Carlos finally agreed, and we started downstairs.

"Just one last feel," I said, and stroked again the carved tusk. That gave Carlos fresh salesman adrenalin, and he launched into a story about rare white jade, reaching for a delicate white sculpture in a display case to show me the jade's inner glow under the spotlight. His sale pitch started at $4,000 and eventually got down to $1,500.

"Carlos, you're killing me here," I laughed, while thinking: My wife would kill me. "No, I just can't," I concluded. "I spent all my money on chickens at home, building them the Taj Mahal of chicken coops."

Carlos laughed as if he knew what the hell I was talking about, but he seemed deflated. I went on my way with my naked netsuke, an odd birthday present for my wife.

* * *

As a mailman "sub" in 1970, I filled in for regular mailmen who were off work for one reason or another. That meant that I was sent to every part of San Francisco and got to know all its streets, back alleys, neighborhoods, and skyscrapers. I drove my truck every day in traffic jams and smog, and hauled heavy packages up the city's steep hills and endless stairs, dodging dog shit that seemed everywhere. Often, I could empty my delivery truck early, and park and read a book or take extra-long lunch breaks at home. The second summer of my job, the post office sent me downtown on walking routes in the financial district. Typically, I would finish hours early and ride around on the cable cars, free for mailmen on duty and carrying a mail bag. Being a hippie mailman was easy, but it sucked.

Living with my girlfriend, Diane, on the other hand, was beautiful. We spent my free days in Golden Gate Park, along Bodega Bay, and on Mt. Tamalpais hiking and bird watching. She cooked and made our tiny apartment homey. She smelled of springtime's lily-of-the-valley. We drank jasmine tea and ate Chinese food with chop sticks. I bought an enlarger and made a darkroom in our walk-in closet.

I got fresh squid for bait in Chinatown and fished off the rocks at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, using a cheap saltwater fishing rod I got through the mail from L.L. Bean. Rarely, I caught rockfish, which we ate, and tiger sharks, which I threw back. The sharks seemed more like dogs than fish; their malevolent black eyes would follow my hand, and they would snap at me when I took out the hook. One time, something enormous took my bait and headed into the setting sun. It easily stripped all my line and vanished, leaving me shaking and in awe. And once, I caught a 19-pound striped bass off the beach in Marin County. I rode my Harley home across the Golden Gate Bridge with the great fish's tail sticking out of my backpack. Jaws dropped as cars passed me. It was a proud moment.

When Diane returned to Michigan at the summer's end, I was ok with it, knowing she would be returning for good after fall term. I had a job, and had found new friends.

Diane's dancer friend and her boyfriend -- Susan and Ray -- had moved out from Michigan. They stayed with me a few days until they found a place to live in Oakland. Ray became a lifelong friend and mentor.

He was tall and lanky with a gymnast's build, his face a bit too sharp and angular to be truly handsome. Yet, he seemed completely comfortable in his body, and in life for that matter. I didn't know quite what to make of him.

Ray had a Master's degree in philosophy. How that led to his first business of cleaning carpets, or his second, in carpentry, wasn't obvious. I suppose the philosophical response would be: why not?

It's not so much that Ray loved to argue, as he just loved to explore contrary ways of looking at the world. He would challenge any assumption or belief. That helped open my eyes to new experiences -- to a point. He and Susan dragged me to their modern dance performances with Anna Halprin's Dancers' Workshop. In one, they each transformed themselves into a totem animal; I think Ray was a panther, roaring and springing from rocks. I loved it, yet sat there sweating, dreading the prospect of audience participation. I couldn't get past my lifelong phobia of dancing. By the way, thank you for that, Jesus.

Ray introduced me to simple Zen mantras that I've worked to embrace throughout my life: Go with the flow. Be here now. Because of Ray, I got better at seeing the world as it is, rather than as I dreamed it to be. Not perfectly, as coming events would prove, but better. Go with the flow. Be here now.

### My Wheel of Karma Turns

Life in San Francisco had become bearable. I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up -- but I was doing okay. I had a couple of new friends in Oakland, plus Dennis, a friend from Lansing, who had moved to Pacific Grove, 120 miles south.

I loved going fast on my Harley. On weekends I would ride down to see Dennis (and buy weed), doing 100 mph on the freeway over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the coast. Another favorite ride was the Bay Bridge coming back from Oakland on the top span: accelerate full throttle out of the toll booth into the merging lanes, and hit 90 mph before dropping back to normal speeds.

I really loved tunnels. On the 101 freeway north of the Golden Gate Bridge are a couple of good ones. You hit the entrances at 70 mph and open the throttle. The wind stops, the bike roars, and you fly past cars and pop into the sunlight and cross winds at some ridiculous speed. Best, though, was the tunnel in the city on Broadway Street just west of the topless strip. I would ride there late at night, idle until traffic had cleared ahead, then fly as fast as possible through the half-mile-long tunnel -- 85 mph was my tops. The Harley's roar in that narrow, one-way tunnel was a thrill, especially when I was a little drunk. Far out.

My trouble-plagued motorcycle did break down one last time with the same transmission problem as in Michigan. But this time, the San Francisco mechanics found the root cause (a pinion gear shaft 1/1,000th of an inch too fat) and fixed it for good. It was a sign to me that my bad luck was changing. After a good weekend in Pacific Grove, I told Diane, with obvious surprise:

For a change it seems that more things went right than went wrong. In fact, nothing of any importance went wrong.

I hadn't completely given up bad shit, however. In my mailman job, I would look for packages covered with stamps that had missed being cancelled. I usually could peel them off, then send the stamps to Diane to use for shipping out my books and her stuff from Michigan in advance of her moving out for good to live with me. I was tempted to steal stuff from the packages that I delivered. I did just once and sneaked home a big Van Gogh art book addressed to a bookstore in Ghirardelli Square. I felt awful about it (and years later gave the book away). That was my last bad shit. Finally, I had learned. What goes around comes around.

Even then, it took a while to fully drain my reservoir of bad karma. I crashed my motorcycle again, for example. It was rush hour, and I was riding home from work and was a few blocks from the end of the elevated 101 freeway. As usual, I was stoned, and my attention was taken with a shiny motorcycle zooming past on the opposing roadway. I missed a sudden traffic jam and looked up to see a BMW sedan stopped dead in front of me. Hitting it at about 35 mph, I crunched the car's rear bumper and landed on its trunk. My motorcycle's forks were bent inward, and even after I replaced their tubes, the wheelbase was shortened by a couple of inches; that Harley was never the same. I had no insurance to get it fixed right. Karmic justice? After all, this was the motorcycle I had gotten by filing a false police report and ripping off an insurance company.

For the rest of the fall I delivered mail, got high every day, took acid and mescaline regularly, suffered bouts of poison oak, fished, went to the Oakland flea market with Ray and Susan, and agonized endlessly over what in the world I was going to do with my life.

* * *

One Sunday morning in an early December rain, I dropped half a hit of acid and headed for Golden Gate Park. From the foggy bus window, I spotted a bum on Haight Street who looked familiar -- tall and lanky, scruffy beard, dark eyes. I jumped off and found an old friend from Michigan, Tom, selling the Berkeley Barb alternative newspaper. He was dirty, ragged, and looked like he had been standing out in the rain too long. He told me he was living on the street, selling papers, and sleeping in crash pads, the park, or, once in a while, hotels.

I gave him my other half-hit of acid, and we walked around the park, sat and talked, and went to the art museum. He waxed nostalgic about going back to East Lansing. Tom stayed with me a while and then moved on with his life in Michigan.

A decade later, when I also was back living in Michigan, Tom and I ran a half-marathon together on a gorgeous late-fall day in rural mid-Michigan that was the best run of my life. We averaged 7:30 minutes per mile and finished together with energy to spare. Today, running one mile at that pace would finish me.

Back then, Tom was looking for love and used a dating service where, after many, many false starts, he found a wife. They moved to a bucolic farm in Minnesota. Tom developed Parkinson's disease, but he seems to have had a happy life with his family and farm animals, though filled with more than his share of family tragedy, judging from his annual Christmas cards. As I struggle these days through my solo runs in rainy Oregon, I often marvel at our long-ago friendship and those two strangers I barely recognize, running like gazelles in the Michigan sunshine.

* * *

When Diane moved to San Francisco to live with me, early in 1971, we had the real deal -- young love at its best. She enrolled in college, and I rode the bus with her to cinema classes, my introduction to a lifelong love of Akira Kurosawa's films (e.g., Seven Samurai, Ikiru). I took her bird watching at all my favorite places. In Golden Gate Park, we watched old Italians play bocce ball and dreamed of learning the language and traveling to Italy. We were enchanted by an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the park's open-air amphitheater. Puck and love's foibles made us laugh.

Diane and I rode my Harley north to Mt. Lassen National Park and hiked into the wilderness to camp. We ate wild trout I caught and a grouse I killed with a rock. We followed a little stream all the way up a mountain to its beginning as a spring and found a beaver skeleton; I kept its big curved white and orange front teeth.

The love of a good woman, however, wasn't enough for me. I was 24 years old and lost in life. What the hell am I gonna be when I grow up, damn it?! I craved direction and purpose; I still couldn't imagine a career niche where I fit. That's when Diane and I headed for the northern California coast with Ray and Susan and four hits of blotter acid.

### Epiphany

I was in a foul mood. Wind and April rain shook Ray's beat-up van as we crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. I was bitching that our weekend was ruined, and how could we enjoy our planned next-day LSD trip in the goddamned rain? Finally, Ray told me to shut the fuck up and take it as it came, for Christ's sake. Since then, I've always believed my best trips start in the rain.

After our stormy ride north to Salt Point, we rented a rustic cabin a few miles from the coastal state park. That evening the rain quit, and we smoked weed and hiked the half-mile across the meadows from Highway 1 to the ocean. The storm had built monstrous waves. They smashed the cliffs with earth-shaking violence, the broken sea flying higher than our heads. Gale-whipped salt spray clogged the air. We felt blessed to be part of the spectacle. It cleared my head for the gift to come.

The next morning, we returned to Salt Point. The sky was blue. Tan cliffs glowed, their eroded shapes rounded and pitted into organic shapes. Waves had diminished enough that we could approach the cliff edges. We had the place to ourselves.

Each of us was familiar with LSD. We pretty much knew how it affected us and what to expect. I could take a small hit of acid and still function, go out and have a good time playing. Or, I could take a big hit of acid in a private setting, get essentially dysfunctional, and experience unpredictable and amazing things -- thoughts, insights, hallucinations, visions. LSD, under the right circumstances, can be a shortcut to wisdom.

That day at Salt Point, we picked one of the most beautiful spots on earth for a big-hit acid trip beyond anything I expected. My life changed that day; it set in motion my future.

All your life  
You were only waiting for this moment to be free. (The Beatles)

For hours I sat tripping on the lip of a cliff with high-tide surf pounding rocks in the pools below. I had to resist seductive urges to slip into the air and drop into the foaming water, there to merge with primal beauty. I wanted to be one of the white gulls hanging in updrafts just beyond reach. I walked in grass meadows broken by hillocks of bare rock. Traffic moved noiselessly on the distant highway. Beyond, redwood forests climbed into the foggy Coast Range.

I felt deep in my soul the interconnectedness of it all -- the gulls, the wind on my face, the surf. I watched a fragile sparrow being buffeted by the wind -- surviving somehow in the force of the enormous universe engulfing it. I became that sparrow for a moment. Life was no more complicated than the evolution that had programmed my own genes and behavior, which is to say, a miracle of infinite complexity. Just different, with my unique human awareness.

I understood that this was where I belonged, close to nature and its connections. It was so obvious. This was my calling, the career and purpose I had searched so long to find. It had been right there all along. I would go back to college and study ecology. I couldn't wait to get started. I felt that the spirit of Salt Point would guide me, and it did.

* * *

That LSD-fueled epiphany led me eventually to protecting nature at a job with the National Wildlife Federation, from where, 25 years later, I returned to that same Salt Point at the cusp of another life-altering career decision. I found the same path to the sea that the four of us in our youth had hiked on our trip. I sat among the same golden rocks and cliffs, meditated, and pondered my future. No LSD this time; a bottle of nice California cabernet instead. Once again, Salt Point's spirit spoke to me and made my decision easy (to take a promotion with more responsibility). Again, I felt I was simply saying "yes" to working for the earth.

Then, another eleven years passed, and in 2007 I returned once more, this time with Ray again, but now with the final loves of our lives. The path to the sea was as I remembered. Same cliffs. Same sparrows, same gulls. Same deep blue sea. But the waves had calmed. This time I sought no epiphany; none was needed. I had done it. My career to help the earth was behind me. I was retired and had nothing left to prove. I was happy. I was sharing Salt Point with the woman I loved and two wonderful friends. Life was perfect, and I was wise enough to appreciate it.

* * *

But that happy ending is getting way ahead of my story. Back in San Francisco in 1971, notwithstanding my new-found quest to save the earth, life was far from perfect. California colleges didn't want me. As a result, we looked back to Michigan. My alma mater, Michigan State University, accepted me for graduate school. It would mean first taking a year of undergraduate classes in biology and chemistry. Then I could start grad school in MSU's Fisheries & Wildlife Department. Diane also was accepted at MSU to get her master's degree in ornithology. We started planning our return to Michigan.

One morning as I was rushing out the door to my mailman job, the phone rang. A woman from the National Park Service told me they had just picked a new class of job applicants to start work as park rangers. Because of my good test scores, I was at the top of their hiring list. I should report to Grand Canyon National Park for training in 60 days. Yes or no?

"Wait a minute. I've got to decide my future on my way out the door to work?" I pleaded. She gave me until 4:00 that afternoon to get back to her, and made it clear that there was a long list of applicants happy to take my place. Just when I thought I was set with a plan, along came my dream job -- a park ranger working in the national parks.

That morning, I stole away from my mailman job, parked my truck in a loading zone at the Federal Building, and got an impromptu interview with the guy in charge of the region's National Park Service. What would the job really be like? is what I wanted to know. He told me to forget about riding a horse in the wilderness. After training at Grand Canyon National Park, I would be sent to an urban park, such as those in Washington, D.C., or the Arch in St. Louis, for at least two years. Good assignments were hard to get when young, and I would be moving around a lot.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,  
I took the one less traveled by,  
And that has made all the difference. (Robert Frost)

I turned down that job, at least partly because I couldn't see how such an outdoors career for me could work out for Diane. She had followed me without complaint to San Francisco; she was committed to me. But dancing was her passion, if not yet her career, and how could I expect her to follow me to whatever backwater place the Park Service might decide to send me?

But in the end, we didn't stay together, anyway. How different would my life have been, had I taken that National Park Service road? Might I have ended up in environmental advocacy, anyway? Might I have met my future wife in Bullhead City, Arizona, anyway, just like it did happen? After all, Bullhead City is not that far from the Grand Canyon. Might I have fallen in love with the Grand Canyon and Colorado River early on (instead of decades later), which could have changed the direction of my life? River guide?

That, then, was the life of my early twenties \-- a mostly unhappy time trying to find myself, and filled with weed, acid, and ennui. Yet, finally, at age 24, I had figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Starting in San Francisco, I spent a lifetime creating the life I wanted.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

### CHAPTER 5:  
LOOKING FOR LOVE

I left San Francisco in August, 1971, with my girlfriend, Diane, and headed back to start a new chapter of my life in Lansing. Her mother, Verna, had driven out; we rented a trailer to tow my Harley and all our meager possessions in a trailer behind her Buick Skylark.

Heading east, I don't know what I expected our life would be like when we got back to Michigan. What actually happened, however, was that I went back to college, got a dog and two cats, split up with Diane, found my career, and again went looking for love.

You can't always get what you want  
And if you try sometime you find  
You get what you need. (The Rolling Stones)

At first, I pretty much got what I wanted, and the domestic bliss of our months together in San Francisco carried forward. Diane and I moved back into my Hayford House in Lansing, living like Ozzie and Harriet, that is, if Ozzie and Harriet had been twenty-something hippies. We went to school and studied hard. I went back to work at the Michigan State University library.

We got a calico kitten and named her Ganja. We got a hunting dog puppy, a German wirehaired pointer, and named him Levi. We got a second cat and named him Oscar.

After motorcycling California's coast and mountains, Michigan's flat, straight roads were boring. So, I sold my motorcycle and at age 25 bought my first car -- a brand new, shit-brown Ford Pinto station wagon.

I suppose that Diane and I might have had a long, happy life together, except that I just wasn't ready to settle down. Diane was a wonderful girlfriend, and she turned into an amazing woman. But back then, I still needed to check out my options -- what else could my life become? -- and no young love could survive that attitude. Besides, nearly everyone is hopelessly fucked up when they are in their twenties. Few couples survive it.

During the summer that Diane spent in Palo Alto in 1968, she had an affair. She was still seeing Roberto after I hitchhiked out to stay with her. On night she crawled into bed with me after just screwing him, his acrid odor still clinging to her body. She must have wanted me to know; no one is that foolish. But what could I say? I had screwed my housemate's girlfriend, Lori, a couple of times earlier that same summer.

* * *

While some of us fantasized about hitchhiking around America or seeing Europe, Phil and Lori dreamed of building a ketch and spending their lives sailing the world. Phil was obsessed with sailing, boat plans, and stories of seafaring adventure. He tried to fit the captain's image -- commanding, disciplined, dogmatic, dark eyes, a bushy black beard.

While Phil studied engineering at MSU, Lori worked. Phil had it all planned out. She would support him so he could get a degree and then an engineering job to earn lots of money to pay for their sailing dream. They lived in the attic of Hayford House, where Phil had cut a big rectangle out of the upstairs ceiling and built pull-down stairs. Every morning, Lori would get up an hour earlier than any of the other eleven people sleeping in the house, lower the gray-painted stairs on the squeaky pulley, and creep down to the only bathroom to do her makeup and hair. Lori's appearance and sex appeal largely defined her self-image. Her job was hostess at East Lansing's newest upscale, hip restaurant, Beggar's Banquet.

Crazy as Phil's boat-building dream sounded to almost everyone, his ketch actually began to take shape. He had rented a bare farm field 20 miles east of Lansing where he built his forms of wood, foam, rebar, and chicken-wire and started pouring his ferro-cement 40-foot sailboat hull. He suffered constant "Noah" wisecracks. His plan was to truck the finished hull a hundred miles west and launch it in Lake Michigan, thereby connecting his romantic vision to the world's oceans via the St. Lawrence Seaway.

On a boat, there are few straight lines, and everything built must be contoured to fit the hull's curves. His progress was slow, often stalled for lack of money. A few times, I helped him. It was no fun, just hard, tedious work, and Phil demanded perfection.

He insisted on the same flawlessness from his girlfriend; Lori had to always look glamorous, as well as agree with Phil about everything. It left no room for Lori's own identity or personality. Her opinions were Phil's opinions. Her life was Phil's life. Her dreams were Phil's dreams. And then they weren't.

Long story short: Lori ran off to California with a Beggar's Banquet's cook; they started a chic restaurant in Marin County. Years later, I had lunch there once; the food was wonderful. Lori had put on pounds and wore minimal makeup. She seemed happier than I ever had known her.

With Lori gone, Phil's travel-the-seas-on-his-homemade-sailboat-with-his-glamous-girlfriend dream abruptly died.

Some years ago, I tracked down Phil via the Internet and we traded a few emails. He was married and living in rural Kentucky in a small community of friends. He had found Jesus and was active in the town of Pisgah's "oldest Presbyterian church west of the Appalachian Mountains." He was working as an electrical engineer and looking forward to retirement in six years: "I want to relax before Type A mortality kicks in." He seemed perfectly happy. I didn't then ask about his lost dreams, so I called him again more recently.

He hadn't retired, as planned, but had gotten divorced ("still good friends," he stressed). He obviously was good at his job and was being paid lots of money not to retire, a status he was understandably proud of, especially since most of the economy was in the crapper. To my surprise, not only had his old cement sailboat been completed (by a new owner), but Phil had sailed on it on Lake Michigan with the guy. Yes, it had been quite a thrill, he agreed.

As happy as he had sounded to reconnect, I never heard from him again. I left him my email, and he promised to stay in touch, but you know how it goes. I've never told him about screwing his girlfriend, but he might have known. Maybe he was still pissed.

* * *

That long-ago fling I had with Phil's girlfriend did manage at the time to boost my self-image. After all, I didn't want to see myself as a guy who had only had sex with one woman (Diane). But I didn't enjoy doing it with Lori enough to keep doing it, and we reverted to just being roommates. As it turned out, she was a lot better to look at than she was in bed. At least with me.

My next fling was with Nellie, a lovely, petite Chinese-American girl I met working in the post office in San Francisco. We saw each other for a few weeks, mostly at her apartment when her daughter was at school. We shared nice lunches and nice sex. Then, Diane moved out to live with me, so that was that with little Nellie.

A few months after Diane and I moved back to Michigan, temptation appeared. Sherri was a friend of my little sister in high school when I had first met her. She was precocious, flirtatious, blond, stacked, but way too young. Then, to my surprise, one day she was a freshman at MSU, living in a dorm across town, calling to see me, and no longer way too young.

We did it in her dorm room and under bare rafters in my attic bedroom (where Phil and Lori formerly lived). Sherri was smart, and wore her big tits in tight sweaters. She wrote me poetry, revealing a softness that belied her hard-edged, chain-smoking veneer. We rode the bus together on her class trip to the Chicago art museum.

Maybe we could have made something together. Sherri wanted that. But I was caught in cross-currents of love and jealousy and couldn't let go of Diane. So both my love affairs failed.

It was awkward. Sherri and I were seeing each other, while at the same time, Diane and I still were living together. About this time Diane started having her own serious affair. Her new lover, James, was threatening -- handsome, soft-spoken, cool, a good guy. He always seemed a bit amused by me, which I had to admit was justified under the circumstances -- what with me being the semi-jilted lover, and all -- which pissed me off even more.

After about eight months of hot babe bliss with Sherri, I wrenched myself away from seeing her and tried to get back on track with Diane. But she moved out anyway, taking on the challenges of a single woman living alone, and seeing James far more than she saw me. And why not? I behaved as if I just wanted what I couldn't have, and that was probably true.

I don't know how Sherri's life turned out. I'll never know if my ham-handed rejection, which appeared to hurt her badly at the time, affected the direction of her life. She dropped out of college soon after and went to work writing owner manuals for auto companies. Last I heard long, long ago, she had gotten married and moved to Virginia.

Grad school wrapped up for me in June of 1974. As I started my environmental career, I kept trying to work things out with Diane. Or, more accurately, I couldn't bring myself to accept that things were never going to work out for us. The paradox was that while I couldn't give up on dreams of a life with her, I couldn't commit to it.

Diane started a modern dance performing company, which she named Happendance, in 1976. Their initial claim to fame was putting on free outdoor summer dance concerts on the MSU campus -- creative programs that set in motion what today they bill as "Michigan's longest running professional modern dance company." I helped in a tiny way by papering the campus with her first Happendance fliers.

Diane had dominated my dream of love for more than eleven years, starting in my virginal youth and ending at about the time my professional career was taking off. I dashed that dream for good on Valentine's Day, 1977, when I visited Diane at her apartment and told her I was moving on.

Then, I headed to Pasqualli's Bar where I met Ben, a new friend who was art director where I worked. Coincidentally, Ben had just dumped his wife that same day. Seems she had been screwing a state legislator she met at work in the Capitol.

"I didn't want somebody else ramming her. It's as simple as that," Ben explained to me. "I didn't want to have to push the car uphill and have someone else riding in it downhill."

We got drunk together and laughed about what romantics we were to pick Valentine's Day for our dirty deeds. That night cemented what would become a lifelong friendship. Lose some, win some.

But what had I lost that wasn't already gone? Diane and I had grown up together and suffered through the changes of youth -- crazy times in the best of circumstances -- during an era that infected my generation with the turbulence of war. It affected everything. I should have given up on our relationship years earlier.

Off and on over the next couple of years Diane and I remained casual friends (sometimes with benefits). I wrote her:

I hope you will find someone to fall madly in love with that you really like. I expect that to happen. But I wonder, more about myself than you, whether that is possible. You and I came close to making it work. I wonder if it's possible for anyone to come closer. I think we both were looking for a magical quality that wasn't there. And I guess we are both romantic enough to insist on it, or nothing at all.

In my last-ever letter to Diane, I told her to remember always:

When the going get weird, the weird turn pro. (Raoul Duke [Hunter S. Thompson])

Diane got married soon after that on the lawn of a city-owned Lansing mansion that sometimes had served as performance stage for her dance company. I was invited but begged off; I did drive by the ceremony and privately waved goodbye. I never really understood why she picked the man she married. He was a wannabe musician, a mousey little fellow who never amounted to much that I could see, but I'm sure I must have missed something. She got a step-daughter in the deal, but never had any kids of her own. I hope he was a nice guy and made her happy.

A decade or so later I ran into Diane in the Quality Dairy parking lot not far from Hayford House, where I was in the final days of my first marriage. I had attended her company's recent dance concert and had been thinking of calling her, just to catch up and maybe recapture some memories of when love had been good for me. Then there she was.

She told me about a man with three kids coming up to her cameraman after her concert. He said he had dated Diane 17 years ago. He turned to his kids, "She could have been your mother." Then they vanished. Diane said she couldn't imagine who the guy was. I was no help and we both concluded it was the guy's fantasy. Yet that could have been me, I thought. I could have been father of some kids and Diane could have been their mother. How bad would that have been?

Diane watched my bike while I went in and bought Diet Coke and a half gallon of 2% milk. She was in a hurry; vegetables were cooking on the stove. I smiled and pushed away on my bike, "See you." In the back of her beat-up Chevette were the fake ficus trees used to hide the speakers at her outdoor concert. "It was nice to see you, Wayne," she waved.

* * *

Once I finished graduate school, my life was mostly about work. I had figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up and set about doing it. Now I needed a woman. After I dumped Diane in our "Valentine's Day Massacre" (as Ben branded it) in 1977, I spent the next seven years looking for love. I settled for sex.

My first work-related affair was with Cheryl, an intern at the conservation group in Lansing where I worked. It was clumsy and both of us were a bit perplexed as to why we were doing it. We looked at each other with smirks that said, What the hell are we doing here? I guess we did it because we couldn't see any reason not to do it. Cheryl and I went back to being just work colleagues, but things always seemed strained after that.

Ben told me years later that Cheryl now is a lesbian, but I don't know. Probably. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I Googled her name and it sounds like she has a full, interesting life in Lansing these days, active in good liberal causes, and kayaking the Grand River with friends. It fits how I remember her.

That was about it for me with women for a year or so. Except there was this one girl. Sally showed up at my door one summer afternoon. She had been my student in a college ecology class that I had taught. How could I say no? Why would I say no? She was young and cute, with a great body under baggy, late-hippie clothing. It's just that nothing clicked. She went her way, and I went back to work.

Which led to a couple of hot months with the redheaded office secretary, Vicki Redbreast, as the boys called her. Vicki's uncommon mammary assets compensated for her more common intelligence. After a long office flirtation, we broke the ice in my hotel room after heavy drinking following dinner at the annual meeting of the conservation group we worked for. In early morning dishevel, Vicki ducked back to her room, still wearing her low-cut, black banquet gown and carrying her black spike heels. Wives heading to breakfast were scandalized, the husbands jealous. We had fun, but it was strained, knowing that for me it never would go anywhere serious. After Vicki started getting it on with Ben, I quit sleeping with her. I was pissed at Ben but didn't let it ruin a beautiful friendship.

A couple of years later, Vicki stopped by Hayford House with her baby to visit me and Ben. She seemed happy. Her baby surely was.

Ben was also screwing our other office secretary, Susie. I asked myself: Why couldn't I do that? So I did. Susie was fun, but I quickly found that I really didn't like her that much, particularly in bed.

Later, Susie got religion, married a wealthy surgeon, and moved to Grand Rapids to have a family. Ben stayed in touch with her for a long time; in fact, he invited her to his wedding with his second wife. I thought he paid Susie way too much attention at the reception. But then, Ben wore black leather pants with his white wedding jacket, so who's to say what was normal there?

* * *

Audrey was the junior epidemiologist in a new five-person state agency charged with dealing with Michigan's toxic chemical pollution. After we started dating, she tipped me that her boss, Pat (Soutas) Cole (Miss Utah 1967), was incompetent. I wrote a magazine exposé that got the woman fired (see I Burn Miss Utah at the Stake in chapter seven). Audrey was my deep throat -- in the journalistic sense, that is. I hate to say it this way, but it's true: she fit the stereotype of a Jewish-American Princess. Brilliant, academically. Ambitious. Headstrong. Prone to temper tantrums. We dated for half a year.

I've always felt that the fastest way to find if you are compatible with someone is to travel together. You quickly learn about each other's pleasures, values, history, and moods. You get tired and grumpy. Then you can't decide where to eat or stay overnight. It's a unique combination of fun and stress. Audrey and I tried it out with a cross-country trip. After my story about her boss was published, we took two weeks off our jobs and headed west in my Pinto. Within the first five miles, we started fighting. We were talking about Roots, which she was reading at the time. For some inexplicable reason, I told her part of the ending. To me it didn't affect the story, but she was upset. Can you blame her? Why would I do that? A test?

We went first to Boulder to visit a friend's ex-wife, Susan. She had drifted away from her husband, Ray, while they were living in California; finally, there wasn't any substance left to their marriage, and he had ended it.

Susan was the caricature of a spacey Boulder hippie. She lived with a bunch of people in a big house, was always late, meditated a lot, and took forever to make a decision about anything. Audrey and I hiked some mountain trails in the city, had dinner with Susan, and were glad to leave the next morning for San Francisco. There, we stayed with Audrey's friends, along with their two big hairy dogs. The first night I was devoured by fleas. Everyone seemed insulted by my claiming the apartment had fleas, since no one else was getting bit. Doused in bug spray, I suffered through a second night.

From California, we drove to Arizona to see Ray. If our traveling squabbles hadn't been enough to sour me on life with Audrey, our LSD trip on Super Tubes cinched it.

In Lake Havasu City, the three of us went shopping for our float tubes and a big jug of wine and headed for the lake. We ate our acid and drifted our Super Tubes around a cove under a searing sun and desert blue sky, spying on aquatic critters living in the reeds. Throughout the day, small planes came and went from the airport runway that ended right above our heads. We baked and simmered the summer day away, and then it was time to go home where Ray's mother, Betty, had prepared a big supper for us. Lake Havasu's psychedelic sunset had done nothing to cool our acid-cooked minds.

We piled into Ray's old pick-up, Audrey in the center, still tripping, squirming, and very upset. "I just can't do this," she whined, about the prospect of acting normal over formal dinner with Betty. She scrunched up like an angry child.

Ray was unsympathetic: "Lady, you're going to do it, so you'd better get yourself together."

We survived dinner and our return trip to Michigan, but that was about the end of it for Audrey and me.

A couple of years ago I looked her up on-line. No surprise, she had become a professional success, first getting her doctorate in epidemiology from Johns Hopkins, then working for the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control, UCLA School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine, and finally, professor at the University of Iowa. She devoted her career to maternal and infant health issues. That all sounded impressive, but I also found this online critique from one of her students:

Her emotional instability interferes with her ability to critique and grade objectively. Listen to other students, her reputation precedes her. Worst professor I've ever had!

Yikes! I know it's easy to post anonymous criticism, so I suppose it's possible there's nothing to it, but still, it makes you wonder.

We had a brief email exchange:

Hi Wayne,

...Life in Iowa has been very good for me and my family. I'm still married to John and our kids are now 14 and 17. I wish my lifestyle was less hectic, but can't complain too much. My job is demanding -- especially now that research funding is so tight. My kids are still a handful. I still have disputes with my boss of 10 years.

Here's a pic of me and Julia taken in San Francisco during Christmas break in 2006. We spent Christmas with Bobbie and her family (remember her dog had fleas??).

It's great to hear from you!

Take care, Audrey

* * *

Early summer, 2009, I was driving in sunshine along the St. Lawrence River, heading north through upstate New York. Its landscape has been scoured by glaciers into rounded rocky hills, covered with a worn blanket of topsoil. Harsh winters keep farms hardscrabble. The river is a wide ribbon of royal blue, dividing New York from Canada, a bucolic (in summer) contrast to lean surrounding uplands.

I was there visiting friends I'd made in the late-'70's fighting to save the Great Lakes (the upstream source of the St. Lawrence River) from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' boondoggle that also would have damaged the Thousand Islands region of the river. I had spent much time working with the then-new Save the River community group, organized by the then-incognito, infamous radical Abbie Hoffman and other local activists (chapter seven).

It was for me a time and place steeped in romance and drama. The Thousand Islands is a mix of rural independence, old New York money, and a river so beautiful it will make grown men cry to contemplate its possible despoliation. We were challenging powerful forces -- the Corps, the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority, the steel and shipping industry, big-shot politicians -- in the name of protecting the environment. Heady stuff.

Driving across that upstate New York summer countryside triggered 30-year-old memories of environmental battles won and a woman lost. Mary had dragged me into a street dance in the riverside town of Alexandria Bay one balmy evening in 1979 during the annual Save the River festival. A Dixieland band played Just a Closer Walk with Thee.

Avoid that woman, I had told myself. She is trouble, and you're here to work.

But a friend kept saying, "Look at that," referring mainly to Mary's enormous breasts stretching her too-small Save the River T-shirt.

Mary was pretty, with long dark hair and a seductive smile. I was smitten, but she was someone else's girlfriend.

What's he got that I don't have, I asked myself of Mary's boyfriend. The honest answer: looks, good hair, money, a fast boat, an island for Christ's sake, even a sexy name: "T."

I watched T run in the river festival's 10K road race and decided that he and I should compete at next year's race. Only T wouldn't know that we were competing or that I saw the race as a surrogate for winning his girlfriend. For twelve months, I trained my ass off. I once ran so far along trails in northern Michigan's pine forest that I got lost. By August, I was ready. T wouldn't know what hit him. He didn't, because come race day in upstate New York the next year, T dropped out with a cold. So much for my proxy contest for fair maiden Mary. I ran the race alone. Talk about anti-climax. I did have the best 10K run of my life (40:03), but big deal.

As winter arrived, word filtered back to my Midwest celibate life that Mary and T had broken up. I sought guidance from friends on how to mount a successful long-distance seduction of Mary.

Al called me the "Jester of Love." That was Al, still supporting his wife who had just divorced him. He got her a job in the restaurant in Maine managed by his real love -- a woman married with two kids. Al also was doing the restaurant's bartender and a waitress.

Rick called me a fool. That was Rick, who met a woman in the Capitol in Lansing at a House Republican disco Christmas party and within three months had sold his house, bought a new one, married her, sold their house, and moved to Oklahoma City, of all places.

Ben immediately envisioned three weddings, the last at the Hitching Post Chapel in Las Vegas. That was Ben, whose ex-wife still was claiming his furniture years later.

I ignored all their advice and made my move with Mary. I invented in my mind a fairy tale and, like the Jester of Love that I was, lived it out.

First, I wrote Mary a cheesy letter:

This comes straight from the heart; that's my only defense.  
Ruthless honesty can be difficult to give and awkward to receive.  
But I want you to know.

I want you to know that you are the most beautiful woman I ever met.  
Being near you, talking and laughing with you made me feel  
I had been waiting all my life for you to appear.  
You have completely enchanted me.  
At this moment nothing means more to me than getting to know you better.  
(Is that possible, Mary?)

Remember when you caught me lost in the beauty of the river?  
When I turned and looked into your eyes I recognized the same  
strength, beauty and mystery I found in the river.

If your dreams like elsewhere, if you can't hear the music,  
then I'll be rolling along.  
But I would still want you to know this wonderful feeling  
I have toward you.

As I drove to the Lansing post office, Elvis crooned on the radio: It's now or never, my love won't wait.

For my next move, I went to the Jon Anthony Florist and sent eleven red roses to Case Junior High School in Watertown where she taught art. I hoped: Secretaries will smirk to hide their jealousies, and students will snicker to disguise their horny stupor. Mary is about to have her world view of red roses forever changed.

I wrote heart-rending poetry, some of which I sent her. This one I wrote after a trip to Mexico City:

Sunday in Chapultepec Park

Maybe she just doesn't realize what a sweet-talking  
long-suffering, great lover I really am.

Maybe she just wants to play it safe and find a  
home town boy who coaches basketball or  
works at the bank and have a nice quiet  
life teaching art and doing whatever people do  
in upstate New York.

Maybe men whose names start with "W"  
simply turn her off, remind her of her  
bastard father Wolfgang who walked  
away from all the goddamned women in  
his life when he couldn't stand whatever  
it was that drove him crazy. He believed  
in God and Jesus and then one day it was  
all gone. His wife didn't turn him on,  
he hated going to church, and the craving  
for a stiff belt hit him every time  
he got off work to head for home.

But you never know.

Maybe she still has a flame burning for the  
hockey jock from college, the one with the  
ten-inch cock who says "eh?" a lot and  
likes to crush the can when the beer is gone.  
Someday he will own his own used car lot with  
strings of bare light bulbs and a flashing sign --  
Watertown Auto Sales -- Al "The Stick" Johnson, Prop.  
Al will come home every night and  
watch the news with a beer, bitch  
about the economy going to hell, have  
another beer before supper and then take  
the kids to watch the Watertown  
Wharf Rats get their asses kicked by the  
Syracuse High Braves.

My mind floats above me, drifting back and forth  
in this moment of quiet desperation:  
the ticking of the clock, the great closed eye of the  
television, the scratching of the pen on paper,  
the silence of a soul alone, forever alone,  
and the searing desire to share a love  
filled with colors like the street vendor's balloon stand  
in Chapultepec Park on a Sunday afternoon with  
children in their bright Mexican clothing  
buying cotton candy under that intense tropical sun.

Finally, Mary's curiosity bested her common sense, and she came out to Michigan for a few days. It didn't go particularly well. We screwed a couple of times, but it was not that hot. As Ben said of his first wife, "What good are big tits, anyway? Throw one under one arm. Throw one under your other arm. That's about it."

During Mary's second visit, she caught a bug, had to see a doctor for a yeast infection, and got into a fender-bender. She called Ben to come to the accident scene, since I was unavailable for some reason. He told me later that she seemed unstable and had denied her obvious role in causing the accident.

Ignoring all such omens, I thought I could make things work out for Mary and me by force of will. I regularly consulted the I Ching and found the message I sought: Perseverance furthers. I persevered. What else could I do? I was 34 and still single and hating it. I wanted romance in my life. I wanted love. I wanted a wife.

In my desperation, I adopted a new motto: "Why the fuck not?" It took me years to learn that no matter how bad things seem to be, they can always get worse. That's "why the fuck not." But I didn't know that then. I decided Mary and I should just go for it and get married. I proposed long distance. She must have been feeling some of the same desperation, the same "why the fuck not?" in her life. She said "yes."

I found a jeweler in downtown Lansing and carefully picked out a good-looking diamond of one-third carat. He mounted it in a simple and elegant setting.

The ring and I took the train east, Mary took the train west, and we met at Union Station in Toronto. I put the ring on her finger. "I deserve it," she said, admiring the sparkle, and I agreed. Along with the tourists, some of whom actually were in love, we went to the top of the CN Tower ("1,815 ft., 5 inches, it is the World's Tallest Building and Free Standing Structure").

We went to Toronto's downtown mall, the Eaton Centre. There, we lined up to have our picture taken in a photo gallery, dressed up in old-timey western costumes. Just ahead of us was a make-believe bride blushing to stares of gawkers in the mall. She said her name was Sue from Scotland and the fake wedding picture was to be a joke for a friend back home. She needed a make-believe groom for the picture and I was in the right place at the right time (or was it the wrong place at the wrong time?), so I changed costumes.

I told Sue that my top hat and tux was a good dry run for my real wedding coming in September. My bride-to-be looked on amused, enjoying the charade. Soon, she would come to her senses, and my dream would die. The real bride-to-be would become a make-believe bride; the make-believe groom would remain a make-believe groom. Somewhere in Scotland, a sepia image from Toronto of me in a make-believe marriage hangs on a wall.

Mary and I cried our last cry and said our last goodbye at a Toronto restaurant, A Touch of Old New York. Days later, she called and told me she didn't want to marry me after all. I was crushed. I felt like I'd put everything out there and had been rejected. Which was true. It took a toll, never mind that the entire affair had been an ephemera.

I saw Mary one final time that summer when I drove 500 miles to Watertown to get back her ring. Seeing her little apartment for the first time brought a dash of reality to my fantasy. I had loved the concept that Mary was an artist. Face-to-face with her pedestrian paintings of landscape and wildlife, I was let down. I had expected better.

We had to go to her parents' house to retrieve the ring. Her father, who owned a pizza parlor and was a Mafioso, or so Mary claimed, wasn't home. Her mother, a matronly Italian woman, was nice enough.

I slept in my car that night, then drove back to Michigan, where I gave the ring to my mother, who had never had a diamond ring and wore it often.

I moped around all that summer of 1981 nursing my self-inflicted psychic wounds of love lost. Labor Day weekend, when Mary and I were supposed to have gotten married, found me fishing with a friend in the wilds of British Columbia, still aching over lost dreams. I caught trout and whitefish until I no longer could raise my casting arm. When my little prop plane lifted away from Bella Coola, I looked down on the Talchako River, milk-green with glacial melt water, flowing into the gin-clear Atnarko River that I had been fishing. That moment, my New York heartache vanished. I was free again.

Had I learned anything? Well, a few years later I married an even loonier artist, a self-professed white witch, so the answer would seem to be "no."

* * *

If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all. (Blues classic)

That's how I felt about women for a long time after my love wreck with Mary. I focused on work and trained to run a marathon in the fall of 1982. It was an exciting time, professionally, and my work to protect the Great Lakes made me a high-profile environmentalist in the region. Still, I just couldn't seem to meet any women that I liked that well.

Marsha came along, herself something of a wreck, at a meeting of the Capital Area Audubon Society. She didn't really care about birds; she was there to meet new people. I obliged.

Marsha had been recently divorced by her cheating husband and was consumed with bitterness. Even though she got the house in Okemos (an upscale East Lansing suburb), a new BMW, and custody of her daughter, it wasn't enough. She had a woman attorney who convinced her that the bastard got off too easy. Marsha was suing her ex-husband, ostensibly to squeeze more money out of him, but more likely to punish him for leaving her. Whatever the reason, it all seemed to make her less happy, not more.

The story of my creation of a new environmental organization, Great Lakes United, is for chapter seven. But there's one bit that's relevant to Marsha. When the first annual meeting in Detroit of this new group was scheduled, I decided to stay home. I was being accused by my outspoken environmentalist critics of wanting to run the damned thing, which was the last thing I cared about doing. That's why I just stayed away once the group was up and running. During that first annual meeting, I spent the day shacked up at home with Marsha, grateful that I wasn't stuck in a Detroit hotel with self-righteous environmentalists for the weekend. A friend called me from the meeting to see how I was doing. You can imagine my smugness in comparing my activity with his.

Marsha and I spent my 37th birthday with my parents at their cottage in northern Michigan. In our picture we seem happy enough.

The next month we drove her BMW across Canada to the annual Save the River festival on the St. Lawrence River. Cruising across Toronto at 80 mph, the motor purred like a cat. It was my one and only experience (thus far) driving a luxury German car.

Marsha dropped me at the river and resumed her trip east solo. When later we met up back in Michigan, she gave me a matted miniature collage titled One Flew East. She started seeing another guy, a very odd artist living above a gallery in North Lansing, and that was the end for us.

* * *

My next girlfriend, Michele, was a ballet dancer with whom Diane set me up. She was a lovely, rather shy girl, and we tried to have a good time together. On our first date, I took her to the Toledo Art Museum to see a Goya exhibit. I wanted to like her more than I was able to.

I thought if I upped the romance, all would be well, and planned a getaway to the Lake Michigan coast. We had a wonderful day hiking the dunes, a good dinner, and then checked into a nice motel. I was embarrassed and disappointed in myself. It was proof, as if any were needed, that the chemistry wasn't there for us. We broke each other's loneliness, but that wasn't enough.

* * *

Despite years of looking in vain for love, I was reasonably happy. I recorded my outlook the day after Christmas, 1983:

I am drinking Christmas wine from Verna and eating Christmas cheese from Tom cut on a marble cheese plate for Christmas from Mom. And I am smoking dope bought with my Christmas bonus. I have on my Christmas Save the River T-shirt from Tim. The wine glass was from another Christmas from Verna. My socks are from my Christmas bonus. My pocket knife is my lucky "found for Christmas" one. I am surrounded by 13 Christmas cards. On top of all that Christmas, I have a flock of birds feeding outside my window from a new bag of sunflower seeds. I have six male cardinals in view right outside the window. I was inspired to paint walls in my entire downstairs, just finishing putting up the last pictures this afternoon. I bought a nice new table cloth and mats. All in all, this is a very nice place to be at a very nice time of year. Even if it is the most bitterly cold December ever.

Still, I was alone. That helps explain what came next, which is largely unexplainable (chapter nine). I was tired of chasing women and looking for love. I wasn't made to live alone.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

CHAPTER 6:  
LOOKING FOR WORK

What am I going to be when I grow up? The question consumed me when I was a kid. I hadn't a clue.

When I was in high school, I struggled with my career-seeking conundrum: My aptitude tests said I should become an engineer. Yet, all my personal interest tests said I should become a game warden or a park ranger. I don't remember anyone ever saying to me, follow your passion! That simple advice might have saved me a lot of wasted time.

A deacon in our church, Grafton Moore, came close. He was a big man with a Marine-style crew-cut, and he owned a steel fabricating business south of Flint. That made him by far the richest person in our blue-collar church, so his views carried a lot of weight. When I shared with him my teenage angst, he promised, "If you just keep working at it, you will eventually figure it out."

(Another of Grafton's bromides: "You can't stop the birds from flying around your head, but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair." He recited that after one of his guilt-inducing lessons to my all-boys Sunday School class, when I had asked how you could stop having sinful thoughts.)

Until my junior year in high school, I assumed that my parents would insist I start college at the Fort Wayne Bible Institute, my father's evangelical alma mater. I figured after one year, I could transfer to a real college. But they didn't push me that direction, so I flirted with two equally ridiculous career tracks -- the military and engineering.

My school advisor said West Point was an option for me. He was pretty sure he could secure the needed politician's recommendation to get me into the military academy, but I declined the offer. (I also checked out the U.S. Naval Academy.) Instead, I picked a future career with General Motors.

Down the engineering path I strode, officially set to attend General Motors Institute in Flint. It would be half classroom and half apprenticing in one of the many nearby GM plants that then existed. I picked the AC Spark Plug plant and would major in electrical engineering. The apprenticeship would help with school costs, plus I could live at home cheaply. An electrical engineer working for General Motors -- that was going to be me.

I think it was the prospect of living at home with my parents that brought me to my senses before it was too late. I realized there had to be a better plan. I looked for an engineering school that would put me as far as possible from Flint but still be in Michigan so I could pay in-state tuition. I settled on Michigan Tech in Houghton at the western end of Michigan's U.P. (Upper Peninsula) -- 500 miles from home. The college offered me a scholarship to at least cover tuition.

With kid-sister, Sandy, at Lake Superior;  
heading off to college at Michigan Tech

I chose metallurgical engineering for my major, for no good reason, and soon changed it to geological engineering, for not much better reason. I figured that at least classes in geology might be interesting, even though I knew I didn't want to earn a living digging holes in the Earth; it all seemed a bit sacrilegious. I just couldn't figure out anything better for a major. And then, there was the draft; I had to be in college to get a student deferment. The Vietnam War was heating up and any 18-year-old -- male, healthy, and heterosexual -- without a student deferment was sure to be drafted with a good chance of getting shot or blown up.

My roommate, Doug, had a car, a canoe, and a bit of spending money. A year ahead of me, he knew his way around the north woods that surrounded the snow-bound outpost of Michigan Tech. We fished, shot guns, and went rock hunting around the old copper mines. My first spring, we fished together every other day, catching monstrous spawning pike, crappie, and hog-sized carp in nearby sloughs that connect to Lake Superior.

Now and then, on weekends, I went south with Doug to his home in central Wisconsin. Our idea of fun was to load up fist-sized rocks on the passenger's side floor of his Nash Rambler station wagon. We would target rural mailboxes, seeing how many we could destroy in the three-hour trip. The real challenge was throwing over the top of the car at 70 mph to nail a mailbox across the highway. Yep, we did that.

Ours was a friendship of forced convenience. By the winter of our second year living together, strains were showing. Doug was a total slob; I wasn't. Doug was in the Army ROTC; I was starting to question the Vietnam War. Doug was content to spend winter evenings endlessly retelling the same fishing and hunting stories; I was discovering Nietzsche and Tolstoy.

Those long winter nights were trouble. No social life, no women anywhere, difficult classes, and no spending money. Here's how poor and how bored we were: Pop from the Pepsi machine in the basement cost a dime. We discovered that with about 40 minutes of hard work you could file down a penny to the size of a dime, and it would fit. We did that for lots of one-cent Pepsi's.

Another neurotic case in point (which I wouldn't believe if I hadn't done it myself): I lost my combination lock for my gym locker but coincidentally found someone else's lock. I figured out the lock's three-number combination by systematic trial and error: 0,0,0; 0,0,1; 0,0,2; etc. If I remember my math correctly, there are 36 to the third power (more than 46,000) possible combinations; I don't recall how long it took me to find the right three numbers, but I did it.

So when I say that Doug got weird and one day decided I was a total asshole who effectively no longer existed, maybe it's not so hard to understand how such a thing could happen in that bizarro U.P. world. Doug and a couple of others socially froze me out of everything. I came and went in a vacuum. I lived with people who pretended I was invisible. It was like an Amish shunning.

At that place and time in the U.P., the local picked-on ethnic minority was the Finns, similar to more widespread bigotry toward those of Polish descent. I had bought into that ugliness and had joined in turning it on our poor Finnish roommate, until he actually moved out. The karmic, ironic justice of having blind prejudice turned on me by my other roommates, sadly, was completely lost on me. Growing up is hard to do.

Houghton, midway out the Keweenaw Peninsula that juts into Lake Superior, is set in a landscape from Dr. Zhivago. It snows from early fall to late spring -- 300 inches my first year there. Winter Carnival, with house-sized ice sculptures, was the campus year's highlight. City streets were carved through snow banks piled higher than your head. Some icicles grew six feet or more from eaves and could kill you when they fell. I discovered that at 25 degrees below zero, you should never breathe through your nose or it would freeze. Not that the place wasn't beautiful in its stark, other-worldly whiteness. Although winter nights seemed endless, Northern Lights often blazed and billowed in full, astonishing view from our dorm window.

Classes were tough. During freshman orientation the Dean told us, "Look at the guy on your right, and then the one on your left. If you are still here in four years, odds are those guys won't be." I would become the "won't be" statistic. In fact, I barely made it through my first engineering class ("Statics"). A few weeks into my second one ("Dynamics") as a sophomore, I walked out of class. I hated it. If that's what you needed to know to be an engineer, I wanted no part of it. That was the end of my fledgling engineering career, even though it was one day after the deadline to drop a class and get a refund, and it meant a failing grade. I decided then to transfer to a non-engineering college, some place where the ratio of women to men was better than 1:18. A place that took liberal arts seriously. UC Berkeley was my first choice.

My father was appalled when he saw the "F" grade. I told him I wanted to transfer to Berkeley the next year and asked if he would help with the higher costs for out-of-state tuition in California. I might as well have asked to attend Moscow University and become a Communist.

I spent my last summer at Michigan Tech taking surveying and geology field classes, living alone in a basement apartment. At the beginning of the summer I bought a 50-pound bag of potatoes. I lived mostly on fried sliced potatoes and ketchup, Jell-O, and trout that I caught in Pilgrim Creek -- which was close enough to reach by bicycle.

That fall I transferred to Michigan State University. There were no goodbyes and no reconciliation with ex-roommate, ex-friend Doug when I left.

### Small World

Over the years, that soured friendship with Doug nagged at me. I wrote him a couple of times, but never got a response. Finally, it all went into a corner of my mind's attic where such memories get stored to collect dust and take up space, reminding you of their presence now and then when you unexpectedly stub your toe on them.

Twenty-five years later, I was living far from the U.P., working as a land developer in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. One night, after a few drinks while watching a National Geographic special about the Great Lakes with a friend from work, I started telling him nostalgic stories of my days in Michigan, pointing out places on the map, including the remote location of Michigan Tech.

"You know, Ron," I said, "I found out recently that our geohydrology engineer from Las Vegas went to school at Michigan Tech. He sent me his resume because we needed his credentials for some work. I saw that he attended Tech, so I called him up. 'Hey, Grisham,' I said to him. 'I see you went to Michigan Tech. When were you there?' He tells me, and I say, 'Small world. I was there two of the same years.' Some coincidence, eh, Ron?"

As I was telling this story to Ron, I got a creepy feeling. I was thinking, Grisham. Grisham. Boy, that name sounds familiar.

"Ron, this is too weird. I've got to check something out." I dug out my college yearbook, looking for Grisham's picture. Nothing in my 1965 yearbook, but there in the 1966 yearbook was one Douglas A. Grisham, pictured with the Army ROTC Rifle Team. Now, I had never met in person Las Vegas-Grisham, our development company's engineer. I had, however, talked with him countless times by phone and employed him for numerous jobs. I immediately left Ron and rushed over to my office across the street and dug out his resume. Sure enough, same "A." middle initial. Sure enough, he was originally from Wisconsin. Sure enough, this guy had actually been my roommate for two years at Michigan Tech! During more than a year of working together, albeit via phone, our history together never had dawned on either of us, even when we had talked about the coincidence of both having attended Michigan Tech at the same time.

A few months later, I arranged to meet Doug for lunch in an outdoor cafe in Las Vegas. I hadn't told him about my discovery, and he hadn't figured it out. As we chit-chatted, I casually pulled out a fishing jig, a three-inch-long, red and white contraption with a round lead head and bucktail tied to it. This was a jig made by Doug 25 years earlier on a cold winter night in our Michigan Tech dorm room, the lead poured by his own hands into a jig mold, the dyed bucktail from a deer he had shot or found dead on the highway. It was one of the same jigs he and I had used to catch pike together. I flipped it on the table and said, "Doug, you ever see anything like this?" It laid there in the Las Vegas winter sunlight, 2,000 miles and several lifetimes from its point of creation.

Doug got a strange look on his face.

"Go ahead, pick it up," I said.

He looked it over. "Well, yeah, the thread looks like it's from Herter's, and... What's going on here?"

At this point, I imagined neurons short-circuiting in his brain. I said, "Doug, you made that."

"Wait a minute. Schmidt? Oh, my god."

That's about all there is to this small world tale. We didn't really reminisce, and we certainly never brought up the bad ending to our friendship. After all, it didn't much matter anymore. I looked at this portly, middle-aged man sitting across from me, and I wondered how his long-dead wrath could ever have haunted me.

The next Christmas a small package came in the mail from Doug. In it was a small, hand-made wooden box with my name stenciled on it. Under the sliding lid were six perfectly tied red and white jigs. I've fished with them a few times, but they've yet to catch a fish. I keep trying, though I suppose that's not really the point.

### Dead Ends

In my junior year of college, I transferred from Michigan Tech to Michigan State in East Lansing. Classes were not memorable. In December, 1967, MSU gave me a piece of paper that said I had a Bachelor of Science degree in geology. B.S., indeed. Now what?

I took a hodge-podge of jobs for three lost years. I spent one year living in rural Swartz Creek with Verna, my girlfriend's generous mother, while working as a substitute teacher in schools throughout Genesee County. Verna taught school in downtown Flint. I would drop her off in the morning and then drive her beat-up old Chevy to my own assignment. It was an awful job. For one interminable month, for example, I covered a special ed class all day in a little trailer behind the real school. One kid kept biting the top of his hand until it would bleed. What did I know about short-bussers? Not a damned thing.

Eventually, I lucked out to fill in for a suburban Lake Fenton school teacher who was gone for the rest of the year. They liked me and kept me on, and that assignment at least was sufferable. I taught junior high geography and math, and high school trigonometry, my favorite class since the smart kids took it. Overall, though, I still hated the job. Very little teaching, very much babysitting, and I wasn't good at either. After all, I had zero training.

It was a trio of eighth-grade girls that did me in. I tried subbing again a second year. I usually got sent to schools in black, inner-city Flint. One day, these three girls were completely out of control, making my life as miserable as they could. It was sport for them. Nothing personal. At the end of the second day of a week-long assignment, I walked into the principal's office and quit.

"Not only am I not coming back tomorrow," I told him, "I am never going to sub again."

And I never did. Instead, my professional career progressed from one dead end to another: research lab animal caretaker, janitor, bicycle delivery boy, mailman.

### Thank God for LSD

It was while working as a hippie mailman in San Francisco that I had my life-changing, acid-fueled epiphany at Salt Point, which I described earlier (chapter four). Thank god for LSD. Now 24, for the first time in my life, I had direction. I returned to MSU in 1971. I was afire to learn everything. I took 18 credits my first term, shocking myself with a 4.3 grade point average (mostly A+'s).

Tree identification was my favorite class. I still carry in my car my old dendrology textbook, which I came close to memorizing that term. I even loved the Latin names; my favorite: Pseudotsuga menziesii \-- the words roll off your tongue -- the Douglas fir, those titanic trees that I now live among in Oregon.

I took classes from a few great teachers, a few useless ones, and most not memorable one way or the other. The two worst were the two most famous. Both were arrogant assholes, using dusty, outdated lesson plans, and teaching only because forced to do it to pay the bills for their so-called scientific expeditions around the world. Dr. Maynard Miller, a glaciologist, taught a class about aerial and topographic mapping. He was rugged and handsome, and loved telling stories of his unsuccessful attempt to climb Mt. Everest. He was a pathetic teacher. I learned little of value about mapping.

Dr. George Petrides taught Wildlife Population Dynamics. He was so bad that I complained to the amiable chairman of my department, Dr. Niles Kevern, whose main defense of the tenured old guy was, "he brings in lots of grants." Petrides had authored a field guide to trees and shrubs, his claim to fame. From his book, I did learn a few things about identifying shrubs. From his stuffy teaching, I learned how the Peter Principle works ("every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence").

Later, after graduating, I served on my former department's alumni advisory committee, but found little I could do to ensure better quality teaching. Tenured professors are untouchable by anyone, so are free to subject their tuition-paying students to their incompetence and disinterest.

Dr. William E. Cooper, whose ecology class was dreaded by most, was the other extreme. Bill was a fast talker, quite taken with himself, and quick to depart from his lectures along lines of free association in his jazzy mind. One minute he might be talking about the ecology of a marsh, the next, on the politics of permitting a steel mill in a wetland. Taking notes in Bill's class was impossible, given his pace and eclectic teaching style. It was like trying to follow a swallow with binoculars -- too fast, too erratic, yet beautiful in its way. I tried my best to soak it all in by simply paying close attention. It worked for me.

Bill was chairman of the Michigan Environmental Review Board, or "MERB," as it was known, recently created by the governor to review environmental impact statements of proposed development projects. I started attending monthly MERB meetings, just because I thought Bill was so interesting.

Some years later into my career I would find myself appointed by Bill as his "Alternate" on MERB and would chair its monthly meetings in his absence. It was one of those rare moments when you can measure progress in your trajectory through life. That's where I was on the sidelines. This is where I am now, running the show.

Bill was a strange creature. Short, swarthy, with fierce eyes that he sometimes would flutter and briefly roll into the back of his head when talking to you; heavily tanned from field work; handsome as much by force of personality as his looks. It was the disco era and Bill wore open shirts under his cashmere sport coats, baring his hairy chest blinged with gold chains. He lived to argue. He and I once went at it in a hallway about DDT's damage to the environment, especially egg-shell thinning in fish-eating birds like bald eagles. Bill argued (loudly, since there were bystanders to play to) that it hadn't been proven that DDT was the culprit, my first indication that he could be as full of shit as anyone else.

Bill, however, was my hero because he saw to it that new environmental laws being passed in the day were enforced with some teeth. He was fearless in putting state bureaucrats on the spot publicly for their environmental shortcomings and making them do better. I learned much from Bill Cooper.

While still in graduate school, I tasted my first thrill of saving wild places. East Lansing was eyeing highway funds to replace its dilapidated Kalamazoo Street Bridge across the Red Cedar River, and elevate above the flood level and widen to four lanes the lazy two-lane roadway. It would have meant filling in much of the adjacent flood plain and destroying the essence of that little patch of nature that I loved. My running route took me along the tree-lined stretch of road nearly every day; I had carved a heart with mine and another's initials high in a great, smooth-barked beech tree out in that floodplain. Although my activist help was insignificant, the bridge project did get killed. Amazing! I should have seen right then that being an environmental rabble-rouser was my calling. (Decades later, East Lansing replaced the old bridge at-grade, and again preserved the adjacent bit of urban wildness.)

I got much of my graduate school expenses paid by Consumers Power Company, one of the state's two big utilities. If only they could have foreseen the millions of dollars I would help cost them (recounted later), I'm sure they would have had nothing to do with me. I worked summers with three other grad students doing environmental impact assessments of properties that Consumers was considering for new power plants. Upon graduating, it wasn't such a big jump to start a business doing that same type of work. I partnered with a college friend, Pat Rusz, and we created S&R Environmental Consulting. My house in Lansing was our business address. Pat's training was in aquatic ecology, mine in terrestrial ecology. We were a good team.

We did a few more projects for Consumers Power Company, which got our business off the ground. We landed a job assessing a potential site for a huge recreational vehicle park \-- Outdoor Resorts of America -- but we only got partially paid before the project went belly-up. Trout Unlimited (TU) hired us to study property it had been given along the world-famous Au Sable River in northern Michigan. Pat waded in the river studying its fish, bugs, and weeds. I hiked in the lowland cedars and upland pine flats, which I concluded should be managed for endangered Kirtland's warblers.

These little birds nest in the branches of only one kind of pine (and only when the trees are of a certain adolescent age), which grow on only one kind of soil, a porous sand found only in tiny areas of the upper Midwest sculpted by mile-thick glaciers 10,000 years ago. The warblers find these rare spots to nest in northern Michigan after flying from their wintering home in the Caribbean. The TU property could attract Kirtland's warblers, but only if they first burned down the old scrubby forest. Fire is required to sprout jack pine seeds and grow a clean, young pine forest to the warblers' liking. I don't know if anything happened with my recommendations, but I doubt it. Fortunately, the birds have lots of friends and are doing well on government-managed jack pine forests nearby.

My college advisor, Dr. Leslie Gysel, visited us on that TU site. I think it was rewarding for him to see his protégé making a professional go of it. That was the last time I saw him. He retired to Oregon, like I would do many years later. I never understood why Dr. Gysel, a wildlife biologist, ever agreed to take me as a grad student in 1971. I had been away from college for several years, my geology major meant I had to take all the undergraduate biology and chemistry classes before I could even start as his grad student. My undergraduate grade point average was mediocre. I had never met him. I wonder what he saw that told him to take a chance on me. Thankfully, it wouldn't be the last time in my career that someone would do that.

My biggest problem with being an environmental consultant was that I hated it. I hated dealing with sleazy developers. I hated tromping around in snowy woods in January when freezing rain got so heavy on my Pinto's wipers that one once flew off into the ditch. I hated field work in August, when I had to wear hip boots to avoid poison ivy in the woods and poison sumac in the swamps, on days dripping with humidity and pollen. I hated business paperwork. I hated being poor. Most of all, I hated sucking up to clients to get work.

My partner and I had lunch with one potential client at the Lansing Country Club. This rich weirdo lived on a big rural property. He had a thing about black. He wanted our help to import wild black animals to live on his property. He didn't want to shoot them, just own them. Black squirrels, black geese, black anything. He was trying to figure out how to breed black deer. Black. What was up with that? Nothing came of the lunch, except that it was the last straw for me as a consulting environmental entrepreneur.

Out of the blue, I got a call from someone in the William James College at Grand Valley State Colleges on the west side of the state. They wanted me to teach a class in environmental impact review as an adjunct faculty member. They somehow had learned about me from my attending MERB meetings. It wouldn't pay much, but why not? William James College was a hip, unstructured, avant-garde department. Sign me up. For the next year or two I taught classes one day a week in tree identification, dunes ecology, forest management, scientific writing, and environmental assessment.

I was popular with most of my students, and0 I didn't hate the work. Even in winter snow, I would take my classes on walks in the woods around campus talking about trees and ecology, or hike the nearby Lake Michigan dunes having them assess hypothetical sand mining proposals. I felt a bit like a phony, however, given my limited real-world work experience.

At the end of 1975, I was 29, barely surviving financially (I earned just $5,800 that year), and not really enjoying my work. I was getting bored, and more than a little worried about my future. I needed a real job.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

### CHAPTER 7:  
TILTING AT WINDMILLS

"Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."

"What giants?" asked Sancho Panza.

"Those you see over there," replied his master, "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length."

"Take care, sir," cried Sancho. "Those over there are not giants but windmills." (Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes)

This is the story about the happiest and most productive ten years of my working career. I played a central role in Michigan's environmental movement at a critical time. I loved my job so much that I would have worked for free. It fulfilled my long-sought dream of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Work was fun.

At times, however, my righteous war to impale hulking polluters seemed no more realistic than Don Quixote's quest. Is Michigan's environment and are the Great Lakes the better for my tilting? I think so, but, then, how can anyone measure the value of their life's work? How do you ever know?

After finishing grad school in 1974, I eked out a subsistence living by starting an environmental consulting business with a partner and teaching a few college classes. As I noted in the last chapter, I didn't enjoy the work. I felt that the environmental career I had struggled my whole life to find was floundering.

In contrast, my grad school office partner, Dennis Fijalkowski, reveled in his new job. After college, he started work as field representative for MUCC, the Michigan United Conservation Clubs. MUCC had 100,000 members -- mostly hunting, gun-loving, and fishing types -- and published a monthly magazine, Michigan Out-of-Doors. Dennis' job, working out of MUCC's one-story, orange brick office building on the edge of Lansing, was liaison to MUCC's 400 member clubs around the state.

I started paying attention to MUCC and goading Dennis to get MUCC to weigh in on environmental issues, such as water pollution, wetlands filling, and freeway building, and not just focus on sportsmen's issues. It was the '70s and people were expecting it, I said. He agreed and tried his best to represent MUCC's position in environmental controversies, but just couldn't keep up.

Dennis introduced me to his bombastic boss, Tom Washington, MUCC's executive director, an imposing bear of a man. Tom liked me. Dennis talked him into hiring me for a trial run as MUCC's resident environmental activist. My first assignment was to investigate the Department of Natural Resources' administration in northern Michigan of the state law that regulated use of lakes, streams, and marshes. MUCC was hearing members' complaints of illegal fillings of waterways being ignored by the DNR. I investigated and wrote up my findings for Michigan Out-of-Doors. My first-ever published article, a "Special Report," was mixed-metaphorically titled: Inland Lakes and Streams Act Adrift on Troubled Waters.

I found that there were lots of problems with how the law, intended to protect waterways from indiscriminate filling, was being run by the DNR. But no "villains,"

only ordinary people, operating under conflicting pressures, earning livings, and trying to do what they think best at the moment. The problems...are primarily a function of the complexities of the issues the Act attempts to address -- restrictions on development and land use zoning.

Not very sexy; just honest. My early writing, though clumsy, showed common sense and balance, an approach that got me a long way in my career at MUCC, an association of ordinary people who didn't go for environmental extremism.

I concluded my article:

Perhaps the most fertile potential for positive change lies with the individual citizen, and not in the bureaucracy at all. One thing is certain -- we all share a burden in the environmental problems being faced in Presque Isle County. They are indicative of the problems much of Michigan is facing, and how they are resolved will affect the quality of all our lives.

After that assignment for MUCC, I agreed to work half-time for Tom until we saw how it went. At first, I wasn't sure I wanted to work for this crazy fat guy, and he wasn't so sure about hiring this hippie with a pony tail. But it went well, as it tends to when you marry work and passion. I found that I loved environmental advocacy.

Soon, Tom offered to hire me full time, and I offered to cut my hair. The pay was barely adequate, but at least predictable. I was thrilled to give up my struggles to keep afloat my business partnership, S&R Environmental Consulting. I also phased out of my adjunct faculty teaching job at Grand Valley State Colleges. Tom let me make up my own job title at MUCC: Staff Ecologist. I spent the next ten years building MUCC's environmental programs, always proud of that title.

"I just want one more thing from you," I told Tom.

"What's that?"

"Just give me enough rope to hang myself."

Tom said okay. There would be more than one time coming when he would be sure I was going to do just that. Although I felt the rope around my neck a few times, I never did hang. It was a secret of our odd but beautiful friendship.

I came to Michigan's environmental movement at a unique time. Earth Day 1970 had been a watershed moment, when concern for environmental abuses began to be translated into law and bureaucracy.

(Dave Dempsey, a fellow activist of this era, has told well the larger story of Michigan's conservation history: Ruin & Recovery: Michigan's Rise as a Conservation Leader [2001, The University of Michigan Press].)

By 1975, when I started at MUCC, there was broad and growing public support for environmental improvements. And, in Michigan, there was my boss, Tom Washington, to lead it.

The roots of the environmental movement had been growing for decades. The history of MUCC is that of sportsmen, who were among the first to recognize the costs of wildlife habitat losses, water pollution, and wetlands and flood plain development. The abuses of Michigan's environment had started from the first moment of European exploration and exploitation of its waters and woodlands. Beginning in deadly earnest in the mid-1800s, the ravenous consumption of Michigan's wild animals, fish, trees, and minerals -- compounded by cataclysmic forest fires, erosion, and wetlands destruction -- caused permanent damage.

By the 1960s, the Great Lakes' fishery had collapsed from over-fishing and pollution. Mountains of alewives -- small smelt-like fish that had invaded from the Atlantic Ocean -- died and rotted on beaches. Rivers were stained day-glow by oil and chemical poisons. I had seen industrial wastes being burned in open pits, buried in swamps, or simply dumped on the ground. DDT, the miracle mosquito killer from the 1950s, along with other long-lasting pesticides, had accumulated in the ecosystem and virtually wiped out bald eagles and some other fish-eating critters. PCBs, a fire-proof oil widely used by utilities and industry, had become, literally, ubiquitous across the globe, spread by waters and winds, even dangerously tainting fish in isolated wilderness lakes on remote Isle Royale in the middle of Lake Superior. It was all part of the post-World War II mentality that industry scientists and their miraculous new chemicals could do no wrong. Not until Rachel Carson blew the whistle in her book, Silent Spring, in 1962, did people begin to appreciate the insidious costs of their blind faith. General attitudes of the time were captured in the chemical industry slogan, "Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible."

Salmon from the Pacific Ocean were dumped into the Great Lakes, starting in 1966, to gobble up alewives, which brought some stability to the ecosystem and created a billion-dollar annual sports fishery. The salmon, however, became tainted with the lakes' invisible toxic pollutants, prompting controversial warnings against eating the fish. The common refrain I heard so often from MUCC's Joe Six-Pack Sportsman, however, was: "I've been eating these salmon all my life, and they never hurt me none." I often wanted to hold up a mirror to their stupid faces and ask: "Seriously?"

The environmental crisis was real and felt nowhere more sharply than in Michigan, the "Great Lakes State." Idealism in defense of the environment became a mainstream value by the '70s. Michigan pioneered regulations to stem the tide of environmental destruction -- public funding for new wastewater treatment plants, bans on DDT and PCBs, toxic chemical waste regulations, wetlands protection, sand dunes preservation, a popular bottle bill, and purchase of thousands of acres of lands for nature conservation and recreation.

For ten golden years, I worked for Tom Washington, using MUCC in my crusade to protect the environment of Michigan and the Great Lakes. I had the best job in the world.

Tom allowed me remarkable freedom to build MUCC's environmental reputation. I inserted myself into virtually every environmental issue in Michigan -- hundreds of them -- reviewing every permit application in the state for wetlands fills and pollution discharges; fighting proposed highways, landfills, and water projects; helping write new state laws and regulations; hounding sluggish environmental bureaucrats.

My first year at MUCC was sink-or-swim. I was immersed into a grassroots campaign to pass the bottle bill (requiring ten-cent deposits on beer and soda containers). Our first job was collecting signatures to put the proposal on Michigan's general election ballot in 1976. I spent days getting signatures, including standing outside the restrooms of a welcome center on I-75. People rushed past me with pained faces, promising "I'll get you on the way out." Most did; they were sick of the litter. In six weeks we had more than 400,000 signatures, far more than needed.

Our next job was convincing people to vote for the initiative ("Yes on A!"). MUCC got endless calls for speakers for debates and media interviews about the contentious referendum. I had always dreaded public speaking; then, suddenly, I was talking to audiences and reporters every week -- countering industry claims that deposits on beer and soda bottles and cans would be an economic calamity.

After one radio interview, Gretchen, a reporter for the local public station, privately gave me a searing critique of my on-air style. I talked too fast and too long. She was right, though her giving me tips probably violated some journalistic ethics (we were dating). By November, when voters approved the bottle bill by a 2:1 margin, I had gotten pretty good at it -- public speaking, that is, not dating -- Gretchen and I didn't last.

A big part of my MUCC work was attending meetings of state and regional agencies and legislative committees, and speaking at public hearings. I sat on dozens of advisory committees created by the governor (e.g., Governor's Task Force on High Level Radioactive Waste), the legislature, and state agencies that dealt with pollution. I was a member of obscure groups like the Legislative Committee on Drain Code Recodification. On that one, I got to hang out with lobbyists from the Farm Bureau, conservative farmers, and sleazy county drain commissioners. I chaired the DNR's Environmental Protection Policy Advisory Committee, a governor-appointed panel. I was the token environmentalist on groups like the Saginaw-Bay [Counties] Mosquito Control Technical Advisory Committee.

MUCC was full of its own meetings. It's what gave it genuine grassroots connections. Its unwieldy, 90-member Board of Directors (20 geographic districts with several officers from each) met a full weekend every other month, rotating to host neighborhoods of its local member clubs throughout the state. I saw a lot of Ramadas and Holiday Inns.

Tom was able to control MUCC's geriatric, conservative, often loony board, even when some members balked at the environmental positions I took on their behalf. He was at once respected and feared, his style a complex brew of charm, street smarts, self-confidence, and intimidation.

I got away with pushing a progressive environmental agenda at MUCC because Tom and I shared a conviction: We were representing "the people of Michigan." I felt it a privilege to be constantly talking on their behalf to political decision makers and to reporters. I would say: "...the people of Michigan believe..." Never was it what "I" thought. Usually, I got the benefit of the doubt that the majority of people really did agree with me. Usually, most people actually did.

What I did and said put MUCC in the news, demonstrating that the organization was relevant on environmental issues that people cared about. Yet, I couldn't prove it was good for MUCC's business, as our marketing guy, Bill Kendy, kept harping about. I had little appreciation in my early years for people like Bill and the power and importance of branding in a business, or of my role in it. I posted on Bill's office wall a B. Kliban cartoon, "The Birth of Advertising," showing fat little cigar-smoking men in suits plopping out of a horse's ass. Bill took it hard; in our few encounters over our post-MUCC decades, he always reminded me of my insult -- in a kidding way, but still...

One time, an MUCC form letter soliciting new members was sent back with this note hand printed in heavy black marker:

HELL NO! DON'T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH MUCC... WAYNE SCHMIDT IS NOT HELPING! WHAT QUALIFIES AND WHO ASKED HIM TO SPEAK FOR REAL SPORTSMEN? I THINK HE HAS TWO PROBLEMS NO BRAINS & DIARHEA (sic) OF THE MOUTH. HOW MANY JOBS HAS HIS KIND COST MICHIGAN? HE MIGHT BE BETTER OFF IN THE GREENSPEACE (sic).

Regardless of whether MUCC's business was helped or hurt by my diarrheic mouth, Tom knew how to manage a $3 million budget, which included my paychecks. After all, you can't save the environment if you can't pay your bills. He didn't do it alone -- he had guys like Bill on his staff who made him look good \-- but MUCC worked because of and in spite of Tom's outsized personality.

### Tom Washington Shit in My Hat

"Tofu and granola eaters" is how Tom saw the new brand of environmentalists in the '70s, particularly any in competition with MUCC. A motley coalition of new organizations had arisen, groups like the West Michigan Environmental Action Council in Grand Rapids: polite, sensitive, college educated, consensus driven, backpackers and bird watchers, liberal, pro-gun control, focused on environmental preservation.

Then there was Big Tom: confrontational, dictatorial, loud, impatient, high school educated, a hunter, focused on resource conservation (which in the liturgy of the movement, meant "wise use, not preservation"), a future president of the National Rifle Association. And big. The man -- tall and over 300 pounds -- was a presence. He commanded the center of attention. The Detroit News called him a cross between a bear and a bulldog.

On the one hand, it made sense for MUCC to work with other groups. On the other hand, Tom disdained competition for attention, power, control, members, and funding. He believed that the stronger he was, then the stronger MUCC was, and then the more he and MUCC could accomplish. Sharing power and stage did not fit that agenda. Tom's response to requests to join any coalition usually boiled down to: "Only if I'm in charge."

When Tom and I attended meetings of environmental groups, usually in the ratty quarters of the American Lung Association in downtown Lansing, he loved to mock their politically correct refreshments ("weed tea and seed cakes"). His style ran more to Scotch and fried chicken livers. We would go because we felt we should, and would sit in agony as they debated process and bragged of what Tom and I deemed insignificant accomplishments. An aborted effort to agree on an amphibian-based logo for the coalition led Tom to forever brand them as the "Watch Frogs."

At any event, Tom either was in charge or was in the back of the room grumbling loudly and making sure that everyone was aware of him. In a restaurant he was a self-proclaimed gastronome (justifiably so), demanding the best of service, food, and drinks for himself and his table. Full of his own stories, he would entertain and embarrass his guests, while annoying surrounding tables with his volume. He was an incorrigible ogler of waitresses -- all women, really. "I'll bet she has a bush like King Kong," he would confide to me non-too quietly. As to actual conquests, he either was very discrete or all his stories were fantasies -- I never learned which.

There was a rumor that his desk had a hatchet scar delivered by the pissed-off husband of MUCC's blond office manager, whom Tom reportedly was screwing at the time. When away, he kept his cavernous office locked, but I sneaked in one time; I couldn't find any hatchet marks.

His office was a curious place, dark with pulled drapes, and full of awards, mementos, and dead animals. Visitors dodged the stuffed head on a bear hide draped over his couch. A wild turkey, frozen in a mid-strut, stood next to his desk. After Tom lived his dream and went on a hunting safari in Africa, more dead animals showed up. Cheesy heads of African antelope and a water buffalo, seams obvious where hides had been stitched like Levis, lined fake wood paneling. They all looked rather sad. And very dead.

His best piece of shot-dead-animal-work, however, was in the guest bathroom of his Upper Peninsula summer house on the north shore of Lake Michigan: a stuffed ape, glass eyes glaring, teeth bared, standing with its two index fingers pointing together, frozen just far enough apart to hold a roll of toilet paper. Ironic, given that dead ape's effect on your sphincter.

It's not that Tom was a total rube. On a lobbying trip to D.C. and my usual visit to the National Gallery of Art, I bought for him a cheap print of Winslow Homer's "Right and Left" (two goldeneye ducks flaring over ocean waves as they are shot by hunters). He knew the painting and seemed genuinely touched when I gave him the little print in a frame that I made.

On the other hand, the art on his walls at home came from so-called starving artists sales at malls and hotels. I went with him to one. The "original hand-painted" so-called art was as atrocious as it was cheap. Tom bought a couple of sappy landscapes.

No one enjoyed a tacky prank more than Tom. Now, the only good thing I've ever found about being bald is wearing a fur hat on a bitter winter day. There's nothing like a bare pate nestled in real fur. Tom, however, didn't think much of my haberdashery taste. He insisted that my favorite furry topper -- I called it my yak driver's hat -- "looks like something you should take a shit in." Sure enough, one day I went to leave the office and found a pile of dog shit (mostly, atop a plastic baggie) in my upside-down fur hat. Tom was just so tickled with himself.

I respected Tom because he was a populist, a defender of "the little guy." Because he was actually a little guy himself -- from a working-class family near Detroit. Paradoxically, he spent a lifetime disparaging "fat cats," all the while trying to become one.

There was no faking his love of the outdoors, though. Nature was his salvation, and he loved hunting most of all. It had taught him the importance of habitat and a healthy environment in order to have good hunting and fishing. He wanted everyone to be able to have such fun. That's why he fought hard for public access to lakes and streams. That's why building boardwalks and fishing piers on the river in downtown Detroit was more important to him than saving pristine habitat "Up North" -- the Michigan limited to weekends and vacations for most of the state's urban south. Faced with real-world choices among priorities, Tom was a pragmatist who came down on the side of the disadvantaged and those with little political power.

As for Tom's accomplishments, here are a couple of the big ones: There would be no Michigan bottle bill without Tom. He had built up the institution of MUCC to a business force that could run and fund the grassroots bottle bill campaign and election referendum. He imposed on a rag-tag army of volunteers and flakey do-gooder organizations the discipline needed to defeat a well-funded industry that opposed the deposit law.

There would be no Natural Resources Trust Fund. This is the fund in Michigan that takes state royalties from oil and gas drilling and uses it to buy parks and wildlife areas. A natural opportunist, Tom conceived the idea of the Trust Fund as a way to win a battle over the Pigeon River Country State Forest. Today, it is hard to appreciate what all the fuss was about, but in the mid-'70s it was the most divisive conservation battle Michigan had ever experienced. The issue was whether to allow oil and gas drilling in this big block of undeveloped public forest land in northeast Lower Michigan, two-thirds of it purchased with hunters' money for the purpose of allowing public hunting.

Though in no way a wilderness, the forest's size made for a unique block of state-owned wild land that stirred the preservationist hormones of the emerging environmental movement in Michigan. Roger Conner, director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council in Grand Rapids, led the effort to block proposed drilling, a position strongly backed by the Detroit Free Press. This was about Big Oil in the Big Wild (as the forest became dubbed).

At stake was not just short-term disruption of the Pigeon River Country by oil and gas development. What really was being argued was whether the forest should be allowed to age and revert to wilderness, which would reduce game numbers and hunting access.

To the immense consternation of drilling opponents, Tom and MUCC sided with the oil companies, provided that the new Trust Fund was part of the deal. The drilling and the accompanying roads and tree cutting would be consistent with management and access of lands for hunting. After all, it is freshly-cut, younger forests, not older uncut forests, that produce the most food for deer and grouse, and hence, the best hunting.

And that's how MUCC and Big Oil became strange bedfellows. Here is an excerpt from a Q&A I wrote in 1976 defending MUCC's position:

We feel the Pigeon River Trust Fund that MUCC has recommended is the most exciting environmental legislation proposed in a long time. Environmental protection (i.e., land acquisition) takes big money. Right now we face loss of properties in Michigan on the Au Sable and Manistee Rivers, St. Johns Marsh, Smiths Island, and other prime environmental areas for lack of MONEY. Cut it any way you like, land costs hard cash -- something in short supply in the state coffers these days...

Wilderness is largely a state of mind. We believe that if Michigan shows patience, foresight, and determination and is willing to support the Pigeon River Trust Fund concept, we can have the Pigeon River Country and much more. In time we can CREATE "wilderness" near the people in southeast Michigan. We accept some trade-offs as a necessary price in this hard decision.

"Wilderness is largely a state of mind"! I must have been high when I wrote that Zen-like riddle. (Although my thinking about wilderness wasn't completely gonzo, having been influenced by philosopher Wendell Berry, poet Gary Snyder, and landscape architect Ian McHarg [Design with Nature].)

One of my first assignments from Tom was to write the first draft of the bill to create the Trust Fund. Eventually, a much-revised version became law as part of the deal to allow tightly-controlled oil and gas development in the forest. The Pigeon River Trust Fund became known as the Natural Resources Trust Fund; Tom went on to chair its Board for many years. Millions of dollars in oil and gas revenues from the drilling -- not only in the Pigeon River forest but on all public lands in Michigan -- were dedicated to buying parks and wildlife preserves throughout the state -- especially near urban areas. That was Tom's dream.

The oil and gas drilling came and went from the Pigeon River Country. The deer and grouse hunters, snowmobilers, dirt bike riders, locals, downstate preservationists, newspaper editors, bureaucrats, timbermen, and oil people argued for years about how to manage the forest. But the Big Wild survived pretty much okay and remains a rugged and beautiful place. I fished its dark, tannin-stained rivers for trout. Once, sitting on a stump deep in its swamps waiting for invisible deer, a giant pileated woodpecker, Woody Woodpecker incarnate, flashed its red, white, and black by my face and landed in a birch tree near enough to touch. I hunted grouse there often, including one time with my one-time stepson, Eric.

Years later, working as a newspaper reporter, I taped an interview with Tom:

There's a big need for urban recreation. There's a big need for people who are crowded in like so many rabbits in a warren in a downtown environment to get out, even if it's on their lunch hour and stroll along the river or through the park. What the hell's wrong with that? I think we need to provide those kinds of places for people.

Tom noted that some people appeared "quite stunned" at his sensitivity to urban needs. "A lot of people think that is out of character for me. It isn't." He spoke of his boyhood in Dearborn, escaping the urban environment by going camping along the Huron River in the early 1950s in the area that now is Kensington Metropark, where then there was "clean water that had fish in it."

He said his greatest disappointment in the Trust Fund was "my inability to convince the DNR of the need for an urban state park. I'm talking about Detroit! There's no place where people can camp right in the urban center. We need a campground in the urban area." He defended the Trust Fund's purchase of urban golf courses, because they offered open spaces, and sledding and cross-country skiing in winter, as well as golfing. I don't know that he ever played a round of golf in his life.

Tom told me his favorite accomplishments of the Trust Fund were buying new public lands in the Upper Peninsula's Porcupine Mountains and Grand Mere sand dunes; St. Johns Marsh and a 7,000-acre new state game area in the "Thumb" area, both close to Detroit; and $9 million worth of Au Sable and Manistee Rivers frontage in northern Lower Michigan.

### The Fij

Stoned and bleary-eyed on I-75, I knew the trooper's flashing red lights and high beams right behind us were a bad sign.

We were heading Up North late on a Thursday night for a weekend MUCC board meeting and some pre-meeting grouse hunting. I was driving MUCC's boat-like Ford station wagon -- the staff car, a hand-me-down after Tom had worn it out as his car. The driver's seat was mashed and broken from years of being crushed under Tom's bulk wedged behind the steering wheel.

Amid the boxes of meeting paraphernalia, four shotgun cases stuck out, quite obvious in the trooper's headlights. I could hear one guy in the back jamming a beer can down the seat crack. I rolled down the windows, trying to air out the marijuana smoke. Dennis slumped in the passenger seat next to me.

"This is a very inopportune moment," he slurred, apparently resigned to his pending arrest for his rare pot indulgence. We're all thinking the same thing: How are we going to explain this to the Board of Directors tomorrow?

I quickly hopped out of the car, shivering hard in the wind, and explained to the trooper our MUCC provenance and purpose. He sent us on our way with just a warning. He claimed I was speeding. That was a lie but under the circumstances, I didn't argue. No harm, no foul.

* * *

We called him "The Fij." Dennis Fijalkowski. The guy who got me my job at MUCC. We initially shared an office, and I heard him on the phone a thousand times spell out his last name: "That's F as in Frank, eye jay, A-L-K, O-W, S-K-I."

The Fij's conservation passion and rigid opinions made him good at his job, but also a son-of-a-bitch if you crossed him or disagreed, especially when it came to hunting and gun rights, feeding wildlife ("not natural"), or Indian fishing. For a decade or more, MUCC and the Michigan Attorney General had been suing Michigan's Indian tribes over treaty-guaranteed rights to net fish in parts of the Great Lakes.

My first real introduction to The Fij's volcanic temper came on a long drive home late from a club meeting. We talked about MUCC's conflict with the tribes, and I said something heretical like, "Don't you think their treaty rights need to be respected." His explosion in the dark of the pickup cab was frightening. In a finger-snap, he was wildly pounding his dashboard and screaming anti-Indian platitudes, his face flushed livid in the passing car lights.

Sadly, most sportsmen felt the same way about tribal fishing rights. MUCC tried in vain for decades to get Congress to abolish the Indian treaties. MUCC's legal challenges to the treaties went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with MUCC losing at every step. To my knowledge, Dennis never softened his views on Indian rights, or anything else for that matter.

For the rest of my career, I tried in small ways to compensate for all that bigotry by learning Native American history, respecting native art and culture, and including Indians in my work wherever possible. After all, as some tribes remind, "We're still here."

These little stories don't, of course, do justice to The Fij. He was a complex, enigmatic person, and I long ago lost track of him. I do know this. Dennis devoted his working life to wildlife conservation and that's an honorable thing.

### Ring-around-the-Collar

The issue seemed simple to me. Phosphates from home laundry detergents were getting into lakes and rivers in Michigan and thereby over-fertilizing weeds and algae, which were choking the waterways. Water treatment plants just couldn't remove enough phosphates from sewage. So why not ban the weed-growing phosphates at their source -- home laundry rooms?

A proposed rule to do just that, to prohibit phosphates in detergents, however, was blocked in the state's Water Resources Commission by Commissioner Clem Lay, who worked for soap-maker Amway Corp. and seemed to make defeat of the phosphate ban his personal crusade. It was a blatant conflict of interest, but no one could shut him up.

I wrote an exposé, A Michigan Soap Opera, for MUCC's magazine in 1977 and pointed out that 32 million Americans already lived in areas with phosphate limits: "If a ban is so oppressive, so unacceptable to consumers, why haven't those laws been repealed?"

I took my righteous indignation to the WRC's monthly meetings, complaining to the commissioners of their inaction, and on several occasions read aloud to them the 1929 law that created their WRC and directed them to stop such pollution. I thought the law was pretty unambiguous, but I guess that was just me. They did nothing, so we turned to the Legislature for action.

When a bill to impose a phosphate ban came up for a public hearing in the Legislature's House Conservation Committee, I had some fun. Although phosphate detergents already had been banned by neighboring states, the soap lobby -- Proctor & Gamble, Whirlpool, and their ilk -- made it sound like the law would force everyone in Michigan to live with ring-around-the-collar (a condition made famous by soap ads of the day). Yet, if no-phosphate detergent was so awful, how could they sell it in other states, I wondered?

I did a supermarket check in Lansing to see what was being sold. Lo and behold, I discovered that the soap companies already had quietly introduced no-phosphate products into Michigan. For example, some stores sold Tide with phosphates, some stores sold Tide without phosphates, and some sold both. The boxes were identical, except for the fine print showing phosphate levels. Same extravagant claims about cleaning ability, same instructions on how much to use, same price. I bought 20 boxes of various laundry detergents, emptied them, and hauled the boxes into the public hearing. I read aloud the claims on the non-phosphate detergent boxes: TIDE's in...Dirt's out; COLD POWER will give you a really clean, bright wash; ALL gets your clothes really clean.

How can you go wrong with material like that? It made for nice theater, but the larger lesson I learned was that winning an argument never guarantees success in politics; that bill to ban phosphates went nowhere. The political clout of soap companies and washing machine makers killed it. Eventually, though, the ban was approved through a rule passed by a different state commission.

And what happened then to all those doomsayers who predicted broken washing machines, dingy shirts, and hapless housewives if a phosphate ban was enacted? Nothing, of course. It's the damnedest thing about politics: seldom are people held accountable for their lies.

As for Amway's Clem Lay, I was a pain in his ass for the next eight years. But when I left MUCC, he graciously joined in signing a resolution from the WRC that commended

Wayne Schmidt for his efforts and dedication to environmental protection in Michigan, and extends to him on behalf of the People of the State of Michigan its sincere appreciation and best wishes in future endeavors.

I suspect he was just glad to be rid of me.

### Politicians, Pony Tails, and Liberace Soap

Michigan's environmental improvements were boosted by two progressive politicians -- Bill Milliken, the Republican Governor, and Frank Kelley, the Democratic Attorney General. I had occasion to cross paths frequently with both, though more importantly, on a near-daily basis with their environmental staffs.

Stew Freeman was the Assistant Attorney General that I most often dealt with. Stew was a savvy guy, quick eyes in his Woody Allenesque frame, and well-representing his boss on numerous environmental boards that I appeared before. He was master of back-handed compliments, not shy of adding exaggeration and caricature to suit his purposes, once recalling to a reporter my own early days at MUCC with a fellow "environmental gadfly" and trying to influence various environmental boards:

"They had pony tails, combat boots, and jean jackets. Then they got haircuts, changed their appearance, but said the same things. People started to take them seriously. I don't know if the haircuts had anything to do with it, but they kept saying the same things and people finally listened."

Stew freely spoke his mind and loved the limelight. I think that's probably what did him in with his narcissistic boss ("longest serving state attorney general in U.S. history"); Stew eventually was moved to the sidelines, and my work lost some of its fun.

I was in Las Vegas years later when I got a call that Stew was in the hospital from a heart attack. I had chosen that day to visit the Liberace Museum and felt I should just go with the flow. I went to the museum's gift shop and looked for the tackiest gewgaw I could find, a difficult choice, to be sure. I settled on a box of three big soap bars shaped like grand pianos, giving off a sickly floral odor like you might imagine from Liberace's dressing room. I wrote an appropriate note on a museum card and sent my get-well gift to Stew in the hospital via FedEx. I hope it gave him a smile.

Governor Milliken, though a soft-spoken voice of moderation, knew the line between right and wrong for Michigan's natural resources, and invariably he came down on the right side. Never was there a more righteous case -- real and symbolic -- than the bottle bill (requiring deposits on beer and soda containers). Milliken was unapologetic for his support, signing the first petition to place the proposal on the ballot, and directing his administration to find every way possible to support the referendum.

His white-haired chairman of the state Transportation Commission, Peter Fletcher, was in the forefront of the bottle bill controversy, since much of the debate was about reducing litter from bottles and cans thrown on roadsides. Commission meetings often became forums for public debate of the proposal. In one memorable session -- I believe the occasion was some trumped-up resolution by the Commission to generate publicity for the bottle bill -- I spoke in support of the matter and was followed by Peter Stroh, a brewer-tycoon of Michigan business, who waxed eloquently on myriad economic ills a deposit law would surely bring. When he concluded, Fletcher leaned his considerable girth forward and with just a hint of Cheshire grin said, "Thank you, Peter, for that admirable defense of the indefensible."

A favorite among reporters for his turn of a phrase, Fletcher often opined that he could "count my enemies on the fingers of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir." Years later, when enlisted in a futile effort to help Ohio pass a similar bottle bill, he returned to Michigan grumbling publicly about Ohio's "dull and pedestrian landscape."

Bill Rustem was Governor Milliken's environmental advisor. I had been watching Bill since my first forays into environmental activism while attending meetings of the Michigan Environmental Review Board. It was obvious to me that Bill was in cahoots with MERB's chairman. I watched how they got things done.

Bill was a brilliant behind-the-scenes politician -- soft-spoken, though eloquent; seemingly distracted, though quick eyes missing little; always ready with a smile and kind words under his bushy mustache. He had a unique knack for appearing empathetic -- lots of nodding his head and "uh-huhs" -- and then quietly finding common ground and compromises among warring factions. Tom Washington borrowed him from Governor Milliken to coordinate MUCC's bottle bill campaign. Despite Bill's pathological disorganization, he pulled off the bottle bill victory, then returned to Milliken's employ.

Near the end of my tenure at MUCC, after Governor Milliken retired, Tom hired Bill permanently as MUCC's staff lobbyist. Bill was successful -- too successful. Tom was threatened by Bill's growing power and prestige, even though Bill was masterful at understanding Tom's ego and positioning him for credit and publicity. Nevertheless, Tom got squirrelly about Bill and started undercutting strategies and agreements Bill made with politicians and agencies. Bill got fed up and quit.

Bill partnered with other ex-Milliken aides to start a consulting think-tank in Lansing, and continued playing a central role in Michigan's conservation policies and practices for the rest of his career. He got me my next job (chapter eight). We had some fine hunting and fishing adventures together.

### Purple Paws

Levi's purple paws just wouldn't come clean. Why on earth would a dog's feet be purple after chasing pheasants in the farm country of Genesee County? And why wouldn't it wash off?

That purple gunk turned out to be the tip of a buried iceberg of poisonous toxic wastes of frightening toxicity. Our romp in the fields in early 1975 had taken Levi and me through one of the worst toxic waste dumps in the United States. It set in motion a remarkable eight-year string of events... Who would believe a dog with purple paws could start so much trouble?

Actually, not even me, even though I had written the story, Purple Paws and the Berlin-Farro Scandal. Although the story was mostly true, the "trouble" didn't start with Levi's purple paws. Our early-morning romp (including my treetop surveillance) had been designed to sneak around the dump and find out how bad it was. Levi gave a doggy-friendly face to a complicated toxic waste disaster.

Fate sent me the toxic waste dump called Berlin & Farro Liquid Waste Incineration, Inc. Even before I started working at MUCC in 1975, I had been exposed to the dump's ugliness in the pastoral farmlands near Swartz Creek. Verna Courtemanche, the mother of my girlfriend at that earlier time, happened to live just a quarter-mile down the gravel farm road from the dump.

I always figured that toxic waste debacles were driven by Mafia types and big-money firms. Not so with Chuck Berlin. He was nothing more than a hick-town loser with one really dumb, but marketable idea. The tragedy was that such an imbecile could get zoned and licensed to operate a hazardous waste incinerator on his farmland and could get reputable corporations, such as General Motors, to turn over to him their scariest poisons for disposal. Such were the times.

Verna became obsessed with the dump; it dominated her life for 20 years. Largely due to her doggedness with government bureaucrats and agencies, the place got ranked as the most toxic waste site in Michigan, which was saying something -- the state had big manufacturing industries that for decades had been sinfully irresponsible in how they dumped bad stuff all over the state.

Chuck Berlin was a magician on his 40 acres \-- he could take those poisons and make them disappear -- poof! Of course, nothing disappeared, as Levi's purple paws proved. Day and night, trucks roared down otherwise deserted Morrish Road, carrying tanks and barrels of poisons -- the worst dregs from the chemical and auto industries -- to be buried, dumped on the ground, or burned in an incinerator, first with no state permits and later actually licensed by the state, even though Berlin had no air pollution controls -- none! -- that's how incompetent the DNR bureaucrats were.

I'm just guessing here, but I suppose the DNR boys said, "Well, the stuff has to go somewhere and GM wouldn't do anything too bad with its wastes." And GM said, "Well, the state wouldn't have approved the incinerator if it was too bad." Meanwhile, Chuck Berlin spouted whatever lies would get his half-assed operation more time to make money.

Whose fault was it? Of course, the local politicians and people directly involved with the company were the real culprits. But you expect incompetence and criminal behavior from them. I blamed the state's DNR and especially Bill Turney, who was deputy director in charge of environmental programs. He always had excuses why the DNR was powerless -- weak laws, staffing was too thin, poor cause-and-effect evidence of harm, and so on. They were but gossamer veils hiding the real problem, which was a lack of responsibility, commitment, and passion to fix a critical problem.

No doubt, the complexities of toxic waste management really were overwhelming. But too many of the people with the power to mount soap boxes and tell the true stories of Michigan's pollution horrors -- they were meek and mostly silent.

In 1981, I was interviewed in downtown Flint on the banks of the Flint River, downstream from Berlin-Farro dump, for a toxic waste special by Detroit's ABC television station. I explained on-air the risks of the site's scary chemicals getting into the waters and air:

For years, this burner was burning the most hazardous chemicals used in the state of Michigan. Those chemicals were being burned in an incinerator with no pollution controls. And those fumes were going into the environment. People who lived within several blocks couldn't even use their yards. It was eating the paint off their cars and they were breathing this material for years.

Millions of tax dollars were spent cleaning up that site. Each step was agonizingly slow and never fast enough or good enough to satisfy Verna. Everyone became thoroughly sick of her, but she never quit. As for me, once Berlin-Farro was shut down and the wheels of Superfund cleanups were in motion, I backed away. I think Verna felt I abandoned her; she never really forgave me.

The April Fool's Day publication irony wasn't lost on Verna.

* * *

I saw that a lot, the way environmental issues can consume people's lives, especially if it affected their own neighborhood -- a dump, a chemical plant, a marsh getting filled, for example.

Even billboards. One rather flakey woman, Pam, made banning billboards her life's work. She wanted me to get MUCC to do to highway billboards what it had done to ban throwaway beer and pop containers. Pam was a piece of work -- rich, attractive, not overly bright, and with way too much time on her hands. She lived on Grosse Ile, Detroit's frou frou enclave for its super-rich. Pam invented a little committee, printed up brochures and bright-red Ban Billboards bumper stickers, and made a pest of herself. She even tried to run for U.S. Senate on a ban billboards platform.

Pam called me one day with a doozey of a plan: "I'm thinking about renting a helicopter. It would lower me on a sling to the front of that extra-big tobacco billboard where the Lodge Freeway ends in downtown Detroit," she said. "I'll stick a Ban Billboards sticker over the guy's cigarette. What do you think? Do you think that would get attention?"

It's not that I didn't agree with her about billboards; they were sprouting everywhere like monstrous mushrooms, blighting Michigan's natural scenery. I counted and categorized them when I drove around the state, then tried to stir up people with the information. In one story, I wrote: "It's highway robbery. Michigan's roadside beauty is being stolen right before your eyes." I offered no hope that the visual pollution would ever decline, however, and it never did.

* * *

Verna, however, wasn't at all like Pam; for one thing, she wasn't nutty. Verna was smart and dead serious about Berlin-Farro because she felt that people's health was at stake. Some of the neighbors believed the dump had made them sick, but couldn't prove it. One time I drove to Flint and talked to the mother of a young guy who had worked at the dump driving a bulldozer. He had died of some weird disease, and no one could explain it, or connect it to his exposure to the toxic wastes. The mother lived in this tiny, run-down box of a house. We sat at her cramped kitchen table over tea and she showed me pictures of her dead son and told me her sad story. She epitomized the maddening epidemiological conundrum of science and law being unable to link cause-and-effect between toxic chemical exposure and human health damage. I couldn't help her.

I viewed Berlin-Farro as a strategic environmental opportunity, given my personal connection with Verna. It was a horrendous environmental nightmare in its own right, of course, but it also gave me a means to spotlight needed statewide policy changes and to educate people about what was happening all over the state. The increasingly public battles over toxic waste dumps exposed lousy laws and worse government oversight. I spent years in the trenches -- public hearings, advisory committees, lobbying, media work -- helping get new regulations written and approved to properly deal with toxic wastes, as well as with ordinary garbage and trash.

Throughout, there never were enough environmentalists to go around. Everyone with a dump or landfill in their backyard, or proposed for their backyard, had a legitimate beef and wanted someone to help them protect their environment. Every proposed law, rule, and new environmental standard required a public participation process and needed someone to represent the environmentalist point of view. I got called on nearly every one of those issues, and after a while it wore me out. It was one of the reasons that I finally called it quits at MUCC.

Today, decent laws regulate all the stuff we throw away. The messes at Berlin-Farro and all the other waste dumps around Michigan eventually were more or less dealt with. The people who could have prevented the tragedies long since took their pensions and retired, carrying with them self-justifications about why none of it was their fault.

As for my own (and Levi's) role in the Berlin-Farro debacle, I claim no more than serving as a catalyst. The real work was done by Verna and a few others who sacrificed greatly to secure some small measure of justice. Verna's endless battling took its toll, increasing her cynicism and bitterness. How could it not, all that time spent looking to government bureaucrats for competency and, too often, miracles?

I never heard how life went for Chuck Berlin. I hope not well.

As for Levi, he lived until he died. No dog could ever take his place, so I've never tried. He was a wonder.

Levi the Wonder Dog

Who is going to comb the burrs from your coat,  
Help you over fences, or  
Fill up your bucket with fresh water?

How will you find your way out of the woods,  
When you follow your crazy nose and  
Forget how big the world really is?

Will you be happy, will you find shade  
And unfenced fields  
And plenty of fresh water to drink?

Will your legs and lungs and eyes  
Once again be three years old  
For your endless search for birds?

You were loved because you had spirit  
And you were crazy  
And you made so many people smile.

Your greatest feat was your flying dog trick  
Flinging yourself as far  
Out over the water as you could just for fun.

You were one gigantic pain in the butt  
A great deal of the time  
But never forget my love and the joy you gave me.

Levi, my dog, my companion, and friend  
I am going to miss you.  
Watch out for cars, or whatever strange new things you meet. (August 28, 1985)

### I Burn Miss Utah at the Stake

The blond beauty queen who first headed Michigan's Toxic Substances Control Commission got fired because of an exposé I wrote about her. (My "deep throat" connection was recounted in chapter five.)

The TSCC was created by the state legislature in 1978 in response to what became known as "the poisoning of Michigan" by a toxic chemical (PBB) accidentally mixed with livestock and chicken feed. More than 1.5 million chickens and 30,000 cattle, pigs, and sheep had to be killed and buried, but not before much of Michigan's milk, eggs, and meat had been tainted with PBB and consumed.

The TSCC had hired Pat Soutas Cole as its first boss. She had somehow risen quickly through state government and had the attention of the governor's office, which accounted for her appointment. Pat's biggest assets were the same qualities that got her crowned Miss Utah in 1967 -- statuesque, bleached blond hair, heavy makeup, big boobs. She was reasonably intelligent and about as charming as you would expect for an ex-beauty queen. Her talent in the 1968 Miss America pageant was a magic act and original vocal, Everyone Has Magic.

My 1980 story, "Politics & Poisons," published in MUCC's magazine, started:

The TSCC is in trouble. It is floundering from lack of direction, cynicism from the state agencies it must work with and monitor, few tangible accomplishments to its credit, and indecisive leadership. It is hamstrung by an executive secretary widely perceived as incompetent in most areas of her responsibilities.

I spelled out the agency's failure to improve toxic substances management in the state. I ruthlessly detailed Pat's lack of any technical training in toxic substances, her minimal supervisory experience, and her record of stifling staff initiatives, neglecting deadlines, and failing to assemble a scientific staff. I made a big deal out of her hiring a consultant, with no competitive bidding, to prepare a required plan for future toxic chemical emergency responses. Although I didn't mention it in the story, I had phone records and receipts proving that they were shacking up together.

During my one-on-one interview with Pat, a tape recorder running on the table between us, I asked her about the propriety of her relationship with the consultant. She said:

"I'm friends with so many people. If I started ruling out people that I'm friends with -- just to use your words \-- and I don't think friends -- oh, I guess we're friends. See, what it probably has allowed me to do was have a better insight. I know how he delivers on things... I don't think there is any impropriety."

My investigation pushed the commission to take a more critical look at Pat. Before my article was published, the commission asked her to resign. At first, she agreed, then recanted. A week later, MUCC put out a news release about my story just before the magazine went to print. Later that same day, the commission convinced her to resign. She told the Detroit News, "I'm being burned at the stake."

### Drains

Swan Lake, my first environmental battle at MUCC, is a lake in northeastern Michigan. Back in the '70s, it was being slowly filled in by mill wastes from a limestone mine and cement-making plants owned by U.S. Steel Corp. Prodded by MUCC's local clubs, I raised hell.

The DNR guy in charge of regulating lake and wetlands fills, bristly Dave Haywood, took my criticisms personally. Still, he did the right thing and ordered the filling to be phased out. U.S. Steel was required to restore the lake at a cost of more than $200,000, one of the first environmental restorations in Michigan and the state's biggest pollution settlement to-date.

I sparred with Dave for years over various other proposals to do bad things to lakeshores and rivers. Eventually, Dave got sick of being a bureaucrat, got a law degree, and became a boring lawyer. Along the way he ruined his marriage to Barb and got divorced. I know that because she told me on our dinner date years later that it was all his fault. Nothing clicked between Barb and me, but I still believed her because I knew what a prick her ex could be.

Dave and I didn't always fight. A plan by a county drain commissioner to make some farmland near Grand Rapids drain better would have wrecked pretty, little Sunny Creek. Where this meandering, tree-lined trickle flowed through suburban backyards, it would be dredged into an ugly ditch, including right through the backyard of Joyce Van Keulen, a housewife who needed something to do with herself. Joyce led a fight that killed the planned ruination of Sunny Creek. I helped her achieve environmental celebrity status through exposés in MUCC's magazine and by throwing the organization's support behind her. The victory brought Joyce awards, a local political seat, appointment by the governor to the state Water Resources Commission, and, rumor had it, a lengthy affair with Dave (who was handsome as he was bristly).

Joyce's husband owned a hardwood lumber company -- an amazing break for me. I undertook a major remodeling of my Lansing house, taking out a wall to combine two upstairs rooms, removing their ceilings, re-enforcing roof rafters, and creating a cathedral ceiling with a skylight. I wanted to cover the new ceiling with tongue-and-groove boards, but couldn't afford it. I asked Joyce if her husband could give me a wholesale price on lumber.

Soon after, a truckload of the most beautiful maple boards I've ever seen -- knot free, up to two feet wide and 20 feet long -- arrived at a Lansing lumber yard to be milled with tongue-and-groove edges. It was a gift -- I can't imagine how big; all I had to do was pay for the milling. Joyce told me it was thanks for helping launch her environmental career. She pinned me with a homemade award:

When I ran out of the maple, I sheepishly asked Joyce for more, and got it. The remodeling was a work of art \-- one of the nicest projects I ever completed.

Sunny Creek and many similar battles over drain projects led me into the most frustrating issue that I tackled while at MUCC, and my biggest waste of time -- a quixotic quest to reform the Michigan Drain Code. This was the law that gave elected county drain commissioners almost unlimited authority to fill wetlands and turn natural streams into ditches to improve drainage for farming and suburban development. I soon discovered that the Drain Code resulted in more habitat destruction and environmental stupidity than any law on the books. I worked with an endless litany of people living in farm country who were trying to stave off the ditching of their local creeks. Some battles, like Sunny Creek, were won.

Far more, like Stony Creek in central Michigan, were lost, along with the natural values that these streams once embodied, in order to improve farmland drainage. Stony Creek's rural neighbors complained to me. I complained to the DNR. The DNR complained to the drain commissioner, Harry Harden. It all ended up in court where the state attorney general sued Harden, stopped the project, but then lost the case. While being appealed, Harden finished the dredging. He absolutely believed that environmental regulations didn't apply to streams used as drains.

Those ground battles led to my perpetual efforts to reform the Drain Code, including being part of endless studies and advisory committees that met for years. The Farm Bureau sang the seductive lie, "maybe we'll agree to update the Drain Code," leading to ever more study groups to sap my time. I wrote articles, participated in the political process, and did all I could to raise public awareness of this travesty. Nothing worked. I even spoke to annual meetings of the drain commissioners.

Along with others who were dedicated to fixing the Drain Code (particularly Peggy Johnson with the Clinton River Advisory Council), we failed to change one damned thing. As if that wasn't punishment enough, there is no more boring group of people to hang out with than farmers and drain commissioners. I wonder if that ridiculous law ever did get fixed.

### Freeways and Hanging Ropes

Fighting proposed new freeways nearly got me fired from MUCC -- twice. The first time, it was opposing a plan to extend the M-275 freeway, which by-passed Detroit through its western suburbs, for 22 miles north, across a dense recreational complex of lakes, wetlands, state parks, and rural residential areas.

I was dragged into that controversy by a local activist and insurance salesman, Steve Rosman, who finally convinced me of the egregious environmental damage the immense project would cause his region's wetlands and wildlife areas. I wrote in MUCC's complaint to the state Transportation Commission:

The M-275 controversy is a critical crossroads for the future of transportation planning in Michigan. It is obvious that we cannot afford a continuation of freeway construction at the pace of the 1960s. We believe the combination of budgetary constraints and slowly changing social values is a call to start winding down the freeway machine. We think M-275 is a good place to start.

When the commission later killed the project, its chairman, Peter Fletcher, explained:

It is time for [us] to recognize that we cannot afford financially, ecologically, or socially to construct every mile of freeway that we once dreamed of... I am not in favor of shoving yet another highway project down so many reluctant throats.

I had little, if any, influence in killing this freeway. I was, however, good at positioning MUCC on the right side of such environmental conflicts. The project was broadly opposed by local residents, politicians, and all environmental groups. In this case, however, MUCC's position put me at odds with its own biggest and most powerful local club -- the Multi-Lakes Conservation Association. Its property was right next to the path of the proposed new freeway, which Multi-Lakes wanted built. The highway planners had cut a deal with Multi-Lakes that would align the new freeway to buffer future residential development that one day might encroach on the club's noisy shooting range.

The internal feud boiled over at a two-day MUCC Board meeting. Multi-Lakes brought a resolution to reverse MUCC's opposition to the M-275 extension. It appeared certain to pass the next morning. That evening, I walked in the dark along the sandy Lake St. Clair beach behind our hotel and pondered my dilemma. Should I concede? If not, how could I derail a resolution pushed by MUCC's biggest and most powerful club? The Board nearly always deferred to local clubs with an "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine next time" attitude.

Sunday morning when the resolution to reverse MUCC's opposition to the freeway came up for debate, Tom Washington gave only a muted, politically-expedient defense of MUCC's position. Tom and I stood in the back of the room listening to the freeway supporters have their say. Steve Rosman, though an outsider, was given time to explain why the freeway was a bad idea, but he didn't know the crowd and bombed. I raised my hand to speak, something staff members almost never were allowed to do.

"Wayne, what are you up to?" Tom whispered, a worried look on his face.

"Remember when you hired me, and I told you I wanted you to just give me enough rope to hang myself? This is one of those times," I whispered back, as I headed for the microphone. "Just stay out of the way."

I don't remember exactly what I said that morning to the Board, something about mutual respect and how much I had studied the plan and how certain I was that it was a bad project and not in keeping with MUCC's objectives. Whatever it was, it worked. The resolution was voted down. MUCC's position (and mine) was secured. I had stood my ground and won. It didn't always turn out that way.

Michigan's Upper Peninsula (U.P.) is remote, wild, frozen under snow at least half the time, incredibly beautiful, heavily dependent on government-funded projects for its economic survival, and peopled by self-reliant types who resent any meddling in their affairs by anyone from "Down Below" -- a not-so-veiled allusion to their view of Lansing, Detroit, and similar hellish environs. MUCC's U.P. sportsmen's clubs feared and loathed the growing "preservationist" taint on MUCC's policies by the emerging environmental movement. The U.P. clubs' most vocal spokesman on MUCC's Board was Gordon Roy, a short-haired, tight-assed, transplanted West Virginia hillbilly who worked a low-level job for the U.S. Forest Service. Gordon hated my guts.

From my start at MUCC, he tried to get me fired, just on general principles. I was too radical, too much akin to the young, liberal preservationists he despised. I visited him once, letting him show me around his U.P. region, trying to find some common ground. When Gordon told me that Hartwick Pines State Park should be logged -- this is about the last tiny speck of virgin pine forest left in Michigan -- I knew this man was seriously fucked up and we never would agree on anything.

His mission to get rid of me nearly succeeded when I put MUCC in opposition to converting two-lane US-2 into a new east-west freeway across the U.P. The proposal had been quietly designed by the state Highway Department, largely as an economic sop to powerful U.P. legislators, and cagily crafted to use only state funds to avoid detailed environmental reviews by federal agencies. A few bureaucrats saw the scale of environmental damage expected -- endangered plants, sand dunes, wetlands, and wildlife habitat destroyed -- but were powerless to slow the project's political momentum. US-2 was distant from where most of Michigan lived (including its environmentalists), so virtually no one cared one way or the other about it.

I knew the spectacular terrain that US-2 crossed due to my college commutes to Michigan Tech, and from hunting and fishing throughout the region. I also knew that the low traffic levels couldn't justify the costs. I spent a week in the U.P. examining the proposed route, as well as alternative roadway alignments that had been rejected by highway planners, which would have reduced environmental damages.

MUCC had a generic policy opposing new freeways, so I used that to justify a strong position statement against the project. Tom okayed it and that was that. When Gordon saw my position paper that went to the state, however, all hell broke loose for me. He got MUCC's president to appoint him head of an "Ad-Hoc Committee on US-2 Improvement," and delivered a blistering report to the Board of Directors at its December 1978 meeting.

It concluded that the "minor and temporary environmental disruptions" that would be caused by the US-2 expansion did not justify the "big flap" I had created. My objections were "emotional disturbances" based on "no good reason except his ego." It recommended that I be muzzled by the Board and ordered to stop "harassment" of the project.

These U.P. boys wanted the economic spin-offs that a new highway would bring. They figured they had plenty of wild areas (they also kept MUCC opposed to any wilderness parks), so a little damage was no big deal. But mostly, they wanted me and MUCC to butt out of their business.

Several months later, Gordon and his U.P. clubs got a resolution passed at MUCC's Annual Meeting that reversed MUCC's position and supported expanding US-2 to a three- to five-lane highway, inexplicably including the western portion where no planning studies had even been made. Tom Washington stood by me; he hated Gordon as much as I did.

After the dust settled, I drafted a long, rambling resignation, then replaced it with a four-page critique, slamming MUCC's action but making no mention of resigning:

This issue was a major item of discussion and controversy at two board meetings, executive committee meetings, and the annual convention. And yet not once was I called upon to make a presentation. Not once was I called upon to respond to questions about the staff's position or respond to the merits of various arguments advanced by U.P. interests. Only a handful of our delegates and board members even asked questions privately.

My wounded ego survived, and I stayed at MUCC. Also, that freeway never got built; the state ran short of money. US-2 eventually was improved modestly -- passing lanes added on hills, etc. -- and that was about it. I don't know if all my work and nearly getting fired had any impact on the outcome. Maybe it was enough to tip the balance or slow the process just enough for economic realities to catch up.

Tom never forgot or forgave Gordon; one day he found a way to get Gordon's new boss in D.C., a former MSU professor we knew, to make a new rule barring U.S. Forest Service staff from being on boards of groups like MUCC. That was it for Gordon -- he had to retire from MUCC's board.

### Saving the Great Lakes

Early in my job at MUCC, I told a friend that I was going to save the Great Lakes. He laughed and said he thought that was a quixotic goal, as it surely was. But that's what I tried to do. They say you can't be an activist unless you actually believe you can change the world. I did believe that, at least for my world of the Great Lakes. And protecting them is one thing on which most everyone in Michigan agrees, at least in principle.

It was a colossal boondoggle proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that sucked me into Great Lakes issues. I guess I should thank those dull Army engineers and bureaucrats for pushing their stupid plan. My work to kill it shaped my life. Among amazing people I met because of that boondoggle -- one, I almost married; another, I did marry; some became my best friends for life. One of them, an infamous friend (now dead) was even formally branded by my MUCC bosses as an "anti-government person of questionable character who has a record of breaking the laws of the United States," part of an unsuccessful effort to get me under control.

In order to save the Great Lakes, I learned all the best superlatives: The Great Lakes hold one-fifth of all the fresh surface water on earth. Michigan owns 40 percent of the lakes' area and has 3,200 miles of shoreline. The lakes are bordered by eight states and two provinces. And so on.

The lakes' natural awesomeness was lost, however, on those who viewed them as a shipping channel for raw materials -- coal, iron ore, grain, chemicals, fuel oil, limestone, and cement. Those commodities were shipped port to port and even worldwide through the St. Lawrence River, the immense outlet connecting the five Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, after the river was retooled in 1959 with locks and canals to bypass rapids and waterfalls, "River" was dropped from its name; most everyone now calls it the St. Lawrence Seaway \-- a brilliant stroke of Mad Men-era branding.

Remodeling the Great Lakes for big ships came with steep environmental costs. Dredging deep channels through shallow harbors and connections between the lakes, such as the Detroit River, ruined fish and waterfowl habitat and stirred up bottom mud that was poisoned with wastes spewed from industries and cities. Mostly, the dredged-up, polluted muck was dumped into wetlands edging the waterways. In more recent years, the muck has gone into boulder-diked enclosures. Those projects include some marsh restoration that mitigates, but can never make up for, past environmental losses caused by commercial shipping on the Great Lakes.

When they built the Welland Canal, a locks system between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie that raises and lowers ships around Niagara Falls, it allowed sea lamprey from the Atlantic Ocean to invade the upper four Great Lakes; lamprey numbers exploded and a once-priceless lake trout fishery was decimated. Even today, sea-going ships still import an exotica of fish and other critters from foreign waters, hidden in bilge water dumped into the Great Lakes, and causing all manner of environmental problems. The Great Lakes, beautiful as they appear, are an ecological mess because of commercial shipping.

All the special interests that make money from this government-subsidized shipping -- from the shippers to the industries to the politicians they support -- agreed back in the '60s that winter was a big inconvenience to fully using the Great Lakes as a water shipping network. Ice covers the lakes and harbors from December to April. The Corps of Engineers, however, has never met an obstacle of nature it couldn't tame. In cahoots with shipping proponents and their Congressional friends, the Corps came up with a billion-dollar plan to re-engineer the entire Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system -- all 2,300 miles from Duluth, Minnesota, to the Atlantic Ocean, to make all-winter shipping possible.

The Corps proposed to build colossal floating booms to control drifting ice, and install massive air bubblers and heaters to keep locks from freezing up in winter, such as the Soo Locks between Lake Superior and northern Lake Huron. It would fashion Bunyanesque dams on hinges on the bottom of the St. Clair River -- called "compensating works" because the gate-like dams could be adjusted up or down, depending on how much they needed to slow the river to "compensate" for the increased flow out of the upper Great Lakes due to ice-free channels (less friction from the ice cover means greater river flow which means more downstream flooding). The powerful St. Clair River carries the combined outflow of lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior.

The Corps planned to build its underwater dams right on top of some of the last spawning grounds for endangered lake sturgeon. History was on the Corps' side: Once upon a time, centuries-old lake sturgeon were piled high on Great Lakes beaches and burned like trash because they were so legion that they got in the way of the rapacious netting of lake trout and whitefish (which also were decimated).

The key piece of winter shipping was ice breaking by the U.S. Coast Guard (and, to a lesser extent, its Canadian counterpart). That's why I bummed a ride one frigid day aboard the icebreaker USS Mackinaw.

The Corps people weren't stupid. They didn't propose that all this change and billion-dollar costs be approved by Congress all at once. Instead, they embarked on a ten-year "Winter Navigation Demonstration Program" in order to test things out a little at a time to ease into all-winter shipping. Each year, the Corps put out reports that predicted minor environmental impacts from the ice breaking and shipping and then measured the past year's damages. Not surprisingly, the Corps found few.

The Corps' reams of reports went mostly unread. No one seemed to notice the quietly growing momentum behind the proposal. In the fall of 1977, I flew to Cleveland for a Corps' Winter Navigation Board meeting in order to lay out MUCC's objections to its program. I was all alone in my public criticism; the Corps officials seemed amused. Who was I to challenge the collective power and judgment of Congress, the Corps, and the battalions of experts who had concluded that this was a fine project? I was just a radical environmentalist, an obstructionist bent on contributing to the decline of the U.S. steel industry and the Midwest's economy.

At the meeting, I met U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologists working on winter navigation studies, some from New York that predicted serious environmental harm. That connection is what got me a ride-along on the Coast Guard icebreaker in the dead of winter.

I saw big ships, some as long as footballs fields, getting stuck in several feet of ice on the St. Marys River, downstream from the Soo Locks and ports on Lake Superior. The Saturn, a tanker ship, was obviously underpowered for plowing through even thin ice and repeatedly got stuck, requiring (complimentary) road service from the U.S. Coast Guard. Its USS Mackinaw was built for ice, having immense power, thick hulls, and could even rock side-to-side to help get itself free if stuck in ice. Afterwards, I opened my story for MUCC's magazine:

With men like the crew of the icebreaker Mackinaw, you know that year-round shipping on the Great Lakes is possible, if not inevitable. They attack the ice with steel-eyed determination. There is no question that Capt. Donald Garnett, skipper of the USS Mackinaw, is a match for any ice the Great Lakes can build.

The Mackinaw shattered the river's ice, opening paths, and churning up broken ice and bottom mud. All the activity spooked then-endangered bald eagles from the neighborhood, and generally changed winter's quiet isolation. The most dramatic effect we saw later, when we went ashore and then out onto the ice. Ships passing 1a mile away displaced water in the shallow channels, which surged ashore like under-ice tsunamis, cracking ice and spurting water, sand, and any aquatic critters in the way into the air and back to the ice. For us, it was a brief, scary roller-coaster ride on heaving ice.

* * *

I hadn't slept much in the Sault Ste. Marie Ramada Inn after my long day on the icy St. Mary's River. A couple next door had been humping loudly, and the blizzard of the decade was expected in the morning. At 5 am, gas tank full, I fled. Getting 50 miles south to cross the Mackinac Bridge, which spans the five-mile-wide connection between lakes Michigan and Huron, was my first challenge.

By the time I hit the freeway bridge's toll gates, snow was blowing sideways. "Drive 35 miles an hour. Be careful," said the attendant bundled in Arctic attire.

Atop the bridge, 200 feet to the ice and water below, my tinny Pinto station wagon shuddered in the gale, seeming of its own mind to edge toward the guardrail. Minutes after I made it across, the dangerous gales shut down the bridge -- the first time since it had opened in 1957.

As I drove south on I-75, the blizzard intensified. Lonely snow plows were helpless against the drifts quickly building across the one open travel lane. My little car was a poor match for the storm -- it shuddered, thump, thump, thump, as its bumper topped off one snow drift after another. Several times, I stopped in the relative shelter of freeway overpasses, opened the hood, and dug out the engine, encased in snow up to the hood, and freed tires from snow-packed wheel wells. Blinding snow stung my face like needles and caked my glasses.

Driving was barely possible, visibility almost nil; the freeway became two faint tire lines. Then it got worse. After hours of struggling through Michigan's northern forests, I hit the open farmlands where the full weight of the wild storm pummeled me. By this time, I was nearly out of gas; I aimed for the exit at Mt. Pleasant. I made it nearly to the exit's stop sign, then lost sight of the ramp and everything else in the whiteout, and ended stuck in a snow bank, engine dead.

Across the freeway was a Standard station; I trudged in just as the guy was closing up for the storm. He agreed to first tow me to his shop. Next door, blessedly, was a Holiday Inn. I got one of the last rooms, out in a wing not usually occupied in winter. In the two days I was stuck there, my room never did warm up. The motel had an indoor-outdoor pool; popping my bare head from the pool's warm water into the blizzard's bite was a unique, though lonely thrill.

* * *

I made a second trip that same winter of early-1978 to travel by land the length of the St. Marys River. I sat in kitchens and backwoods bars, talking to local people who had been living with disruptions caused by the Corps' demonstration winter shipping program, such as blocked over-ice access to island homes. No one I talked to thought winter navigation a good idea, but people admitted that the harms and risks were hard to measure. My trip did help put a human face on the fight, but this issue was about raw power and big money, not about little people in the sticks of the U.P. To package the issue for popular consumption, I framed winter navigation as a morality struggle of good vs. bad. Which it was.

I was particularly worried about winter shipping's risks, albeit remote, of oil spills under river ice. I wrote stories for Outdoor Life and for MUCC's magazine; one started:

The last ships to pass through the Soo locks last winter were Canadian tankers carrying fuel oil to Thunder Bay. What would be the impact of an oil spill under ice in the St. Marys River or the lower St. Clair River? There would be no possibility of containing the spill in such a "worst case" situation. The blizzard that hit the Great Lakes in January makes such a catastrophe seem entirely possible. The tanker Saturn rode out that blizzard in 80-knot winds on Lake Michigan. But a fully loaded ore carrier went aground in the St. Marys River during that storm and ruptured three ballast tanks. Why have we never had a major spill on the upper lakes? "Luck," responded one Coast Guard seaman.

In large measure due to my relentless courting of reporters, the winter navigation controversy was widely covered by national press, and I got lots of interviews:

...Schmidt charged that the Great Lakes environmental impact statement contained no criteria by which to identify any "unacceptable environmental impacts": "New York studies raise serious questions about under-ice impact on fishery resources, on fishing habitat, on vegetation and wildlife in near-shore wetlands and a host of other disruptions to the delicate but poorly understood ecology of the Great Lakes." (The New York Times)

I told the Wall Street Journal: "If you get oil under ice, there is no way to contain it."

In Sports Illustrated, I baldly accused the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of selling out on the project in order to get funds for years of studies:

$50 million (in studies) is being held out as the carrot for the (agency), Schmidt says...: "The Corps is saying, 'Give us approval now, and you can study the environmental impact as we go along, and if we discover any adverse impacts, we may stop.' There's a nice bureaucratic catch phrase for this: 'Programmatic approach with a reversibility mechanism.' That is totally absurd. Nobody believes that the Corps will make a huge investment and then stop in its tracks if something is wrong..."

In the Chicago Tribune, I debated Vice Admiral Paul Trimble, president of the Lake Carriers Association, and I said:

The $1 billion [costs projected by the Corps for all-winter shipping], including interest and everything else, comes to about $100 million a year. It doesn't include any cost to clean up oil spills, to prevent environmental damages, and a million other things that will have to be done.

I told the Los Angeles Times:

This project is horrendous in terms of size, complexity, and confusion. We're talking about totally restructuring the Great Lakes waterway... This program has been so big, everybody has been afraid to touch it. Now that citizen opposition is mushrooming, they are realizing that this is one federal pork barrel that we can bring some sense to.

All this press got the attention of television reporters; I was a fountain of background information for producers. CBC (Canadian) television aired a documentary, Winter's Storm, in which I appeared. I was a prime source, and on-air antagonist, for an ABC 20-20 broadcast. Reporter Sylvia Chase threw me softball questions, then clamped down like a vise on Col. Melvyn Remus, the Corps' guy who got stuck defending his agency's madness. I think it pretty much stalled his Army career, and he retired soon after.

I always felt a little sorry for the poor colonel; 20-20 did a bag job on him. Even though I think ABC's show helped our cause immensely, after that I never fully trusted network news shows; I saw firsthand how they could shapeshift truth. A friend from the St. Lawrence River who was involved with the show told me recently what he thinks happened:

We usually brought people up to the river to show them how beautiful it is. With Sylvia Chase, it was the opposite. She arrived in April to interview people during one of the worst blizzards ever. Boat houses were blowing away across the ice. She looked at that storm, thought of ships trying to move through it, and I think she said to herself, "This is crazy." I think that's when she lost her objectivity.

In fact, it was those savvy upstate New York environmentalists in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River who were most responsible for getting national TV coverage of the controversy. And, it was my friend, the late Abbie Hoffman, who led and inspired much of that success.

It used to surprise me when talking with someone younger to learn they had never heard of Abbie Hoffman. He's an icon of the counterculture '60s, but then, so were lots of people, and they're largely forgotten today, too. The anti-Vietnam War protests, the Yippie movement, the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial fiasco -- Abbie was in them all up to his eyeballs. Which the FBI said were cooked on coke (Abbie said "entrapment"), sending him into hiding to avoid arrest for many years.

That's where I found him, living under the alias "Barry Freed," and fighting the Corps' winter navigation plans for the St. Lawrence Seaway (nee River). Abbie-Barry lived with his partner, Johanna Lawrenson, on Wellesley Island in her old, white Victorian home on a grassy hillside, big picture windows overlooking boat docks and the river.

Barry knew more about community organizing than anyone I'd ever met. Coalition building, public relations, speaking, fund raising -- Barry knew it all and was a pragmatist, a rare bird among environmental ideologues. On his adopted river turf, he was central to starting (and naming) Save the River, which ended up being pivotal in killing winter navigation. A Corps' public hearing on its plan for the Seaway gave Save the River a perfect forum for its initial community organizing. That's what first brought me to their little town of Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands.

I loved my brief adoption into the community and culture of the Thousand Islands, that fragile 50-mile stretch of the St. Lawrence River most vulnerable to winter shipping's insults. Biologists from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service gave me an extensive tour of the river in a Boston Whaler that beat the hell out of us in the river's big waves. The community of activists feted me as an "outside expert" and genuinely appreciated my role in the fight. I was a sucker for the region's elegance and grace -- qualities marinated in the Thousand Islands by an eclectic mix of the old New York moneyed and the hardscrabble North Country, no-nonsense settlers.

Their passion for the river was infectious, but then, the Thousand Islands can seem a fairyland. Deep turquoise water flecked with silver surges through channels, narrow and wide, among the namesake islands. A medley of summer homes, from cottages to (literally) a castle, and over-water boathouses edge the rock islands, some not much wider than the footprint of the home. The islands' interiors are covered with rich, green forests of oak and pine. During winter, a few residents stay, using snowmobiles to reach the mainland once ice covers the channels.

Into this riverine paradise came the Corps and the St. Lawrence Seaway Authority seeking for the first time to bring icebreakers and winter shipping to rend winter's rhythms of ecological and cultural quietude. Barry and fellow "river rats" were having none of it. Save the River became a potent political force -- locally, in the state capitol in Albany, and in Congress.

I was convinced that the Corps had overextended its Great lakes winter navigation plan by including the St. Lawrence River. It wasn't just Save the River's novices that the Corps had to contend with. There also were brilliant biologists with exceptional political skills who were opposed to the plan based on well-studied ecological grounds. They could prove the environmental damages that would come from winter shipping. The New York governor was against it (though, more likely based on protecting New York City harbor's competitive economic interests, rather than any great love of nature). I wrote in my trip summary: "I will continue to coordinate with New York interests. They hold the key to giving the winter navigation machine its first major setback."

All this while, Abbie remained "Barry" to nearly everyone, including me. Despite his incognito persona, he relished the limelight, such as a highly publicized event where New York's U.S. Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared, "Everyone owes Barry Freed a debt of gratitude for his organizing ability." (Jezer, M. 1992. Abbie Hoffman, American Rebel. Rutgers Univ. Press)

Things changed in September 1980, when Barry revealed his true identity in a carefully orchestrated interview on 20-20 with Barbara Walters. Of course, in retrospect it all made sense and explained how Barry got his unmatched community organizing and political skills.

It was Abbie (as Barry) who planted in my head the idea of starting a regional Great Lakes organization to fight winter navigation and future threats bigger than any local organization could counter. That's the story I'll tell next, including how a General Motors Vice President tried his best to get me fired from MUCC for my connection with firebrand Abbie.

* * *

We won the winter navigation war (mostly), and the Corps lost. The shipping season did get extended incrementally on the upper Great Lakes. But not on the St. Lawrence River. The really big plan for twelve-month shipping everywhere died under the weight of its own cost and madness. That's not to downplay, however, the extraordinary effort to kill it by many people in and outside of government. Cost and stupidity alone -- and certainly not scientific facts -- are never enough to kill pork barrel water projects. There has to be smart, sustained, organized opposition.

(Among Michigan's heroes were Michigan Congressman David Bonior and his aide, Claudia Elliot, and Lee Botts, as chair of the Great Lakes Basin Commission. In New York, there was the late Professor Jim Geiss from Syracuse University, and my two good friends, John Hickey and Rick Spencer.)

When winning is defined by defeating a bad proposal or project, as often is the case with environmental battles, nothing happens. So, how do you measure, how do you celebrate the absence of environmental damage? How can you tell if you really made a difference? How do you know for sure what might have happened without you?

I once intervened to block the proposed filling of a wet spot of cattails across the street from the Natural Resources Building at Michigan State University. They were expanding the parking lot and were set to pave over the wee marsh. Instead, because I made a fuss, they ended up saving that puddle of mud and putting a split rail fence around it. It's one of the few tangible environmental accomplishments I could actually touch. Great Lakes winter navigation didn't happen, and I know there are marshes somewhere that were spared. I just can't point to them.

### I Wore Abbie Hoffman's Coat

For over 25 years, Great Lakes United has been a unifying voice for ensuring a healthy and vibrant future for the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River ecosystem. We find consensus during controversy and agreement within division; we build bridges between disparate interests, organizations, and individuals. We tackle emerging concerns with vigour, setting a framework for a progressive protective action.

Our members span a diverse spectrum of interests, organizations and individuals. We are citizens, environmentalists, conservationists, labour unions, First Nations, tribes, hunters, anglers, academics, and progressive business and industry. Together, we work to protecting the world's largest freshwater ecosystem. (Great Lakes United former web page – 2011)

This is the story of how I started Great Lakes United. It is the environmental accomplishment I'm most proud of. Not because of what GLU achieved -- I don't really know how much influence the organization had on issues. Rather, it's because I created an institution that gave quite a few people a place to focus their passion about doing good for the Great Lakes. Amazingly, GLU survived for more than 25 years, from its tumultuous birthing in 1982.

For a year or so after my introduction to Save the River, I schemed by phone with Barry (Abbie) regularly about our joint campaign to kill proposed Great Lakes winter navigation. We compared notes and plotted strategy; he often boosted my sagging spirits when things looked bleak for us. Barry never understood, though, that northern Michigan and surrounding states were not like upstate New York's Thousand Islands where "The River" was part of daily life, not just part of the scenery. The Midwest north abutting the Great Lakes is thinly populated and universally poor, with minimal political clout.

Barry pushed me to set up a conference about winter navigation, a rally for people and groups opposing the Corps' project. I got to almost dread having to talk to him because he would harass me so about why we weren't better organized and weren't going to do a conference. In September 1979, he offered to do it himself: "I would be willing to organize a Great Lakes-St. Lawrence conference of all groups opposing winter navigation," he wrote me. "We're real strong here."

Shortly after that, however, Barry dropped out of sight. The next thing I knew, he was announcing his celebrity Abbie Hoffman identity to Barbara Walters on national television. For the next few years, Abbie had to focus on his FBI arrest, cocaine conviction, and judge-ordered community service.

Even though I was unconvinced that a winter navigation conference could be successful, his idea stuck in my craw. If not that, then what? How could we broaden organized, public opposition to winter navigation, as well as to other ecosystem-wide threats to the Great Lakes? In early 1981, Bob Sugarman, chairman of the U.S. half of the International Joint Commission, called me with an idea.

The IJC is a group of mostly stuffy U.S. and Canadian political appointees who no one ever heard of who have jobs no one understands. They have committees of bureaucrats who write lots of reports, some very good, about what's going on with the Great Lakes. The IJC was created by treaty more than a century ago to deal with border disputes over water. And, it oversees a more recent U.S.-Canada agreement to protect the quality of shared waters of the Great Lakes.

When Bob was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, the IJC was cautious and conservative, offending few and accomplishing little. Bob knew that the IJC needed a bigger constituency in order to become a more activist force for improving the Great Lakes environment.

My long association with the IJC started out as a sideshow to my main environmental work. I had learned a little about this obscure group with the indeterminate name, so I drove up to Bay City for an IJC public hearing in a tiny auditorium. I wanted to tell them what MUCC expected the IJC to do regarding its international mandate to clean up and protect the lakes.

Except for government bureaucrats, the only other environmental types there were a couple, Mimi and Jim, who operated under the non de plume of Great Lakes Tomorrow, acting as if they were a citizens' advocacy group. It was really just the two of them, however, just two IJC groupies, insiders who survived on IJC grants to give the illusion of public participation. I found it all too chummy. I gave the IJC my blunt assessment of myriad government failures to protect the Great Lakes and what the IJC should do about it, and I went on my way.

I never would have guessed that this was the first step in a decades-long association with the IJC. Or that the IJC's cozy little get-together in Bay City would one day morph into public hearings attracting many hundreds of people. Or that the stodgy IJC would be branded by polluters as a radical environmentalist cabal. Or that the key IJC staffer behind this populist transformation, David LaRoche, would become a wonderful, life-long friend.

After that Bay City public hearing in 1980, I was surprised to get my first of many calls from Commissioner Bob Sugarman. He said my statement was a good blueprint of things that needed to get done, and he would try. Fast-talking Bob, the Philadelphia lawyer, flattered me.

From time to time, Bob would arrange to meet me. For example, if he had a layover at Detroit Metro Airport, I would drive down from Lansing. He was looking for a way to get more involvement in the IJC from sportsmen. He knew that the people who hunted and fished had the greatest vested interest in protecting the lakes. Why was MUCC about the only such group with a real-life constituency that the IJC was hearing from? I didn't have a good answer.

I can't say that I got very far with the IJC in those days. They were used to hearing from scientists, not ordinary people who talked to them in two-syllable words, as it were. They had one eccentric Canadian scientist, Dr. Jack Valentine, as a technical advisor. Jack went everywhere with a globe on his back, affixed like a backpack with fancy shoulder straps. You'd see him, lean and serious, walking down the street in his suit, briefcase in hand, with this big, tumorous globe on his back.

Jack religiously promoted "the ecosystem approach" as holy grail for what the IJC should build all its recommendations around. It was perfectly logical and scientifically valid. Except for one thing: What the hell does it mean? I told Jack that "Joe Six-Pack" would never use such words, so why should the IJC?

After Reagan was elected President, Bob Sugarman got dumped from his post. He called me and said, in effect, that he was now free of IJC ties, and it was time to get down to business. He wanted to build a new political voice to speak for the Great Lakes. He thought there was grant money available to do it, and he believed that MUCC and I could pull it off. It sounded like a colossal pain, but he asked me, "Who else is there?" I had no answer, so I went to work on his idea.

Like Barry (Abbie), Bob's idea was to start with a big conference with expert speakers on the Great Lakes. Another conference sounded boring and not very useful. Tom Washington and I brainstormed and between us, the idea was born of creating a new non-profit citizens organization, a "Great Lakes Federation."

We needed such a coalition to battle winter navigation. We also knew that future Great Lakes issues might not be so clear-cut, the target harder to demonize, and the political process even more devious. With the Great Lakes shared by eight states and two Canadian provinces, consensus on any environmental issue was nearly impossible to achieve, even among environmentalists. In trying to coordinate groups across the Great Lakes Basin, the distances alone are staggering -- 2,300 miles from one end to the other. At the French-Canadian downstream end (Quebec), most people don't speak English.

We decided we needed a region-wide advocacy organization focused solely on the Great Lakes (including the St. Lawrence River). In our initial plan, MUCC would start such a "federation" -- just like that -- and open the doors of a new Great Lakes organization to whomever wanted to join.

Bob said, "okay, let's do it," and went to his contacts at The Joyce Foundation in Chicago. They said it sounded too ambitious and told us to prove to them that there was support in the region. I sent around a survey and talked with lots of people. Many saw our plan as a plot by MUCC to take over their environmental world. It was a foretaste of the ugly turf battles to come.

Among the most paranoid was the National Wildlife Federation, which surprised me since MUCC was its state affiliate. However, NWF had never been much help on Great Lakes issues; its political clout most often was focused on environmental issues in the South, home to many of its leaders. Tom told them he would release some alligators in the Great Lakes if it would help get NWF's attention.

None of the "Big-Green" environmental groups ever did much, if anything, to fight winter navigation. The Sierra Club's office in Wisconsin eventually helped some, but that was about it. Ironically, these were the same groups that detested the idea of a new Great Lakes activist organization. I told NWF that a new Great Lakes "federation" wouldn't be necessary had they been doing their job.

Our "just do it" approach, however, was too pushy. I backed off and proposed that we simply have a "meeting" to get everybody together to ease into the idea of a "Great Lakes Federation." I called around and everyone loved the idea; the foundation gave MUCC the $27,800 I asked for.

I modeled the meeting after two successful ones I had attended. I drew the "atmosphere" from a meeting on environmental toxics held at a rustic center in the hills of West Virginia. The place was beautiful, and it was isolated. No phones and no excuses not to focus on the agenda. I drew "personality" from Save the River's summer "River Days," adopting the philosophy of "if it's not fun, you're not doing it right." I decided that the most crucial elements for success were, in this order: location, people, agenda.

Location first: I had seen how snarky and territorial environmentalists could get when their brand of environmental ideology or their turf was threatened. They were as bad as the religious fundamentalists I had grown up with, who would rather argue about trivial rules and doctrine than be relevant to non-believers. A dramatic setting in nature could mellow those tendencies, I was sure, which is why I picked Mackinac Island.

No one else liked the idea of going to Mackinac Island; Tom Washington tried up to the last minute to talk me out of it. I was adamant; atmosphere was critical, and our success would have to be as much about impressions as substance. After all, an island in the Great Lakes -- what could be more perfect? The non-motorized pace (horse-drawn carriages only; no cars are allowed) would throw people off balance. The trip to get there (there are no good airline connections to nearby towns) would make people think long and hard about what they were going to the meeting for. (The grant money paid travel expenses, so no one could really complain.)

I deliberately gave attendees tickets on the slowest ferry to the island, in order to force them onto the water for as long as possible. I wanted the psychological effect of "crossing the water" to gather together on an island. The grand setting of the island floating in the broad Straits of Mackinac (connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron) would be staggering and a bit humbling. It would all, I hoped, dampen some of the outsized egos I would have to contend with.

Because of limited ferry crossings to the island, everyone would have to get there on time, and no one could sneak off early for "more important" matters. We were meeting in May, the off-season, which gave us exclusive use of a small hotel. Its rooms had no TVs or phones. (In 1982, of course, there were no cell phones, laptops, or Internet.)

People second: I picked 60 as the maximum number to attend the Mackinac Island meeting; it seemed the most I could hope to work with as a group. I was damned if we were going to break into the useless small-group sessions, which I hated, that typically were used at environmental conferences. I spent two days compiling a mailing list. "Requests for Nominations" went to everyone I could think of. I solicited proposals for issue papers and paid 15 authors $100 each to write them, and then present them at the meeting. The papers I picked were about key Great Lakes issues and best approaches to mobilizing citizens to deal with those issues. Press releases went to hundreds of newspapers. I wanted to make an invitation to our meeting a privilege and a note of distinction.

I made it clear to everyone from the start that final attendance selections would be made by MUCC (giving me effective control), but I sought advice on all the 120 submitted nominations from an informal steering committee -- Bob Sugarman, Dave Herbst (NWF's regional guy from Indiana), Lee Botts, David LaRoche, and Tom Washington.

Dave Herbst was a right-wing NWF staffer from Indiana, who had nothing constructive to offer. Lee Botts headed the Lake Michigan Federation in Chicago, and had been a long-time fixture in Great Lakes environmental activism. A stubby little bulldog of a woman, Lee was smart, ambitious, and paranoid; she could support our new organization, but only if there was something in it for her.

David LaRoche headed up staff for the U.S. half of the IJC. We had become close friends. David had impeccable political instincts, viewing complex issues like a chess game and able to coolly assess the best strategic moves, detached from emotion and prejudices. I ignored his viewpoint only twice. First, was his prediction that we would not likely reach consensus on forming a new Great Lakes organization. I vowed to settle for nothing less. Second, he (and everyone else on the steering committee except Bob) didn't think Abbie Hoffman should attend. Dave's prescient question was, "What do you want your press lede to read?"

I wanted Abbie there. He was my friend. Plus, he was exceptionally talented and my first inspiration for creating a new organization (although he later downplayed that). Abbie was risky, but I agreed with Bob Sugarman, who told me, "I'm willing to take some chances." I figured Abbie might get us extra media attention at the meeting, falling back on one of my favorite maxims, soon to be sorely tested, "There's no such thing as bad publicity. Just spell my name right."

At first, Abbie turned me down. He sensed, and I think resented, the controversy over his invitation. Maybe he thought I was just inviting him out of courtesy, or thought he was being set up for something unpleasant. In any event, after I told Tom and the others that Abbie wasn't coming (much to their relief), a Save the River friend of Abbie's, T Menkel, called me. I convinced T that I really did want Abbie to be part of our meeting. T talked Abbie into coming. He agreed to attend as his alter-ego, Barry Freed.

Even though Barry's identity as Abbie was publicly known at this time, outside of New York State few people paid attention and recognized the connection. Using Abbie's old nom de guerre could at least postpone any controversy over his participation. I underestimated, however, his polarizing reputation (deserved or not) and the pettiness of environmentalists.

The final attendance was a balance of activist types (e.g., environmentalists, labor unions, farmers) and geography. My philosophy was simple: It was an open meeting. People who were activists and represented a region or constituency were invited, no matter now obnoxious I may have privately found them. A few were there against everyone's advice and my own opinions of them, but I shut out no one if I felt they could make a contribution.

Agenda third: I choreographed the two-day meeting agenda to produce two tangible products: a "Great Lakes Charter," outlining key issues confronting the lakes, and a "Strategy for a Great Lakes Federation."

I moderated the meeting and tried to control every detail, from the name tags to the taped music played on the after-meeting dinner cruise on Lake Huron. (My Willie Nelson tracks got ugly complaints.) "Cordiality" was my watchword; everyone's opinion was equal.

There was, for example, the venerable and long-winded Dr. Alden E. Lind, head of his mostly one-man show, the Save Lake Superior Association in Duluth. There was quiet, disarmingly-effective Russell Gossman, with the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Daniel Green and Magali Marc came from Montreal, representing SVP, Societe pour Vaincre la Pollution. Art Duhamel, a leader in a nearby band of the Ottawa and Chippewa, was the only Native American I could find to attend, and he said little and didn't last. Seven newspaper and TV reporters attended on their own.

I ran the meeting with tight control, formally using Roberts' Rules of Order, and had a designated parliamentarian to settle disagreements on process. I paid a court reporter to sit and transcribe every word of the entire meeting.

The first day, authors presented their issue papers about improving citizen action to benefit the Great Lakes. I led the group in arguing over organizing issues and identifying the most important environmental challenges facing the lakes. This was my meeting's shake-down period. I let people talk, ramble, and babble, then pulled in the reins, and we finished on schedule, having created the gist of an issue-based "Great Lakes Charter." It was a simple job for a committee I appointed, with Lee Botts as chair, to finalize the Charter that first evening. My MUCC assistant, Martha Judy, did a masterful job steering them away from some of Lee's more parochial goals, though I've forgotten the details.

For the last 90 minutes of the first day's meeting, I opened the floor to the question of creating a new "Great Lakes Federation" -- was it a good idea? I knew that many attending shared a simmering resentment and paranoia about that plan. My goal was to get as much of it out in the open as fast as possible. It worked. The environmental movement's schizophrenia was fully revealed.

Everyone knew that I backed a strong, politically aggressive federation that would act independently to pursue environmental objectives, similar to how MUCC, the UAW, and Save the River operated. However, an outspoken contingent led by Lee Botts and the Sierra Club's Jane Elder wanted a weaker, consensus-driven, information-coordinating federation that could never overshadow their existing environmental groups.

The day ended in shambles. My hope was that the committee I had selected to draft the "Strategy for a Great Lakes Federation" could pull it back together before morning. This committee was, as I was correctly accused, "stacked" in order to get the job done: Bob Sugarman, Tom Washington, Dave LaRoche, and Barry Freed. Based on the day's discussion, I added to the group two others who seemed to have some common sense (Canadian activist Adele Hurley and Michigan cherry farmer Josh Wunsch).

They came up with a one-page report that I, Martha, and one other MUCC staffer typed and mimeographed (no computers back then) late that first night. By morning, everyone had a copy, along with the draft "Great Lakes Charter."

I had stayed up late plotting floor strategy. We expected a donnybrook and talked about how to handle the irrevocable split that most expected. I wanted to avoid such a schism, but couldn't be sure how things would go. I hoped that after all the petty arguments, most people would realize that a split was not what environmentalists needed, not why they came to Mackinac Island, and not the conclusion they wanted (or wanted to read about from the many reporters attending).

By Saturday morning I was ready for the challenge, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. Barry said: "I don't want to leave here with a box of fudge [a Mackinac Island specialty] and another newsletter. The solution to our problems lies beyond the reach of our single organizations."

He made a simple motion to form a new Great Lakes organization and by 10:30 a.m. it was unanimously adopted. We elected a by-laws committee and killed the rest of the day giving the environmental conference junkies the small-groups-discussions fix they were dying for.

There was one last debate of note on a proposed amendment declaring that membership be primarily limited to "citizen groups, " thereby barring individuals from joining the new organization. Barry was the first to object and gave a rousing speech about how we have to work with everyone. He had often said, "If you got a coalition and everyone looks alike, you ain't doing it right because all American's don't look alike."

Objecting to the amendment, and agreeing with Barry, was my stuffy parliamentarian, Paul Wendler, which was ironic, given the role he would play in the controversy over Barry/Abbie's attendance that boiled over the next morning. The amendment was defeated.

On that final evening's dinner cruise, we sailed through the Straits of Mackinac into a beautiful sunset, and I got plastered. Everyone felt good about what had been concluded. We had accomplished exactly what I had dreamed of doing -- setting in motion the formation of a new region-wide Great Lakes activist organization.

The Abbie Hoffman sideshow: My euphoria was dampened by Sunday morning's hangover and the Detroit News headline: "Ex-radical Hoffman plugs for group to save lakes":

Mackinac Island -- His nameplate read simply: "Barry Freed, New York." But the intense, bearded delegate attending an environmental workshop here yesterday to mobilize a citizens group to protect the Great Lakes is better known as Abbie Hoffman, the radical leader from the 1960s... Hoffman was pleased over the outcome, although he probably won't play an active role in the new organization.

Other reporters were less careful with their facts. Veteran environmental reporter Paul MacClennan wrote for the Buffalo Evening News:

Mackinac Island -- A plan to recycle a 1960s Yippie leader as a hired organizer to rally environmental groups around Great Lakes issues at a conference here has backfired, leaving the sponsors embarrassed and delegates to the session furious. Convicted drug seller, Abbie Hoffman, a familiar radical figure of the 1960s, was brought to this two-day session under his alias, Barry Freed...

I was livid. I called Paul and reamed him over his "blatant fabrication"; no one had ever thought about hiring Abbie, I insisted. Paul tried to defend himself, but I was having none of it. "You made that up," I fumed, which is about the worst thing you can accuse a reporter of doing.

Paul's mention of an "embarrassed sponsor" was, however, an accurate depiction of MUCC's President, Dwight Ulman. Dwight, who looked like a cross between Joe Garagiola and Porky Pig, loved the limelight but had a midget intellect.

I wrote Dwight's "Welcome to Mackinac Island" opening address, which included some history of the island and background on how the meeting came about. There stood chubby Dwight, naked in his ignorance, proclaiming:

The idea of this meeting came from one of Save the River's founders, perhaps the best community organizer the Great Lakes region has ever seen, Barry Freed.

Poor Dwight had no idea that the "Barry" he praised was Abbie Hoffman, and certainly couldn't have anticipated the controversy-to-come in the Buffalo Evening News:

By Sunday, however, Mr. Ulman was fuming, saying "I didn't know Barry Freed was Abbie Hoffman when I made that speech. The staff knew it but didn't tell me."

Dwight was Paul Wendler's lapdog; both hailed from one of MUCC's biggest affiliates, the Saginaw Field & Stream Club. Wendler, an MUCC Past President, was a vice-president of General Motors and was, for the most part, a conservative ass. I liked him anyway, probably because at least he was smarter than the typical MUCC ol' boy. He was pissed enough over the Abbie Hoffman flap, however, to later get all seven MUCC Past Presidents -- this was like a "council of elders" -- to sign a resolution giving me a good slap:

Recently..., the staff of MUCC met with and worked with a person of questionable character who has a record of breaking the laws of the United States. Not only of anti government, but of criminal crimes dealing with the selling of controlled substances. This person was given credit for organizing such a meeting and is now known under an assumed name. The staff was aware of his past record, but chose to cooperate with him because of his supposed organizational ability...

Wendler's resolution tried to require MUCC staff to get approval from the MUCC Board of Directors for any similar events in the future, attempting to shift control from Tom Washington to the Board, a concept anathema to Tom. Nothing much ever came of it. Also, I'm pretty sure none of them ever learned that I wrote a glowing character reference letter for Abbie, got Tom to sign it, and sent it to the judge who was sentencing Abbie on his cocaine conviction. (His sentence ended up requiring him to work as a volunteer for a time at a drug rehabilitation center in New York City.)

Windsor -- GLU's birthing: Over that summer of 1982, my assistant, Martha, and I worked with a committee that drafted by-laws for the new Great Lakes organization. We scheduled a big meeting in Windsor, Ontario, for November to ratify the by-laws and formally launch the organization; 125 people showed up, representing more than 70 organizations from all the eight states and two Canadian provinces that border the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.

I spent two days at the podium running the meeting, trying to make music from a cacophony of voices and opinions. The upshot was the formal naming and launching of a new environmental federation called Great Lakes United (GLU). My disappointment at the time with the outcome is evident in my snarky reflections written a month afterwards:

"A Disunited Great Lakes United" (Dayton Daily News), "Group Meet Runs Amok -- Not Great Lakes United Yet" (Detroit News), "Lakes Conference Plagued by Dissension -- Strong Vs. Weak Coalition" (Detroit Free Press), "Abbie Hoffman, MUCC Split with Great Lakes Group" (Bay City Times). So what went wrong in Windsor?

What started as a lean, politically oriented conservation coalition was turned into a flaccid, informational coalition with task forces to study Great Lakes problems.

The Windsor meeting revealed a fundamental split within the environmental movement which has always existed, but has generally been suppressed. The factions were branded by the press as "moderates" (who won) and "activists" (who lost)...

The Windsor meeting proved to me that the Midwest "establishment" environmental movement in the U.S. and Canada is ponderous, ineffective, entrenched, and largely irrelevant to today's political processes. It is elitist and exclusionary, as evidenced by repeated efforts to cut out individuals from membership to GLU.

There exists an enemy of the environment we never talk about publicly -- the environmentalists themselves who give the public the illusion of effectiveness. As vital as communication is, newsletters do not necessarily equate to political success. Activity does not necessarily mean action...

If two men as different as Tom Washington and Abbie Hoffman could threaten the same people, it wasn't Washington or Hoffman they fear. What they fear is leadership and power. So they hide behind task forces, networks, and committees. They would be put off by anyone capable of asserting dynamic political leadership for the Great Lakes.

When those modern-day rustlers in cowboy hats come riding in to steal our Great Lakes water, GLU will head them off at the pass with a slide show, break up into task forces, have some tea, define optimum strategies for integrating [Great lakes water] diversions with holistic living, and put out a special edition of the GLU newsletter...

As if that wasn't enough, I added some jibes about the unhelpful role of the National Wildlife Federation:

Characteristics which have made NWF the most successful conservation group in the world were precisely the characteristics which NWF insisted be deleted from GLU's By-Laws.

NWF includes all U.S. states and territories; NWF wanted GLU to exclude Americans and Canadians from the St. Lawrence River region. NWF marks its success and fundraising largely on its individual members; NWF insisted that GLU exclude individual members. NWF succeeds largely due to strong central leadership and extensive profession staff; NWF supported weakening GLU's staff to "coordinator."

If NWF views formation of a strong GLU as an admonition that NWF has not been capable of giving the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River enough attention, that would be correct. Creation of NWF's Great Lakes Natural Resources Center in Ann Arbor is a welcome step which will yield great benefits for the Great Lakes. But neither NWF, its regional center, or its state affiliates are capable of dealing with Great Lakes politics. They may never be. We can't wait; the lakes can't wait... Who from NWF speaks to the IJC -- ever? Who from NWF speaks to the Corps of Engineers at hearings and workshops? Where was NWF when Wisconsin threw out its phosphate ban in detergents this year?...

(My clash with NWF and its representative to the Windsor meeting, Larry Schweiger, would have reverberations decades later in my life, a doleful story I've told in my second ebook, Life with Big Green: A Memoir.)

Like me, Abbie was disgusted with GLU's apparent "information network" direction, rather than one of harder-edged political advocacy. Looking back at the Windsor meeting, Abbie defended his role:

There was an undercurrent of fear that conspiracy of one or more strong personalities was being hatched in the dark corners to "take over," to "dominate," etc. Since I was one accused of that, indeed was the only person publicly attacked coast-to-coast during this "voyage" since Mackinac Island, let me get personal. I feel the record will show I never acted nor did anything different than any other delegate. I've spent six years fighting to save the St. Lawrence River at a risk, it would be fair to say few else would be willing to take...

Fame scares people, intimidates them, magnifies one from a human to some power figure and distorts one to a cartoon. It allows anyone who wants their name in the papers (for only one day) to do so simply by attacking that person...

I doubt few delegates on Saturday knew Lee Botts had that very morning accused me in the press of trying to stack the Windsor meeting to take over the environmental movement. She told that to a friendly reporter at the Chicago Tribune who rushed it on the wire service.

Ironically, I spoke at Northwestern University where she works last August. Even after her first volleys of disparaging remarks and before 1,200 students and faculty who had paid $5 each to hear me, I praised her. Indeed, I have never said nor will I say publicly a bad word about any attacker in this debate...

Sticks and stones have rarely broken my bones, so what's a few nasty words by people who don't know you from one of the Beatles? What I really hated was people whispering in my ear that I was o.k.; it was Tom Washington who was the power crazy dictator bent on become "Czar of the Great Lakes." "Do you know you are getting in bed with a fascist pig?" I was told...

Abbie and I flirted with the idea of going off and starting a different organization more to our style, but nothing ever came of it. Besides, after my gigs at Mackinac Island and Windsor, I was burned out and thoroughly sick of most environmentalists (a recurring humor throughout my career). But I got over my pique, and GLU held its first annual meeting, passed resolutions, elected its Board of Directors, hired staff, opened an office, and went on its way. As did I.

Early GLU leaders, l. to r.: Tim Eder, John Hickey, Rick Spencer, Martha Judy, Josh Wunsch

For the first few years, I attended a few of GLU's meetings and tried to be constructive. I had no interest in getting any closer. At its second annual meeting in Toronto, GLU presented me with its Founders Award (a second went to MUCC).

GLU didn't turn out to be the hard-edged activist force I envisioned. Yet, for the time it lasted, that coalition had to be better than the nothing that existed before GLU.

After this article was published in the Detroit News (July 25, 1982), I got a nice note from the late-Tom Anderson, the widely-revered chair of Michigan's House of Representatives Conservation Committee for 13 years: "No one else in my entire acquaintance would be so fortunate as to carve this kind of publicity out of screwing off skipping stones. But, congratulations, Wayne, on a well-deserved good story. I agree you're a MOVER!"

* * *

It was the next summer, 1983, and we were tearing down the St. Lawrence River. Abbie had the 70 hp outboard at full throttle, grinning and waving in the sunshine to the young girls on the riverbank. It was hard to believe that they recognized him -- infamous '60s radical and now local environmental activist \-- from a hundred feet away, but they seemed pretty excited, the way they were waving back at us. I saw the floating milk jug ahead marking a rock reef one second before we skimmed over it, shearing the lower unit clean off the Evinrude. Suddenly it was very quiet. A small oil slick bubbled downstream from our ruined motor.

It had been a good afternoon on the river, five guys fruitlessly fishing and heavily drinking. Maybe the beer explained why Abbie hit the reef; he boated this water all the time and should have known better. It wasn't even his boat; he had borrowed Johanna's. Now she would be stuck. In the Thousand Islands, boats are like cars. You go to town in your boat. You go visit friends on other islands in your boat. You have to have a boat.

Abbie did have his own boat, a sleek, powerful in-board. That's the one we had been riding around in earlier in the day, when our non-fishing objectives had been going fast, looking at scenery, and drinking Canadian beer.

Abbie & John Hickey -- a happy day

Johanna's dead boat drifted to shore. A short paddle away was the dock of an old fellow that Rick Spencer knew from long ago. Our rescue plan was to borrow the guy's boat, drive it 20 minutes downstream to Rick's island cabin, pick up his utility boat, drive that back upstream, then use it to tow Johanna's boat back to her dock on Wellesley Island.

"You're welcome to try, but I haven't had her started all summer," the old guy said to Rick.

The engine was old, the gas was old, yet somehow Rick coaxed it sputtering to life. He and I got in and headed down to his cabin. The old engine did not want to run fast and the sun was getting low. Just as we got to Rick's dock, the motor died. "I'll tow it back to him tomorrow," Rick said.

After plowing back upstream against the heavy current in Rick's utility boat, we tied a long line to Johanna's dead, red-and-white boat, then headed downstream as fast as we could. We already were late for dinner. It was slow going and dark by the time we tied up at Johanna's dock. She had dinner set and waiting for us, with help from two sexy young interns from Save the River. Everything was lovely. It was the last time we would ever be all together.

* * *

Six years later while riding through the Arizona's Mohave Desert, I learned of Abbie's suicide on a radio news report. I stared out the passenger window at a whirr of passing creosote bushes and palo verde trees. I thought of Abbie's episodic sadness and the demons of depression that had finally overwhelmed him. Far from our once-shared Great Lakes, my new home's desert landscape looked especially bleak.

Twice, long after our river escapades, Abbie had shown up in Michigan on his speaking tours, and I had gone to see him and say hello. The last time had been at Michigan State University. It was billed as the "Yippie vs. Yuppie" debate -- Abbie vs. Jerry Rubin, his '60s partner in anti-war protests who had joined Wall Street and was promoting the virtues of capitalism. The debate was hokey, but Abbie was entertaining, with well-practiced jokes and cute phrases, sadly, lost to time. I well remember, however, his surprisingly poor public speaking skills -- always looking straight ahead into the same middle of the audience, for example.

I went backstage afterwards, and Abbie was busy packing to head out. He was glad to see someone he knew, and I tagged along to a boring party held for him. Before we left, he took off his brown, corduroy sports coat, but couldn't get it to fit in his suitcase. "Here, you want this?" he said to me. I wore Abbie Hoffman's coat for years. Once, much later, my daughter wore it to a costume party. I still have Abbie's coat, but no way could I squeeze into it now.

* * *

The last time I saw Johanna Lawrenson, Abbie's life partner, was in 2005. A friend and I were visiting Rick Spencer for a few gorgeous, late-spring days on the river, and we left my car at Johanna's. Rick picked us up at her dock in his boat. Johanna thanked me for having years earlier sent her copies of all my papers having to do with Abbie. She had lost little of her '60s zeal for political activism. Recently, she had attended President Obama's first inauguration along with "my five lesbians," as Johanna put it. She said something about their group trying to exorcise the Bush White House before Obama moved in.

Johanna's current outrage was Proposition 8 in California that had made gay marriage illegal there. She was upset, not that it passed, but that new efforts to overturn Prop 8 didn't go far enough in spelling out gay rights. Yet, it was clear that Abbie and his celebrity legacy remained the bigger part of her everyday life -- his writings, stories about him, film ideas. I found it a bit sad. I was happy to see this beautiful woman once again, and was happy to boat away with my friends.

### Not the Last Rat Off

The main reason I quit my dream job -- my last day at MUCC was November 22, 1985 -- was because MUCC's amazing team of professional staff was falling apart. They were all good friends and work was less fun without them. Moreover, I saw MUCC heading to decline with the wholesale talent drain. I told myself that I didn't want to be the last rat off the sinking ship.

When I told Tom Washington I was quitting, he leaned back in his big chair and said, sincerely perplexed about the wave of resignations, "Wayne, what's going on?" I don't remember what I told him, but it was nothing about rats and sinking ships.

Two of the best staff -- art director Ben Graham and lobbyist Bill Rustem -- had already left, with more in the works. I think Ben just wanted to try something new. As I noted earlier, Bill, however, quit mainly because our baffling boss wasn't capable of sharing power and changing with the times. Ironically, Tom felt threatened by the very talent he had hired and trained. I think he worried about becoming marginalized within his own organization. Such were the intense insecurities of this difficult man.

His latest office manager, Jan, was no help. Jan played to Tom's sense of entitlement and treated him like royalty, waiting on his every whim. She was a complete contrast to his prior office manager, a businesslike woman who didn't fit well with Tom's chauvinist, paternal view of women, so she didn't last. Jan, however, seemed to glow in her maternal role.

Tom griped about having to park his car at the far end of MUCC's small lot, if he arrived mid-day when all the good spots were taken. It meant he had to walk an extra hundred feet. Lord knows, he needed the exercise. Nevertheless, to smooth this wrinkle in Tom's life, Jan bought a large, wooden "Reserved" sign and had it bolted prominently into the brick wall closest to the building's back door, making it clear that this was the boss's spot. It offended my egalitarian ideals. That weekend in a late-night raid, I unbolted the pretentious sign, which was never to be seen again. Jan steamed, but Tom's reserved parking space quietly died.

During my last few years at MUCC, it was apparent that Tom was having an increasingly tough time paying the bills. MUCC's county map book had been a big seller, but now there was competition from newer and better map books. MUCC's Outdoorama Sports Show was struggling to make a profit.

Every year, the same hustle: Outdoorama! Ten big days! A sure sign of Spring! It was the assignment from hell, standing in MUCC's round welcome booth as Detroit's finest flooded in, handing out free MUCC magazines and wildlife posters, then trying to sell Detroit's gearheads an MUCC membership, while offering a bonus county map book, or some years, a sizeable pocket knife. Can you imagine that today, handing out free knives like candy in Detroit's Eight Mile Armory?

Outdoorama was a tacky affair, full of booths set up on the armory's dirt floor hawking outdoor products and fishing resorts, everything with a carney flavor. Hucksters selling miracle frying pans and my favorite, the Mystery Box for $5: Could be a watch! Could be a diamond ring! Could be a time bomb! (We added that last one to his script.)

For years, the big draw was "Victor the 'Rasslin' Bear." Victor, a black bear muzzled and leashed by his trainer, George, would take on all comers in a wrestling match on the big stage. I'm sure you won something for pinning Victor, which rarely happened, but I think a guy would have to be really drunk to go Greco with a slobbery, stinking bear.

One year, Tom brought in a wrestling tiger. I don't know if Victor was indisposed or if Tom was trying to ramp up the 'rasslin' excitement. The tiger, though a magnificent animal, was a bust as stand-in for Victor. Because of the danger, it only would wrestle its trainer -- no gearheads allowed, drunk or otherwise -- and seemed bored with the whole affair.

Gallagher (the watermelon-smashing guy) was the headline entertainer one year. His was a low-budget operation. I drove him downtown to Detroit's Farmers Market, and he bought his trademark melons to smash on stage. First, however, I dragged him along with me on an errand to a suburban mall to pick up a suit I had bought; he didn't seem to enjoy himself much. Gallagher was my first close-up brush with celebrity; I can't say that I was impressed. He seemed pretty humorless for a professional entertainer. But still, how many people can say they've been to the mall with Gallagher?

Over time, MUCC added to Outdoorama educational presentations about birds and snakes and such, and shifted from 'rasslin' animals to contests in giant water pools for log-rolling lumberjacks and retrieving hunting dogs. Outdoorama moved to a convention center in suburban Oakland County, which was cleaner and classier. Maybe it slowed the slide of Outdoorama.

With MUCC's revenues flagging, Tom needed something new, something big. He came up with the idea that MUCC should buy a decrepit six-story office building in downtown Lansing, abutting City Hall and across the street from the State Capitol. His plan was to renovate the building, sell MUCC's existing headquarters, move the staff downtown, and lease the empty office floors. And one more thing: build and operate a brew-pub on the first floor.

A brew-pub. What that had to do with conservation was a mystery. But, I really think that was mostly what it was about -- Tom was getting bored and he always had wanted to own a restaurant. Here was his chance.

MUCC's Board didn't think much of his idea, but Tom finally bullied them into buying the decrepit building (by this time, I had left MUCC). I don't remember why, but the whole deal eventually fell through, and I think MUCC took a nasty financial bath on Tom's brew-pub fantasy.

* * *

As I contemplated the possibility of quitting MUCC, I prepared a table with the pluses and minuses of leaving MUCC. On the top of the negative column was "no more constituency to speak for"; fifth was "have to keep mouth shut." On the top of the positive list was "no more TLW [Tom Washington]." Having Tom for a boss did get tiresome.

Despite that, I had it good. Tom had just given me a nice raise, I had all the independence I could have asked for, and the work remained enjoyable and rewarding most of the time. Best of all, I had gotten really good at my job. I was recognized throughout Michigan as a tough, effective environmental advocate. I was on a first-name basis with environmental agency staff throughout the Great Lakes region, and had open access to most environmental policy makers. I was in constant demand for media interviews, speeches, public hearings, and various environmental, public advisory committee memberships. It felt good to work in the thick of all things environmental in Michigan.

After ten years, however, I was tired of it. I could still do it, but I didn't really love it any more. Too much of my time was being spent helping NIMBY ("not in my backyard") landfill opponents. I could understand the paranoia about a dump next door, but landfill proponents also had a good point: Garbage has to go somewhere.

Early on in my job, right and wrong had seemed obvious regarding Michigan's environment. Pollution was bad. Clean water was good. Improvements could be measured by new laws and regulations, although at the time the pace seemed painfully slow.

Yet, even this sluggish progress couldn't last, and by the mid-1980s questions of balance -- "how clean is clean?", risk assessment, costs versus benefits, jobs versus environment, private property rights versus public interest -- turned environmental questions into mind-numbing debates requiring ever-more studies, advisory groups, and increasing paralysis in getting anything done. Making it all worse, Reagan was President and environmental agencies were being run by bandits.

Near the end of our decade of working together, Tom, a gung-ho supporter of Reagan, was named to an advisory committee for U.S. Interior Secretary and environmental nemesis James Watt (perhaps the most cynical cabinet appointment of pre-Trump times). After the acerbic, self-righteous Watt was forced to resign, he came to MSU to give a speech, stirring some controversy. A Detroit News reporter asked me what I thought.

"Even a fool needs a forum," I said.

Tom just shook his head when he read my quote in the newspaper the next day, "Wayne, why do you say these things?"

To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Even though it was the season for me to leave MUCC, it was hard to imagine a better purpose under heaven. Saving the environment, speaking on behalf of fish and wildlife, trying to protect the earth from all the outrageously stupid things people do to it -- it was an enviable place to be.

I prided myself on speaking truth to power, saying what I knew many were thinking but couldn't say publicly. Or, sometimes, pointing out what no one else seemed to notice. I was appalled, for example, when the city of Lansing replaced its downtown bridge across the Grand River and edged it with solid, ugly barriers, blocking any view of the river. I went to the city council meeting where they all were congratulating themselves on the opening of the new bridge.

In the public comment period, I said, "I'm sorry to rain on your party, but how could you build a bridge where you can't see the river from your car?" I held up the city's thick riverfront planning reports, which called for improving visual access to the river. "Doesn't anyone read these things?" I asked.

"You shouldn't be looking at the river when you're driving, anyway," harrumphed one councilman.

Nearly 20 years later, Tom mailed me a Lansing newspaper story, headlined, "Council wants view for Michigan Ave. bridge":

Lansing officials are trying to take another small step toward improving the city's image, this time setting their sights on the Michigan Avenue Bridge over the Grand River. City Council members said that there's only one problem with the concrete-railed bridge -- motorists can't see the river from it. "How did they come up with that design that completely blocks the river?" Councilwoman Ellen Beal said.

The newspaper also editorialized in support of the idea: "Bridge should be a window on the Grand [River]." Well, duh!

* * *

"Tom's gone." That's how I learned in a phone call on Dec. 5, 1995, that Tom was dead. He had always been a walking heart attack -- overweight, out of shape, a true glutton of all things food and drink.

I went outside and walked up the hill behind the hotel where I was attending a meeting and looked out over a lake, watching the clouds, the geese, a lone gull in the wind. Thinking all the thoughts that you can't prepare yourself for, even when you have known for weeks that it most likely was coming. Each time I heard that Tom was "doing better," it seemed to clash with what my instincts knew. I had just that morning started to believe, however, that maybe, indeed, he could once again pull through his latest health challenge.

But then he didn't, and it was over. Finished. The moment that we had talked about for years as inevitable. When it finally came, it still caught me off guard. I cried. I knew that nothing would ever be the same in the business of conservation in Michigan. I wrote an obituary used by the National Wildlife Federation:

Those who knew Tom Washington will remember a personality of baffling complexity. At once overbearing and sensitive, respectful yet profane, a lover of guns and all of life, he was a self-made man who led Michigan to permanently improve its stewardship of its natural resources.

More words have been expended over beers and around campfires in analyzing Tom's perplexing personality than anyone I've known. He was an asshole a lot of the time. He could be a colossal pain to work for. In the long run, however, we're all dead and maybe what really matters is whether we made a difference in our passing. Tom made a huge difference. It was an honor to have worked so closely with him. His motto could have been Joseph Heller's line from Catch 22: "I'm going to live forever or die trying."

Tom Washington and son, David, at oil well blow-out fire --  
Pigeon River Country State Forest (1978)

* * *

One of the last things I did before leaving MUCC was testify to a Congressional budget committee on Capitol Hill in late-1985 regarding federal funding for Great Lakes protection:

How great are these lakes? Well, they are each so big you can't see across them. They are so deep, no one had seen the bottom until last summer. You can swim in them and drink from them and not get sick. They offer some of the best fishing in the world.

But these remarkable lakes are in trouble. Their waters and fish are laced with hundreds of exotic chemicals. Children and women who ever expect to bear children are advised to eat none of those fish. Lake trout won't reproduce in some of the lakes. Some fish-eating wildlife exhibit gross deformities. Hideous cancers are commonly found on fish in some heavily polluted waters of the Great Lakes. A billion dollar sport fishing industry and a multi-million dollar commercial fishing industry are threatened by pollution.

It was a fitting swan song for my MUCC career; toxic chemical pollution of the Great Lakes would become my next full-time environmental crusade, several years down the road after I had tried my hand at being a newspaper reporter and then a land developer in the desert.

I had no idea where I might work if I quit MUCC until one day, out of the blue, Bill Rustem called me at MUCC and asked if I knew anyone who might be interested in a new position being created as full-time environmental reporter for Booth Newspapers.

"Me," I said, without hesitation.

* * *

There was something about those ten years I spent at MUCC -- their intensity, their youthful idealism -- that produced enduring friendships. Most enigmatic was my partnership with Mark Van Putten, who, fresh out of college, created the National Wildlife Federation's regional office in Ann Arbor in 1982, three years before I left MUCC. We made quite a team, fighting Great Lakes polluters together. It's a critical piece of my career at MUCC that I've left out of my story for now.

Eventually, I would go to work for Mark in that same NWF office in Ann Arbor, then follow him to Washington, D.C., when he became NWF's big boss. All that is a tale with a not-so-happy ending, deserving its own ebook: Life with Big Green: A Memoir.

### Speaking in Tongues

I can't leave the story of my years at MUCC without giving a few samples of the babble that flowed from some of the organization's simple-minded and muddle-headed volunteer leaders.

At a Board meeting, for example, an MUCC vice president declared that "the bears that we have in the state today are much younger than they were a few years ago." (Wendell Briggs)

My favorite resolution -- from a well-meaning, but "feed up" club in southwest Michigan trying to stop deer "shinning" and "pooching":

Whereas the practice of shooting deer with artificial light from a motorized vehicle leads to a high rate of pooching, and controlling the pooching from sunset to 11:00 p.m. is hard to control, and many rural residents are feed up with having the lights put in their windows. Therefor let it be resolved that MUCC seeks legislation to stop all shinning from motorized vehicles at all hours.

A fellow staff member amused himself by compiling his own favorites in a "Cavalcade Diction (and other grammerical errors)" -- six pages of invented words from actual Board meetings, and defined for outsiders. A select few:

ammoninities: [a-munn-ninn'-knit-tees]. n. Probably definition: Really little bullets. (assumed derivative -- amenities). Use: "I've never stayed overnight and been able to enjoy all of the hotel's ammoninities." Founder: Dan DeLisle.

conscrew: [kaan'-screw]. v. Probable definition: what inmates do. Variation, misconscrew: what female inmates do. (assumed derivative -- construe). Founder: Dan DeLisle.

ennamint: [enn-uh-ment]. adj. Probable definition: the original and highly unsuccessful name given to the prototype of the Velamint. (assumed derivative -- eminent). Founder: State Representative Tom Middleton.

invertidly: [inn-ver'-tid-lee]. adv. Probable definition: looking at something upside-down while standing on your head. (assumed derivative -- inadvertently) Founder: Jim Jett.

lamblast: [lamb-blast']. v. Probable definitions: (1) to violently assault young sheep; (2) the unexplainable, spontaneous combustion of sheep. (assumed derivative \-- lambaste). Founder: Art Dittmar.

tourcism: [too'-er-sizz-umm]. n. Probable definition: the removal of a traveler's foreskin. (assumed derivative -- tourism). Founder: Bob Laich.

Please stand for reading this invocation (transcribed from tape) delivered by one of MUCC's elder statesmen at its 1985 annual convention:

Let's all rise.

Gracious Heavenly Father, as we come before thee this morning, Lord, thou hast just heard the Pledge of Allegiance, Lord, and the Conservation Pledge. And the Pledge of Allegiance, you know, as an American, uh, that is one of the greatest resources that we have in this country being an American and then in the Conservation Pledge and their "one nation under God."

We as Americans and our resource here our young people is our greatest resource, Lord. But the, too, Lord all us Americans are great resources. We praise thee, Lord, for these delegates today, Lord, that give of their time so unselfishly...

We praise thee, Lord, for the DNR that thou hast given us. We know, Lord, that it's the best in the world, Lord, and we praise thee for this. And we praise thee too, Lord, for this nation and for being an Americans and being a nation that is created under God. If, Lord, if this nation, as you know, wasn't created under God we would, we would be like other nations. We are a great republic. Uh, Russia is a great republic. China is a great republic. But this nation under God separates us. Lord, if we have, if we as a organization doth, does not have God, Lord, we are really a nation like Russia. If we have a club that is not, that doth not have God in it, Lord, we might as well be another, another Russian club, Lord.

So, we praise thee, Lord, for those things, Lord. We praise thee, Lord, for this great state that thou have given us. We know, Lord, that when you created this nation that you shaped in in the, in the shape of thou hand, Lord. And we praise thee for that.

We praise thee for all the resources that thou have given us here in this state. And now as we go into our convention, Lord, into these resolutions, Lord, we will just hope and pray, Lord, that every delegate here will take, uh, into their hearts, uh, the considerations, Lord, in the consideration under God.

Amen.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

### CHAPTER 8:  
JUST OPEN A VEIN

There's nothing to writing.  
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. (Red Smith)

It was the hardest job of my life, being a newspaper reporter. I knew right from the start that I was in over my head. I assumed it would get a lot easier over time. It didn't.

Even on my very last story on my very last day as an environmental reporter in the spring of 1989, I struggled. It was supposed to be a brief story about the slow recovery of bald eagles around the Great Lakes due to toxic pollution in the water and fish. I just sat there, staring at my notes and into my "tube," as we called computer monitors. I said to my reflection, What the fuck? This shouldn't still be so hard after doing it for more than three years.

My job at Booth Newspapers was to find and cover environmental news, then compose coherent stories from a jumble of information and interview notes; writing in no more than 500 words (that's about two double-spaced typed pages), no matter now complicated the issue; and doing it under looming late-afternoon deadlines. I couldn't have survived without understanding editors. I got the stories, and they helped me quickly turn them into readable newspaper articles.

I wrote nearly 300 environmental stories. They were printed in Booth's eight daily newspapers around Michigan (Ann Arbor, Bay City, Flint, Grand Rapids, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Muskegon, and Saginaw), with a combined circulation of 600,000. I worked at the chain's Lansing Bureau, where a staff of around ten churned out a daily stream of copy about state news.

My stories occasionally appeared on front pages, and were sometimes distributed more widely when Booth's parent company, Newhouse News, picked up my articles for their newspapers throughout the U.S.

I got hired for this amazing job because Booth's president, Werner Veit, who was active in The Nature Conservancy, decided that Booth needed a full-time environmental reporter to give nature issues more coverage.

To this day, I'm amazed that Booth's Lansing Bureau Chief, Ed Petykiewicz, hired me for his boss's pet project. I had no real journalism background. What I did have, though, was an impeccable network of connections enabling me to cover Booth's statewide environmental beat.

For the prior decade I had been environmental gadfly for Michigan's powerful conservation group, MUCC, the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (chapter seven). Thanks to years of building professional friendships with staff who ran Michigan's and the Great Lakes region's natural resource management and environmental programs, people talked freely to me -- on and off the record. In that pre-9-11 era, I had unfettered access to wander the cubicle-packed warrens of state agencies and legislative offices and barge in on staff if I had a question or needed information.

Being a reporter further enhanced my access to public officials, who nearly always were quick to return phone calls. Most people, especially politicians, like to talk, and especially to a reporter who might put their golden words with their name in the newspaper for all the world to see.

I often interviewed people over the phone since I could type nearly fast enough to keep up verbatim. Even more fun was being face-to-face with big-shot politicians at press conferences and in private interviews, being one of those reporters who gets to ask the uncomfortable questions. "Senator Blowhard, have campaign contributions of $X from the beer and wine industry influenced your opposition to legislation that would require deposits on wine cooler bottles?" for example.

In my new role with Booth, no longer was I a lobbyist, but now a supposedly neutral reporter. Just the facts, Ma'am.

That's nonsense, of course, and Booth made no such claim. There's a difference between being neutral and being honest. After all, what good is a reporter who is neutral on a story about political corruption or flagrant pollution? When things are truly wrong, how can a reporter pretend otherwise?

Although we always tried our best to find and tell the truth, I likened it to peeling an onion -- there always seemed to be one more layer to reach its core.

Truth. That's a laugh. At best a close approximation, you hope. Like a blind pig stumbling onto an acorn, from time to time you actually find words to coincide with truth. Beauty. There's the rub. What good is truth if it doesn't come in a beautiful package? There is an essence of beauty in the quality of truth. Find the truth and you often have found the fabric to describe it. Find the design of the fabric and you may have found the truth. Find the beauty that makes the design... Beauty. It is tied to the core of writing -- at least of good writing. (Journal - Jan. 28, 1987)

Okay, I probably was stoned when I wrote that, but still... A more sober assessment:

You hold out your thumb, eyeball the world, and proclaim "this is truth" for the entire world to read. Doing that every day in the face of absolute uncertainty, professional manipulators of information, ruthless deadlines, and space limitations is a risky business. One thing that makes it bearable, however, is that no matter what, your sweat and agony of today is wrapping dead fish and lining bird cages tomorrow. (Letter to a friend - Jan. 8, 1988)

Booth's editors made sure my stories were honest, even while letting my writing have a point of view, starting from the self-evident assumption that nature, environmental protection, and competently administered conservation programs are good things. The inevitable shortcomings of government agencies and bureaucrats, however, made for juicy stories.

### Fake Fred, Secret Salaries, and Rat-tailed Maggots

"Fake Fred" was my best scoop. Through an insider tip, I learned that "Fred Johnson" was an imaginary bureaucrat dreamed up by some state officials in the Department of Natural Resources as the "person" in their agency's Detroit-area field office to whom they would refer pollution complaints, any time they deemed a report too unimportant to deal with immediately.

Although the ploy hadn't yet caused serious environmental problems, my newspaper exposé touched a public nerve, nonetheless. Fake Fred epitomized readers' worst suspicions about government bungling. My stories prompted crabby newspaper editorials (e.g., "DNR's Fred Johnson scam anything but funny") and wonderful political cartoons by Booth's resident cynic, Gary Packingham.

Publishing stories can have consequences, which, after all, is one of the points of writing them. Fake Fred's inventor in the DNR was suspended for two weeks without pay. Several months later as the agency concluded its internal investigation, the supervisor of Fake Fred's field office abruptly resigned.

I was a bit embarrassed by the to-do over my reporting on Fake Fred. Compared to real, on-going pollution, it seemed somewhat an over-reaction to a stupid bureaucratic stunt. On the other hand, I suspect the Fake Fred incident was symptomatic of bigger problems with the DNR's anti-pollution program.

Investigative reporting taught me this: no matter how bad things look, they are always worse. I saw it proven time and again in my own and my colleagues' reporting on political corruption or bureaucratic incompetence. At staff meetings, we would agonize over whether sources of critical information for a story could be trusted, or whether the facts justified a story that could destroy someone's reputation or career.

However, once the decision to publish was made and the story became public, invariably, calls from readers would come in saying some version of: "You think that is bad. Let me tell you about...", and we would be relieved that not only was the muck-raking accurate, the full story was even worse. It lessened my guilty feelings about messing up people's days, or sometimes their lives.

Major political or personnel changes often are driven by seemingly insignificant events -- the "last nail in the coffin," as it were.

When I started as a reporter, the head of Michigan's DNR, Ron Skoog, had been losing favor among conservationists for his mediocre performance. Early in 1986, I wrote an exposé that started, "The DNR has knowingly violated state and federal laws by storing toxic wastes for years in at least eight unsecured locations across Michigan."

The DNR's toxic waste storage snafu was something that critics could point to as tangible evidence of Director Skoog's poor performance. The governor's environmental advisor, for example, responded to my story: "It indicates continuing management problems in the DNR that must be resolved." The governor resolved it by forcing Skoog to quit.

My stories weren't the sole reason Skoog resigned, but I did get a nice congratulatory letter from the governor's office after I won a journalism award:

Your articles not only uncovered an embarrassing oversight in state government, but as you know, played a critical role in triggering leadership changes at the DNR. Those changes have been dramatically for the better; it's good to know that sound journalism can have such an effect on public policy.

In such sad cases, people argue about whether "Snafu A" or "Screw-Up B" was justification to fire someone. In reality, though, such incidents often are indicative of underlying problems that are tough to document. I'm sure Ron Skoog felt he was unfairly branded by my headlines (e.g., "DNR waste storage violates law"). Regardless, I was glad my stories helped boot him. Good riddance, was my conclusion.

As for the DNR's illegal toxic waste storage, a special appropriation of $700,000 was approved to clean up the problems, "an initiative of ours that arises directly from your stories," the governor's staff told me. Moreover, the DNR was fined $9,500 by the U.S. EPA. Although a small amount, such a fine against a state agency was unprecedented.

No one missed Skoog, and the next DNR director (David Hales) was way better.

* * *

My overnight conversion from environmental advocate at MUCC to environmental reporter at Booth Newspapers left some skeptical. None were more churlish than fellow (non-Booth) reporters.

Early in my stumbling months of learning to write usable newspaper stories, Booth sent me to a several days-long newspaper writers training session near St. Louis. I was thrown into classes of mostly young reporters, all with far more training and experience than me. And, let me add, way more self-righteousness.

During a class discussing ethical conduct of reporters and situations of potential conflict of interest, I volunteered the tale of my own abrupt change from environmental lobbyist to reporter. That brought a few murmurs of disapproval. To egg them on, I told them about a story I had written recently.

Throughout the decade that I worked for MUCC and its boss, Tom Washington, his salary had been a closely-kept secret. Early in my job at Booth, while brainstorming about potential stories, I had mentioned this to my editor. Ed immediately smelled a story, since he knew that salaries of top staff of non-profit organizations, such as MUCC, are included in publicly-available, annual reports to the IRS. I wasted no time.

In a story I wrote about Michigan environmental groups' declining political clout, I included the salaries of Tom ($60,000) and heads of other environmental non-profits. I concluded with a quote from a legislator, whose dislike for Tom was well-known: "He has an attitude problem. I've had representatives tell me that when Tom Washington calls, they vote the opposite way."

Tom was offended by my story, but it proved to everyone that my loyalty now was to reporting, not to MUCC. He got over it, although his office manager sent a letter-to-the-editor complaining:

It is disheartening when [Wayne Schmidt] seeks contentment in writing such a biased story for publication.

As I finished telling all this to my St. Louis journalism training class, my colleagues were aghast and turned on me like a den of vipers. I just smiled, and when I immodestly told them I was the very best person to fulfill the 25-cent contract with the reader on that particular story, the snakes went wild. H-s-sss!

My "25-cent contract" reference was from our prior class, where an old-time journalist, Clark something-or-other, had made each of us promise that when we got back to work we would tape a quarter to our tube. "That quarter is your contract with your reader," he told us. (Daily newspapers cost just a quarter then.)

"Write for your momma," Clark had exhorted us. "Write for the guy in the pick-up and the woman in the Cadillac. Write for the fourth-grader, the Harvard graduate, and everyone in between. You should want everything you write to be read by everyone who paid a quarter for your paper."

Our reporting goal, he said (repeating a well-worn journalism mantra), was to write "Hey, Martha!" stories. That's where a husband is quietly sipping coffee and reading his morning paper, but suddenly stops and exclaims to his wife, "Hey, Martha, get a load of this...," as he reads your story aloud.

I really didn't give a shit what my sanctimonious colleagues in St. Louis thought of my reporting, so long as my boss was happy with my work. And he was.

Editor Ed took particular delight, it seemed to me, in poking Consumers Power Company, a big utility with headquarters in Ed's hometown of Jackson, served by Booth's Jackson Citizen-Patriot newspaper. I poked Consumers good and often with my stories about the utility's fish-killing power plant on Lake Michigan. Consumers' PR guy, Paul Knopick, complained constantly to Ed, and to me, about my bias.

Actually, I could see his point. The whole fracas about their power plant killing all those fish had been instigated by me while at MUCC six years earlier. Now, they were being sued by the state for more than $150 million in damages. You can understand that when I wrote a story about the imbroglio, they would question how objective I could possibly be.

As if my adversarial history with the utility giant wasn't enough, one other thing stuck in their corporate craw: Consumers Power Company had helped pay for my graduate school studies at Michigan State. Some return they got from that investment.

When I left Booth in 1989 to go become a land developer in the Southwest, I got a tongue-in-cheek letter "from your dear friends at Consumers Power Company":

We wish you the best of luck in your new assignment, raping and pillaging the virgin Arizona desert. We hope you find it equal to the fun of being a newspaper reporter, raping and pillaging poor PR guys just trying to make an honest buck here in the lower middle of a huge corporation. (In fact, we never did figure out if you actually were a newspaper reporter or simply on loan from the MUCC. But I'm not going to quibble here at your retirement.) We'll miss you. Sure we will.

P.S. As a token of our esteem and affection, you will receive a very tightly wrapped package. Please ignore the resemblance to a dead fish and take it with you to Arizona!

(The tale of my long-running entanglement with this issue is included in Life with Big Green: A Memoir, my second ebook.)

I did other investigative stories, such as combing through microfilm records of political contributions to link lousy environmental voting records of state politicians to their corporate donors. I went on a Canadian government-organized trip through Ontario and Quebec to see the impact of acid rain, and I wrote:

The Beauce, Quebec -- In the quiet of his dying forest, Jean-Marie Laliberte pulled a slab of rotten bark from the sugar maple tree that just three years ago was a prized syrup producer. "Look! Look at that!" demanded the burly, mustached French-Canadian. "I would like to show that to Mr. Reagan as a friend, and to all the ones that want proof that something is happening."

Canadian scientists contend that Laliberte's dying trees -- like millions of maples and thousands of lakes throughout eastern Canada -- are in large measure victims of acid rain caused by U.S. pollution.

I also pointed my finger at Canada's own pollution, traveling north to write a story about "one of the foulest spots on the Great Lakes," a Canadian, Kleenex-making pulp mill on the rugged northern coast of Lake Superior:

...Wastes from a pulp mill here in Terrace Bay, 300 miles northwest of Sault Ste. Marie, are so toxic that only rat-tailed maggots can live in the stream that carries the discharge 13 miles to Lake Superior. The maggots survive the deadly brew of more than 100 chemicals and tons of wood residue by extending breathing tubes above the water, like tiny snorkels.

Ed once told me that my rat-tailed maggots line was his favorite lede (the opening paragraph of an article) of anything I ever wrote. I think he liked that it was inflammatory by simply using facts. Who can object to facts?

### The Nature of Michigan

Osage County, Okla. -- If you squint into the reddish twilight that falls upon the Osage Hills of northern Oklahoma, you can almost see shadows of countless buffalo flowing over unfenced America.

This was my own favorite lede, from my story about a proposed new tallgrass prairie national park in Oklahoma. Like all my stories, I had struggled to find the right words, staring that winter afternoon out my motel window at the Oklahoma sunset. With deadline looming, my imagination took over and I pictured the ancient buffalo wallows still evident amid the prairie grasses I had just traversed. At that point, the story almost wrote itself, and I garnered praise from my boss.

This nature story had but tenuous connection to Michigan, although a bit of native prairie with bison once existed in the state's southwest corner. Nevertheless, my feature got good placement because I brought back exceptional photos of wildflowers and butterflies taken by a local cowboy and self-made prairie expert.

My nature writing opportunity of a lifetime came in an assignment to write "The Nature of Michigan." Michigan's 150th birthday was in September 1987 and Booth's big boss (the same guy who had created my environmental reporter job) wanted to do something special for the occasion. Booth would print a 24-page tabloid newspaper insert that would celebrate the best, pristine nature oases in Michigan.

Working with staff scientists at The Nature Conservancy, I picked several dozen nature areas throughout Michigan that most resembled pre-rapacious European settlement. I visited many of them, accompanied by local naturalist-experts. To insure against my limited writing experience, Booth gave me a tested partner, Susan Harrison, a columnist from Booth's Muskegon paper, who was a fine writer. We worked it out.

Our lede read:

At the top of Michigan, a rugged forest trail leads to an unspoiled beach on the world's greatest lake. The air cools quickly near the water. Sounds of singing birds and buzzing insects give way to the clatter of waves washing over cobbles.

Something marvelous happens here along Lake Superior on the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula where land meets lake to create Horseshoe Harbor. One look, and vintage Michigan appears: untouched, undeveloped, undiscovered even among its own people. This is what Michigan looked like 150 years ago.

The assignment allowed me to visit some wild areas I had always wanted to see, such as Sylvania Recreation Area \-- 34 square miles of publicly-owned wilderness in Michigan's western Upper Peninsula. I wrote:

Imagine eight bald eagles soaring high on the winds, eyeing the crystalline waters of Loon Lake for fish. Suddenly one eagle tucks his wings and plummets toward his mate flying below. As he slows just before impact, she twirls upside-down to meet him. Frozen for an instant in mid-air, they clasp talons. Then together they spin in a timeless fall toward earth.

At the last moment, the great birds break their aerial foreplay, spread their wings and sweep to the heights again. Their mating bond has been strengthened; and the future of Michigan's eagles is slightly more secure.

At my insistence, we also highlighted pockets of urban wildness, including a 72-acre virgin woodland that I knew well, along the stinking, polluted Rogue River in suburban Detroit, part of a grand estate once owned by Henry Ford, "where 400-year-old trees live and die at their own pace."

"The Nature of Michigan: Then ... Now ... Forever" was a privilege to write and a thing of beauty, full of gorgeous photos and maps. It was inserted, not just in Booth's newspapers, but in 41 papers going to 2.5 million households across Michigan. Its advertising revenue of $136,309.72 was given to the Nature Conservancy to protect special natural areas.

### My Writing Life

My morning with presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, March 12, 1988, made clear my journalistic limits. During the political campaign of the day, our bureau's reporting staff was stretched thin one weekend. No one was left on a Saturday to cover Jackson's speech in East Lansing. I got tapped.

So what, that all I had ever covered was environmental stuff? How hard could it be? Go listen to a speech, takes some notes, interview a couple of politicians.

Ha!

In my defense, that Saturday I was sick as a dog, all plugged up, and couldn't think straight.

Jackson gave his speech, full of the usual political falderal, with nothing newsworthy. I kept thinking, this is the same old shit that everyone's heard before. It was the kind of repetitive campaign event that hundreds of regular reporters cover regularly.

After his canned speech, Jackson held an informal Q&A backstage with us reporters. In my sinus-induced haze, I was mesmerized. There, just a few feet away, was the golden-tongued Jackson, free-styling. I listened to his words rise and fall like jazz, accented by now-forgotten phrases of his unique eloquence. It was beautiful.

Then he was gone, and I headed downtown to our newsroom. One problem, though, and it was a big one. My notebook was virtually blank. All those lovely words of Jackson had captured my heart but not my pen. Trying to remember what he had said was impossible in my fog.

There were, in fact, legitimate reasons to cover Jackson's commencement address at Michigan State University, I realized later. Although Jackson had yet to officially declare his candidacy, MSU had never allowed political candidates to give commencement addresses and some of the university trustees expressed outrage. In retrospect, it wasn't just silliness; Jackson became a serious candidate and even won Michigan's Democratic presidential primary.

That chilly spring day in Lansing, however, all political significance of the moment was lost on me. I just wanted to go to bed.

David Waymire, a legendary reporter whom I worked alongside at Booth, was on duty that Saturday in the newsroom. When I had been at MUCC, Dave had covered environmental news for Booth, so became a mentor when I took over that beat. Over the course of my career, I met and worked with hundreds of news people. Dave was one of the greatest reporters I ever knew.

His expertise was all things Michigan and political; he knew it well. (And still does, I'm sure, in his current political consulting role in Lansing.) Dave was among Booth staff regularly tapped for the local PBS news analysis show.

His early training had been running a small-town newspaper, the kind of one-man show where he covered the full range of local news, wrote countless stories on the fly, and managed to routinely fill a weekly newspaper with his copy. He could cover an assignment like Jackson's speech with his eyes closed, his hands tied, and one ear plugged.

Not me. I had the worst case of writer's block imaginable. Minutes stretched into an hour as I suffered and sweated at my keyboard, trying to find words -- any words -- to fill up a wee news hole about Jackson's speech.

Meanwhile, Dave was writing his own story and editing copy coming in remotely from other Booth reporters. He had no time or sympathy for my journalistic catatonia. "Schmidt, just write the goddamned story," he fumed.

In the end, however, Dave had no choice but to soften and help me invent a couple of paragraphs of pabulum about Jackson's speech, gave it some generic relevance for Michigan, and I made an ignominious retreat to home and bed. That was the last time anyone at Booth sent me to cover non-environmental news.

* * *

Notwithstanding such limitations in my writing repertoire, my stories kept getting good coverage among the eight Booth newspapers, whose editors knew that their boss liked to see environmental stories in his papers. Plus, I had gotten pretty good at my job.

I raked in awards for my reporting from environmental groups. Most rewarding was winning the Ben East Prize, a journalism award given by MUCC (for my stories about the DNR's toxic waste storage debacle and Director Skoog's poor record). The award had been invented by MUCC's magazine editor, Ken Lowe, who had overseen my writing for Michigan Out-of-Doors.

Writer Ben East, name source of MUCC's award, had been the dean of hunt-em-up, shoot-em-up stories in outdoor magazines when I was a kid. I grew up reading them all. I fantasized about my name being on a story in Field & Stream or Outdoor Life magazines.

When I was a high school senior, Deacon Tally from our church took me on a mule deer hunting trip to Wyoming. For a week, four of us with two guides hunted from horseback, riding out of a tent-camp high in the mountains. Long story, short, I shot a genuine trophy-sized mule deer.

Tally got the idea that I should write an article for Outdoor Life about our adventure and how I shot this huge buck. He was a neighbor and friends with Ben East, who then was an editor at Outdoor Life, so Tally was certain I could get published. Flattered by the opportunity, I wrote my story.

Tally sent it to Ben, and Ben returned it with a little hand-written note at the top of the first page: "He writes well for a boy of his age, but it's not something that Outdoor Life could use." He added something to the effect that a revision wouldn't help because the story, itself, wasn't all that interesting. I was crushed.

I should have listened to my high school English teacher, Gene Dolby, who had read my manuscript. He tried to tell me it was crap, but I didn't listen. Mr. Dolby was a young, hot-shot teacher fresh out of college and stuck working in our mediocre high school. He dripped disdain at his students' pathetic lack of interest in English and literature, yet his high standards inspired me to work hard on my writing. (At some point, Gene may have relaxed his expectations, however, as he ended up teaching at that same school for his entire career. I know that because recently, we became Facebook friends. Go figure.)

Though crushed by Ben East's rejection, I didn't stop writing. If you're a musician, you make music. If you're a painter, you paint. An athlete, you work out. You don't find excuses for not doing it. You just do it, because you have to do it, and most of the time you actually want to do it. I write.

I've always loved words and writing. In high school, having consumed the Hardy Boys and James Bond series, I discovered the real deal with stories by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and D.H. Lawrence. I even toyed with the idea of a college major in literature.

On the adjunct faculty at Grand Valley State Colleges for a few years, I taught classes in how to write environmental reports. At the time, environmental impact statements were vogue and jobs as environmental consultants required writing skills. With few exceptions, my students were terrible, unsalvageable writers. Editing their slop was painful, but it made me feel like a writing genius.

During my decade at MUCC, I wrote articles for its monthly magazine, Michigan Out-of-Doors, which went to 100,000 members and was read by politicians and people who worked in natural resource management jobs in Michigan. The magazine's content was put together nearly single-handed by its editor, Ken Lowe.

I wrote stories about various environmental travesties, about diminishing numbers of canvasback ducks, about billboard blight. I was a published writer! I loved it. Fulfilling my young dream, I even got a story published in Outdoor Life (about threats to the Great Lakes).

My writing suffered, however, for lack of good editing. Once we agreed on a story for Michigan Out-of-Doors, Ken would print whatever I wrote. He had come to MUCC from being editor of a daily newspaper in northern Michigan, so he certainly knew how to edit. It's just that his job of filling up an entire magazine every month, only him and an art director, left no time for finesse editing.

* * *

During my years at MUCC, no matter how early I got to work, Ken would already be at his desk, hunched over his electric typewriter, pounding out copy for the next monthly edition of his beloved Michigan Out-of-Doors magazine.

He would already have jogged over his exactly one-mile neighborhood route. Ken worked hard, played hard, and drank hard, but never any of those two at the same time. At MUCC's staff-only social events, Ken would be at his cantankerous best, bellowing his disgust with "Reptiles" (Republicans) and other idiots in Congress and the Michigan Legislature. Being from Michigan's often politically-wacky U.P. (Upper Peninsula), Ken had plenty of buffoons to harpoon with his barbs.

Most hated by Ken, perhaps, was state Senator Joe Mack, who actually was a Democrat, albeit a pre-Tea Party hyper-conservative one. Mack hated environmentalists, constantly bashing wilderness advocates as backpackers who came to his U.P. "with $5 and a pair of underwear and don't change either for a week." But I digress...

MUCC's boss, Tom Washington, whose conservative opinions of all things political except conservation and gun control were antithetical to Ken, relished baiting his liberal apotheosis. Policies of the city of East Lansing were a scornful target for Tom, who lived in a subdivision on the far edge of the town. When the city council funded the display of outdoor sculptures along the city's main drag, Tom roundly belittled the art as "junk," bloviating to Ken and anyone else within earshot.

This may have been the time that Ken gave Tom his infamous nickname. Its provenance came from state legislator Frank Wierzbicki, and arch-foe of state programs that supported arts, such as the East Lansing display of "junk."

During one pre-dinner drinking hour, in the face of Tom's vociferous agreement with Wierzbicki's attacks on art, red-flushed Ken responded, "Listen, Washbicki...", and from thence, "Washbicki" fit Tom like a designer glove. Give Washbicki this, though: most of East Lansing's outdoor sculptures really were junk.

Ken had taken up bird watching, and he filled his free time with birding travels far and wide. He won a bet with me and posted his prize on his office wall -- a one-dollar bill on which I wrote: "Way to go! 200 birds for the year."

Ken loved retreating to his adopted homeland \-- the U.P. -- for fall grouse hunting with his English setters. Since he loved the U.P. so much, I never understood what had driven him to live "Down Below" in urbanized Lower Michigan, until recently.

Ken had been editor of The Mining Journal, the daily newspaper of Marquette, which is the U.P.'s biggest city. In 1972, his boss and publisher wrote an editorial supporting South Africa's apartheid government. Ken refused to run it and was fired. I don't recall him ever mentioning his principled career sacrifice. But that would have been typical. You always sensed that behind Ken's sly smile, he knew more than he felt he needed to say out loud.

In his writing at MUCC, however, Ken was plainspoken and unflinching, helping inform and shape an emerging environmental movement in Michigan. His career earned him a place in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame and the Michigan Conservation Hall of Fame.

Ken's writing hero was Ernest Hemingway, who also loved the U.P., hunting, guns, dogs, and booze, and who, like Ken, had a dark, sometimes belligerent side. Ken mentioned to me more than once that he admired Hemingway's choice in the manner of his death by suicide.

More than a decade before his own death, Ken developed an irregular heartbeat, and, as a result, he stopped his daily one-mile jog. It seemed to me that he went downhill from there. His mood was more often sour and grouchy. He brushed aside my encouragement to get a second medical opinion so he might jog again.

The cause of his death was not immediately known.

That's how my outdoor writer-friend at Booth, Bob Gwizdz, reported Ken's passing. It was true enough, for how can anyone ever know what causes a man to end his own life?

Ken's son found him dead in his car early one morning in 1996, a few blocks down the street from their suburban home. Like Hemingway, Ken had shot himself. I heard the gory details from a friend. It cast a grim, sad shadow on Ken's remarkable, 75-year life and career.

At Ken's memorial service, a Dylan Thomas poem was enclosed with the little handout of Ken's vitals:

Do not go gentle into that good night,  
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;  
Rage, rage against the dying of the night...

I never understood why Ken didn't fight harder, but maybe he was fighting harder than I could know.

His widow, Marie, displayed in the reception room the usual mementos of a life ended -- pictures and the like. What really struck me, however, was the pile of Ken's birding notebooks, list after list recording daily details of Ken's years of chasing birds, lifeless relics of countless moments of sheer ecstasy he found in nature. I thought, This is what it comes to. Your life's passion gets a few glances at your funeral, then thrown into a box that no one knows quite what to do with.

* * *

My extensive writing for Ken and Michigan Out-of-Doors magazine gave me confidence that I could handle the job of writing for Booth Newspapers in 1985. I realized that it would be trial-by-fire to learn the journalism craft, but those were the days when I thought I could do most anything I set my mind to.

Plus, I really believed that I could write pretty well. As it turned out, I had greatly exaggerated my marginal talent.

Ed, my first editor at Booth, always claimed he never regretted hiring me because it taught him the payoff of taking chances. I'm sure that's mostly true, but there had to have been for him moments of sheer exasperation with my journalism inexperience. Yet, he had so much confidence in his own skills, smarts, and experience that my writing shortcomings didn't seem to faze him. Nor did predictable charges of bias in my reporting. In fact, he loved nothing more than making people uncomfortable with good reporting.

That was Ed's trademark -- good reporting. I quickly learned how hard you had to work to meet his professional standards. I saw, firsthand, journalism at its finest. Working with a small group of exceptionally talented reporters and editors, I learned the lengths to which good journalists go to ensure their stories are accurate and fair.

As a result, I've no patience with moronic critics of the "lame-stream media." I've seen print reporting from the inside, and I've never seen anywhere else such high standards for quality, ethics, and professionalism. (As for television news reporting, that's another matter.)

I don't know about other reporters, but I can tell you that, for me, seeing my name in print was a special thrill. You make up this story and type it out and the next day, there it is on front steps and newsstands all over state.

Early in my apprenticeship, my stories needed wholesale rewriting, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable as my own words, but always to my stories' betterment. Abashed, I once asked Ed why his name shouldn't get added as a byline on my story that he rewrote. "Don't you miss it, seeing your name on stories?" I asked of his invisible-handed editor role.

He gave me his sideways, bemused smile, and explained that he didn't miss it at all. "I've had my share of stories. What I get most satisfaction from now is watching and helping younger writers become successful."

I came to understand what he meant. He had working for him a stable of phenomenal reporters. I worked at Booth's Lansing Bureau at perhaps the apex of what newspaper writing once was all about -- constant probing and investigations, courageous and honest reporting, and excellent writing.

When Ed was promoted to editor of Booth's Ann Arbor News in 1988, some of the fun went out of my job. Our new bureau chief, Larry McDermott, was more distant, working more from a managerial rather than hands-on editorial position, and refused to work post-five o'clock hours -- at least not in the office. Initially, that change created some tension in our newsroom. Yet, it was tough for anyone to complain; Booth had just bought a downtown house and completely remodeled it into one of the plushest and most efficient newsrooms anywhere. We had it made.

Besides, Larry was an excellent newspaper man, just with a different style than Ed. For me, Larry was a fine boss, always supportive, but he didn't personally edit my stories.

That challenge fell primarily to our in-house editor, Sharon Emery. Whatever Ed's virtues, patience hadn't been one. Sharon, on the other hand, had it. Good thing for me.

As I would bristle against Booth's unbendable 500-word limit on daily stories, Sharon would calmly work with me to make cuts. She would find the right two words when I had needed ten and fix bad grammar and confusing structure. To this day, whenever I write, invisible Editor Sharon often peers over my shoulder, deleting adjectives and adverbs, making fun of corny sentences, cutting cutting cutting, but also appreciating flashes of good writing.

Heading into my fourth year as a reporter, I realized that the stories I really had wanted to tell were behind me, and I was staring at another cycle of writing many of the same routine stories: annual environmental budgets and rankings of the worst pollution spots, for example.

I started looking for a change, even once talking semi-seriously with a lobbyist for the Michigan Chemical Council about hiring me. My god, was I that desperate?!

Actually, I was that desperate, but it wasn't Booth Newspapers' fault. I still loved my work, all things considered. At the time, however, I was married to a lunatic who tried her utmost to make my life a living hell (chapter nine). I couldn't have been more primed for change.

That's when out of the blue an old friend in Arizona called me and asked if I would be interested in moving to Lake Havasu City to help run his growing land development company that was building condos and subdivisions in the desert. Within one day I had agreed and bailed out of my job, my Great Lakes cause, my house in Lansing, and my miserable marriage.

Something in the air, I said yesterday. So today, Friday the 13th, I'm ready to give it up and move on to Arizona. Strange. Everything at work is going so well. It's fun, rewarding, challenging, promising, and I like the people I'm working with. Yet I'm going to give it up and head for the desert to help build subdivisions. Me, an environmentalist. Life is full of surprises. But here it is, and I know when that strange pulse is drawing me on to something new. The time is right. (Journal - Jan. 13, 1989)

On that painful very last story on my very last day as a reporter, which I mentioned at the start of this chapter, I finally cobbled together my piece about the plight of bald eagles in the Great Lakes. When I hit "Send" and walked out, my biggest emotion was relief at being rid of the burden of reporting for a living. No longer did I have to worry every morning when checking my competition in the Lansing and Detroit newspapers, dreading to find an environmental story I had missed. No longer did I have to know everything environmental before it even happened.

The fake press release from Booth, upon my resignation, correctly concluded:

Schmidt has never been happy actually knowing what he is doing. So now he is heading off (as vice president in charge of turning desert sand into gold) to do what he does best: something he knows absolutely nothing about.

Before I left Michigan, friends gave me a going-away party. Everyone signed a cartoon that Gary Packingham from Booth had created. Looking at it now (framed but stowed away in the attic), I had forgotten how many friends from my years of environmental advocacy that I'd earned. That was a treasure, under-appreciated by me at the time, impossible to ever replicate. They were friends and professional colleagues rooted in a place -- Michigan and the Great Lakes. After I abandoned that, with few exceptions, there would only be friends of the road -- here today, gone tomorrow.

How different would my life have been, had I stayed in Michigan. The state was a little like Cheers! for me, where not everyone, but a whole lot of people, knew my name. What would it have been like to have spent my whole working lifetime building upon that fiercely-earned reputation as an environmental advocate?

* * *

Some years ago, following my retirement and move to Oregon, I got a note inviting me to a reunion dinner with Ed's former Lansing Bureau team. I flew back to Michigan, and we all met at a restaurant near Ann Arbor.

Much of the talk that night was of the changing, shrinking nature of the newspaper business. I felt lucky to have bailed from journalism when I did. Nevertheless, my high opinions of our now-dispersed-team's talents were affirmed, and it was a lovely evening.

In the sober morning, I drove to Ann Arbor to visit former environmentalist associates, and to get a tour from Ed, who now was publisher at the Ann Arbor News. Ed had transformed a formerly oppressive, three-floor office building and its intimidating work environment into a much softer and elegant place of beauty -- from the new presses to the most inviting offices and work spaces. I could appreciate the changes since I remembered well my nervousness during visits as a green reporter to this great, intimidating newspaper. Ed's new architectural pride and joy, and his prodigious journalistic talents, however, were for naught.

The Internet had happened, and the newspaper business was changing forever. Just as Ed's Ann Arbor News had reached the pinnacle of possibilities, it ended. Two years after my Ann Arbor visit, the newspaper's owner, the Newhouse family, closed the paper. After 174 years, it was over, except for a minor online presence. It was the first (but far from the last) time the sole daily newspaper in a large U.S. city shut down.

Ed and I now watch each other's retirements unfold on Facebook. He plays golf on exotic links and beams with his daughter's accomplishments. I fish and pose with grandkids. On Ed's card one Christmas, he penned, "I think you & I are the happiest retired men in the USA..." That made me even happier.

* * *

A postscript: I consider this chapter a dangerous undertaking, writing without an editor about the people who taught me writing and who may read what I wrote about them. After all, these are highly-trained, professional truth tellers. They remember things accurately. They write and/or edit real good; reading my stories, any errant dangling participles, redundancies, lousy-punctuation, mispelings, or cheap mixed metaphors will jump right off the page and into their frying pans.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

### CHAPTER 9:  
SEASON OF THE WITCH

Oh no, must be the season of the witch. (Donovan)

The first time I laid eyes on Toni, I said to myself, that's the kind of woman I would like to have. She cut a glamorous figure -- tall and slender, long auburn hair, a gold crescent in her pierced nose.

I saw them, Toni and her husband, Josh, the moment they entered the back of the room, arriving late and making their way to a center seat in the small auditorium. I was at the podium leading a meeting of environmentalists in Windsor, Ontario (chapter seven). It was obvious that Toni was not your typical dowdy, Earth Mother environmentalist.

It was the fall of 1982. Josh, a cherry farmer from Traverse City, Michigan, was one of 60 people I had picked for an earlier retreat that I had organized to start a new Great Lakes environmental organization. The Windsor meeting was to get everyone to agree on operating by -laws and officially launch what became Great Lakes United.

Toni and I crossed paths again that winter at a party at Studio 54 in New York City. It was the "Save the River Ball," a fund raiser for an environmental group that I worked with in upstate New York. The event was everything I hated: dancing, crowds, loud music, strobe lights, expensive booze. Yet there I was, stumbling around the edge of the renowned dance floor trying to find someone I recognized and not look as lost as I felt.

"Come on, Wayne. Dance with me," Toni said, pulling me toward the music.

Black slinky dress. Great makeup. Great hair. Come-fuck-me smile. Toni at the top of her game. We moved through a couple of slower songs. We drank the expensive booze. Under a giant disco ball, I sweated to not look a fool but was willing to suffer to be seduced by this exotic woman.

We went our separate ways, but over the next year, Toni called me from time to time to talk about Great Lakes environmental politics and gossip about the people involved. One day, she informed me she was leaving Josh. Later, just before Christmas, she called from Traverse City and asked if I was "ready for something really different."

"Sure," I said, and click, the phone went dead. I paced the dining room of my Lansing home, looking out at the snow, pondering my future for the thirty seconds it took her to call back. The phone rang, and my life changed forever. She invited herself and her "green window pane" LSD down for a visit in early January.

In the build-up to the weekend, Toni told me on the phone: "Save yourself for me. Get plenty of sleep."

She was the perfect house guest. We fucked like rabbits, took acid, and fucked some more. She was totally into me.

During a lull in our mating and tripping, I took her to visit the art museum at Michigan State University. Toni said she didn't want to wash up before going out because she loved the earthy smell of our sex on her. We ran into Irv Taran, an artist and professor from whom I had taken an art class, years earlier. I can't remember a thing we talked about, just Irv's look as he eyed Toni. Pheromones were in the air; Irv unselfconsciously rubbed his crotch at one point.

I was captivated with Toni -- intellectually, sexually, and emotionally -- this chain-smoking, Diet Coke-guzzling, self-described "weirdo bé-bé." It felt good not to be lonely. I was Toni's "soul mate" for life, she told me. At night, we slept curled together like cats. "Mates," she crooned, while arousing me endlessly.

Toni came into my life with a splash, as if to say: "Here I am, motherfucker, are you ready for this? Or are you too wimpy to handle someone who knows what she wants, which right now includes you?" Hell, that was my kind of attitude. A strong-minded, smart, sexy woman.

One month later, thoroughly bewitched, I declared myself hopelessly in love with her. She was the most remarkable and beautiful woman I'd ever been close to. I believed that she loved me absolutely. I had no doubt that we would last forever.

### Warning Signs

"In a freefall, you always hit the ground." -- Ignored advice from friend, Ben.

I should have known better. It's not like I didn't get warning signs. For starters, Toni had been married and unmarried a lot. Josh had been husband number five.

Just one week after my first weekend with his ex-wife, Josh was in Lansing and came by to watch the Super Bowl. At the time, I thought Toni and I were putting something over on him, but now I figure he knew all about our steamy affair. I'll bet he was thinking, You poor sap!

During the first month that I was seeing Toni, she showed me a thirteen-page list of her faults that Josh had written. Instead of reading it carefully, love-blinded fool that I was, I ceremoniously burned the list in the snow against the trunk of a maple tree in her backyard and pissed on the ashes. It was Valentine's Day, 1984.

Toni lived in Traverse City, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from my home in Lansing. She had a part-time job doing marquetry in a small shop and shared a rental house with her two teenage boys, Eric and Tom, a collie, and a pitiful poet. "Mr. Morose," as she called him behind his back, would moon about, obviously horny for Toni, getting in return nothing but insults. She complained to me how his mere presence made her feel violated: "Of course he'd never actually lay a finger on me because he knows I'd tear him apart," she wrote to me in one of her letters between our visits.

Toni was a decent artist and I was a sucker for artsy babes. She showed me some beautiful batik cloth panels she had dyed. Like most of her art projects (as I would learn later), they weren't quite finished.

By June, Toni and Eric had moved into my Lansing home with me. Her older son, Tom, a high school senior, moved down a few months later.

On Toni's and my last trip moving her stuff from Traverse City in a U-Haul truck, we swerved off onto a side road and stopped in the North Woods springtime. On the top of a hillside, we fucked in the sun against a great moss-covered log. I was happy. Life felt good. My future looked bright.

At first, living together went well enough. I would go off to work with a lunch Toni had packed, and she would wave goodbye through the window.

Within just a few weeks, however, that blissful life abruptly ended. Toni complained about living an "Ozzie and Harriet" life, informing me, "I don't want to make your goddamned lunch anymore. I've got things to do."

An ugly pattern developed as her unhappiness grew. About once a week Toni would get pissed off at me about something. She would tell me sarcastically, condescendingly that I was always right, she was always wrong. She would say I went out of my way to pick at her. That I didn't appreciate her. Didn't respect her. That I was just an all-around pig. She would get violent. Scream and yell. Throw things. Drink. Seldom was she far from her rum with Diet Coke or a beer.

One evening, I was installing a hook in our living room so Toni could hang a plant. From a step ladder, I drilled a hole into the house's original 1912 ceiling of plaster embedded in a thick metal mesh. Sparks flew as the drill hit the metal. "Yow," I screeched. "The ceiling is hot!"

"That's impossible," said tipsy Toni. "It's just plaster. It can't be hot. Are you going to drill that hole for me or not? Just drill it."

I wouldn't do it. She threw a fit about how I didn't respect her opinion. It was about "control," she said. That became a constant theme with Toni: I had too much control and she didn't have enough.

The next day I discovered an ancient frayed electrical wire touching and electrifying the ceiling plaster's metal mesh.

Our first big row had happened when she still was living in Traverse City. Earlier that day on my way north from Lansing, I had caught some wild brown trout on the North Branch of the Au Sable River, a near-religious experience because of the beauty and mystique of this river to fly fishermen. I was proud of my lovely fish, hoping they could be our dinner. I got to her house later than expected, and Toni went off on me for being late. She stormed that she was a victim of my disrespect and lack of appreciation. She stomped off to bed. I put my trout down the garbage disposal. It was sacrilege. I should have run right then.

Instead, I married her. When I proposed to her, she said: "Why do men always want to marry me?" It sounded like bragging.

### Compared to Fucking What?

September 1, 1984, was our wedding day. Ever since reading George Orwell's 1984 in high school, I had been curious about what that year, so far in the future, would bring. Turns out, 1984 brought me a crazy bitch for a wife.

On the road north to Traverse City the day before my wedding, I had the worst hangover of my life. We pulled off the freeway in Mt. Pleasant for lunch. I stayed in the car and parked at the far end of the lot to keep from puking from that greasy McDonald's smell.

My friends had given me a hell of a bachelor party the night before with a stripper and a huge volume of liquor. I got shit-faced. Someone drove me home in the wee hours. I staggered through our hot, humid house and up the stairs. I stumbled into our dark bedroom, which had the house's only window air conditioner, and stomped right on the head of my soon-to-be stepson, Eric. He had decided to sleep there to escape the heat in his own room.

Our wedding was lovely, held with family and friends in the backyard of Toni's parents on their grassy beach on Grand Traverse Bay. Our theme, with no intended irony, was: This time we know what we're doing. We printed it on our wedding invitations. It was braggadocio that Toni wanted to use, and it suited me fine, even though I knew it could not possibly be true.

The preacher, Dolores Moss from the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Traverse City, said some stuff. Toni said some stuff. I said some stuff. Then, there I was, 38 years old, and finally married for the first time. Toni was 34. Sixth time the charm?

Toni's family owned a rambling summer home in Old Mission, a tiny settlement a half-hour north of Traverse City, at the tip of the peninsula that splits the two cold, blue arms of Grand Traverse Bay, on Lake Michigan. Old Mission Peninsula is a pastoral paradise of rolling hills neatly demarked into fields, orchards, and woodlots. The place is perfect for growing cherries. In spring, white blossoms cloak the hills.

I loved sleeping on the summer house's screened front porch, listening to waves crashing onto the beach across the street and to the wind moving through white pines and oaks that towered over the house. Indians had walked here not too long ago, and some were said to be buried under tree-covered, sandy ridges on the property.

Our honeymoon at the Old Mission house turned into a fight that lasted for days. I don't remember what we argued about. Twice, Toni tore off her new wedding band and threw it out the back door. I rescued it both times from the sandy lawn. That's how our marriage started, and the drama never let up.

Despite our obvious problems, Toni wanted to have a baby with me. She promised to quit chain smoking her Merit Menthol 100's and drinking like a fish if she got pregnant. I wanted to wait, but she said her biological clock was ticking. We tried, going through a bunch of do-it-yourself pregnancy test kits. On our first Christmas, I gave her a book, Pregnancy and Childbirth. In my favorite photo from that holiday, Toni is holding up a white lacy bra from me, while I'm the poor sap holding up a brown wooden toilet seat from her. And smiling!

One evening, before our usual "let's make a baby" routine, Toni purred, "Do you have any rubbers?" That's how I learned her plans to make me a father had ended. "It's just bad timing," she said. "I'm not sure with your attitude that we would be partners in this thing." When I pressed her to explain, she got testy: "Listen buster. You don't control my body. I'm the one who would get all bloated and stretched out. You got nothing to say about it where having a kid is concerned."

She was right: it would have been bad timing to have a kid with her. As things turned out, any time would have been just awful. Thank god...

The day I discovered my wife was a witch was when she showed me the bumper sticker she intended to put on our car: Witches Heal.

Thus, I learned about the religion of Wicca and about white witches ("the good kind") and about the sacredness of Halloween. Toni decided she wanted to become an official witch, so she "applied" to a Wiccan correspondence school. They declared that her application was exceptional -- send check! Eventually, Toni got some kind of certificate. I did put my foot down on the bumper sticker. She stuck it on the outside of our home's front door, instead.

By the end of our first year together, I had to accept that I was in deep shit, but by then, it was too late. Common sense and my friends counseled: Get out now! But I was too entangled, emotionally and practically, to easily get out. Even as Toni's fits grew more frequent, I still believed we could work out our problems, that things would get better. After all, I loved her, still thought she was a beautiful woman, had given her my word, and we were soul mates, right?

I was sleeping alone much of the time; her berating and insults had become a way of life. Toni told me I was simply not worth the effort and was a "hopeless asshole." Our marriage was a mistake. I didn't respect her, care for her, or love her. I was driving her to a coronary, cancer, or ulcer, she cried. Each time we made up after a fight, Toni would deign to "take a new chance with me."

It's not that I merely went along with her drama. I tried as hard as I could to actually accept her brutal criticisms, just as if they had come from a rational human being. After all, this was my wife telling me of my failures as a new husband. I was sinking slowly into a black hole as I tried to anticipate her every need and satisfy her pathological demands for my unquestioning subservience.

Here are typical things she would pick huge fights over: She declared that I was wrong one night because I didn't go around to the back door of the restaurant when picking up her son, Tommy, from work in downtown Lansing. ("He could have been killed between the back door and the street out front.") I was wrong because I didn't insure the packages I mailed for her that hadn't gotten to her sister on time. ("Don't come home tomorrow, Bud, until you put a tracer on them.") Such trivia routinely would lead to hours of inane arguing.

In July, the first summer after our wedding, we took a road trip to Nova Scotia. We had some good moments; how could you not? The province's Cape Breton Island is one of the most stunning landscapes on earth -- meadows and mountains rising straight from the sea. We ate just-caught lobster on my 39th birthday, drank proper British tea, toured the 1700's re-enactments at the Fortress of Louisbourg, soaked in the scenery, and smoked a lot of weed we had picked up in Boston. We nearly got busted crossing into Canada from Maine because we were so stoned. We looked at Nova Scotia real estate and fantasized about buying property for a vacation home.

Dampening all this fun, however, was Toni's viperous blackness. Fighting. Insults. About halfway through the trip, she quit having sex with me, pretty much for good.

Yet, still she claimed to love me. Back home, she wrote me a letter while I was away on business, addressed to "my husband, mate, lover, brother, fellow human struggling with life." She complained about her many problems, but wrote:

By most people's definition I have a fairly good life. I have a loving husband, two not-so-bad kids, a home, enough money (from your job) so I don't have to work or worry about starving to death. I don't have to do a lot with my day, just keep the house reasonably clean, cook one meal a day, and do the laundry from time to time. I certainly don't know of another human being -- male or female -- that I enjoy being with more than you. So what do I have to be upset about? Why am I not happy?

I sure couldn't figure it out. She said she wouldn't go to movies with me, because I put down the ones that she liked. She wouldn't go for walks with me, since I would always lead. She wouldn't go shopping with me, since I was critical of what she liked and didn't show enough interest in what she wanted to do. She watched endless TV to shut herself off. She was glad to see me go to D.C. for a week, since she was happier when I was gone, she said. I was "not trying at all." I hadn't made any changes for the better. I never showed her respect or appreciation. I was happy only when I'd just gotten laid or was watching The Three Stooges. All I wanted was meals, housework, and sex. "But you, Wayne," she would sneer, "you think you are perfect." She promised me, "Unless you change, I will make your life hell."

Compared to fucking what? I thought.

Friends and family saw a different Toni than the nasty, abusive woman I lived with. She prided herself on behaving properly around others. She wrote to me:

There's been plenty of times when I've been pissed at you. Including one very specific time when I would have wrung your fucking little chicken neck. Dave Miller was sitting on that couch and I was sitting here and you were saying your socks were dirty and you were sorry about it but it was because your wife hadn't done the laundry. And I didn't do what I wanted to do and that was take your goddamned socks off and shove 'em down your goddamned throat and stomp out of the room. But we had a guest. And I don't behave in that childish bullshit manner like you do.

Our weekly fights never came to physical blows, but close.

"Go ahead," she would taunt. "Hit me."

"Don't. Just don't," I said, as she pushed her body into mine. I grabbed her arms, forcing her to the couch. "It's like you want me to so you can confirm your worst opinion of me."

"You couldn't possibly be worse than I already think," she laughed. "You are a total wimp, trying to be a man."

Moments later, Toni stood and started a gentle stroking of my shoulders and arms. Her eyes had a sinister look, and I twisted away from her cruel touch. If white witches are "the good kind," I'd hate to meet the other kind -- but I didn't say that out loud.

Toni began pressuring me to make more money to better support her and her boys. "We live in a dump, like Okies," she said. "You couldn't support a bird on your salary." She wanted to live in a warmer clime, at least in the winter. Tampa would be good, she said. She once had lived in Tampa and had an old friend, Bobby, who was there.

Even though I loved my job as an environmental gadfly, I wanted to do something new. About a year into my marriage, I took a job, still in Lansing, as an environmental reporter for a chain of daily newspapers (chapter eight). It didn't pay me any more, but I hoped that eventually it would. Learning on-the-job to be a reporter was harder than I expected. I was stressed and working long hours. Meanwhile, at home, arguments kept me up late, sometimes all night, after which I would drag my tired ass down the street to the bus stop in the morning while Toni, usually drunk, would pass out asleep.

What is even more pathetic is that I still loved her. And hated her. Turbulent Toni, terrible Toni, tantalizing Toni. I would try anything to fix our marriage. At one point, in response to her nagging me about my "unhealthy" ties to past relationships, I took all my journals, letters, and photos -- hundreds, maybe thousands of items -- and tossed them in a dumpster. It was intended to prove to her and to myself that I was going for broke, slashing all ties to my past. Aargh!

In our wedding vows, we quoted Wendell Berry: "The meaning of marriage begins with the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word, and this must be an unconditional giving. The promise must be absolute, for in joining ourselves to one another, we join ourselves to the unknown." I really believed that.

But Toni's view soon after: "What do you want from me? Some promise that I'm going to stay with you forever. You're not going to get it."

Me: "I thought that's what we promised in our wedding vows."

Her: "Not under any conditions where you don't respect me."

That exchange is recorded in an audio tape of one of our nonsensical fights on December 11, 1986 (our third Christmas together). As we talked, Toni was working on making gifts. Through the tape's first forty-five minutes, the background noise is a constant WAKA-WAKA-WAKA, as she slices a mountain of paper strips with a big paper cutter in order to make papier-mache for her animal sculptures. WAKA-WAKA-WAKA!

In the second half of the tape, she lapses into self-pity. She whimpers about how the day before she had to grovel in applying for a job that was way beneath her station. She says that I couldn't empathize with her ("you and your fancy degrees") or appreciate how much she brings to the relationship. As her tears flow, the paper cutting stops, and she turns on some music. Saccharin strings of Chariots of Fire swell in the background.

Toni had insisted on making this tape recording (among several) to later prove how poorly I remembered the bad things I said to her. Actually, working as a newspaper reporter, I had gotten pretty good at recalling my conversations. I also kept voluminous journals and saved notes and letters. Good thing. Had I not kept the hard evidence, I doubt even I would believe this wretched tale.

Toni had never been happy, as far as I could tell. She had never had good relationships with her parents, with most friends, and especially not with men. Yet, she desperately needed men. She needed a man to support her and her boys, although that was just a convenience. What she really needed was a man to control. Ironically, the last few men she had picked were pretty independent sorts. Her previous husband, cherry farmer Josh, was brawny and head-strong. Perhaps Toni just needed ever-larger challenges to fuel her troubled psyche.

With her demeaning treatment of her men, I think Toni was paying back a father who had once tried to control her craziness. When she was young, her parents, Ted and Betty, went so far as to commit her to the Traverse City nut house for a short time. So said Toni. I'm sure they had their reasons. Toni's overt resentment of her parents, however, targeted her mother; she idolized the father she once hated. It all made as much sense to me as an inkblot.

Our sex became less and less frequent. In trying to get me to understand how she felt, she would confess that she wanted my cock "lots of times," but couldn't go through with sex because her body is the only thing she feels she can control so she would rather go without: "I'd make love to you if I could do it without your head."

Toni's revulsion with sex -- at least with me \-- was tied to her larger repugnance about men, in general. Remember that feminist radical, (now-dead) Andrea Dworkin? In her book, Intercourse, which Toni swore by, Dworkin claimed that all heterosexual sex in our patriarchal society is a violation of women, and that intercourse dooms women to inferiority and submission.

Maybe Dworkin's twisted philosophy was where Toni found her language to accuse me of being "one step above a rapist and child molester."

Two years into our marriage, Toni declared that from then on, I had to sleep in a separate bed -- actually, a sleeping bag on a cheap foam pad on the floor outside her door, since we didn't have another bedroom. "The final straw," she said, was that I bought the wrong kind of porch paint.

Toni was up at the Old Mission house and decided she needed to paint the floor of its expansive, wrap-around porch. I told her on the phone that I would buy the paint at our local Sears and bring it north the next day. "Make sure it's oil-based paint," she told me. When I got to Sears, I decided to buy latex paint, instead. It was cheaper, the porch floor was covered by a roof, and I was an environmentalist steeped in facts about the evils of oil-based paints. When Toni saw the paint I had bought, she threw one of her tantrums. There was no reasoning with her. I bought latex paint as part of my "control games," she said. "I will not be controlled. You always need to be in control."

Toni talked more of her dream to live in Florida. Before we even were living together, I had looked into my options for getting an environmental job in Florida. Now, in a desperate move to try to make her happy and save our marriage, I tried again, applying (too late to be considered, it turned out) for managing director of the Florida Wildlife Federation.

When I told Toni, she accused me of trying to bribe her. "Don't play Mr. Good Guy with me. I know you. Don't tell me you were trying to please me. If I can't get along with you here, what makes you think I'm going to get along with you if we live in Florida? You're going to miraculously change south of the Mason-Dixon Line?"

She had a point.

I tried to get us to see a counselor together, but Toni saw no reason, since she was convinced that fixing our problems was as simple as me changing. Eventually, we did see one together briefly, but nothing came of it.

I found a different counselor and saw her without Toni for over a year. Driving from my shrink's office one day, I followed a garbage truck with a sign that summed up her months of expensive advice: "Be yourself. Who else is better qualified?"

### Fuck Me

In mid-1987, Toni and I drove to Buffalo, New York, to attend the wedding of a good friend of mine. Toni shocked me, as we unpacked in the Holiday Inn, when she asked: "Did you bring any rubbers?"

"What?" (We hadn't had sex in a long time.)

"Do you have any rubbers? I thought that maybe later tonight..."

I had considered packing condoms for the trip. But, I had concluded, why set myself up for disappointment? No expectations this trip; no condoms.

Here was the dilemma I faced on that rainy Saturday afternoon in a downtown Buffalo motel. A horny wife. Finally, a chance to get laid. But no rubbers. And no time to go out and buy any.

Skies over Buffalo had started clearing in time for the wedding. We walked the six blocks to the backyard garden in steaming humidity. Bees hummed over marigolds in the sidewalk planters, the flowers catching sun streaks through boiling thunderheads. I kept an eye out for a drug store.

At my friend's ceremony, Toni attracted attention with her long dark hair and svelte figure in red silk. The stickiness made her dress cling like loose skin. No wonder I let her treat me like a dog, I grumbled to myself during the ceremony.

At the reception, I felt Toni's instep slide up my leg under the table. We were high on wine and champagne. I let my mind drift with the rare, sultry sensation. The din of the ballroom receded. The band beat a boogie-woogie. I am past due, I thought, grinning. I downed the last of my wine. "I am really sloshed. You ready?" I said, leaning into Toni and peering down her dress. "Yeah, me too," she slurred. "What are you smiling about?"

We staggered and giggled through goodbyes. Thunder rumbled over Lake Erie. By the time we reached the hotel, the wind was gusting, making a sail of Toni's dress. Lightning flashed across the city. "Nice butt," said Toni, patting my behind as we crossed the lobby. We rode up the elevator in silence, staring at each other in the mirror. I could smell a damp muskiness filling the space. "Oh shit," I said, grimacing. "You know what I still have to do? Rubbers."

In our room, I peered out our ninth-floor window, looking for the neon of a drug store in the city. Nothing but offices and dark store fronts. Mostly empty streets glistened in the steady rain.

"Well, I guess I'm going to have to drive," I said. "I'd better get out before everything is closed. You want to come?"

"No way. That's your job. You should have thought ahead," Toni said, shutting the bathroom door behind her.

"Wish me luck."

"Luck."

Alone in the elevator I realized how drunk I was. "Wayne, what the fuck are you doing?" I muttered aloud to the blurry image in the elevator mirror. "This sure as fuck better be worth it."

I dashed across the parking lot, fumbled with my keys, cursed the rain, and finally got inside, soaked to the skin. I dried my glasses on a left-over Wendy's napkin, then pulled into traffic. I was driving by habit, unaware of stopping at lights, turning corners, braking for traffic.

Rubbers. It was all my bleary focus could handle. Don't get lost, I told myself. circling gradually away from the hotel. Downtown Buffalo was no place to buy condoms after 9:00 on Saturday night. I headed toward the edge of town, hoping for a strip mall. Miles of streets passed. Rain rat-tat-tatted on the car roof. A cop cruised past, giving me cold sweat under my rain-soaked shirt.

Out near the freeway, the lights of a mall were an oasis. K-Mart was lit. I parked in the nearly empty lot and sprinted to the door. A light inside blinked out. I looked at my watch. 9:35. Five minutes too late. I walked slowly along the storefront to my car. I saw them in the garish lights not five feet inside the window. Trojans. Ramses. An inaccessible mountain of condoms.

Back in the car, I wiped my glasses again with another paper napkin and sat silently for several minutes. Rain poured down the windshield. I imagined Toni in her red teddy sprawled across the hotel sheets. The TV would be on. Wine waiting. I looked back at the K-Mart. Just then, all the stores lights went out. "Shit!" I said, smacking the steering wheel. I started the car and drove away.

I finally found an all-night supermarket. "Kind of wet out there?" said the pert check-out girl, as she rang up my three-pack of condoms. I mumbled something incoherent, took my change, and shoved the paper bag into my jacket pocket. The rain was pounding harder than ever. I drove slowly back to the hotel, making only two wrong turns. The green lights of the hotel sign emerged like a harbor in a storm. I turned off the engine. I had been gone 90 minutes; it seemed longer.

Toni was watching TV in the dark when I came in. "God, you can't fucking believe what I just went through," I said, flinging the wadded sack of condoms beside her on the bed. I collapsed on a chair.

"Hey, don't you come marching in here and throw your goddamned rubbers at me," Toni said.

"I didn't throw them at you. Lighten up."

"Like hell. They hit me. I was looking for a bit of romance here, not some goddamned Hun."

"Wait a minute," I said, sitting up and stripping my wet shirt. "Let me get this straight. I've been driving around in the fucking rain for two goddamned hours, so drunk I can hardly see straight, to buy rubbers because you decreed that making love tonight might be okay for the first time in six fucking weeks. And you're pissed?"

"Forget it, asshole. Not with your attitude. Fuck you." She fled to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Sure enough, she was wearing that red teddy.

Yeah, fuck me, I thought, shaking my head. I closed my eyes, but the room started spinning. The bag lay on the bed. One corner of the condom box protruded through the soggy brown paper. I got up and dropped it in the trash.

### What the Fuck?!

Toni and I had an all-night brawl Thursday night. I got two or three hours sleep, then ran at noon the next day like a man possessed. And I got sick. I have cigarette burns on my neck and chin. It is hard for me to imagine a more perverted thing than to deliberately stick a cigarette into someone's face. How do you communicate with someone who does that? How do you meet halfway? I have been abused, degraded, insulted and I am tired of being told I should move out of my own house. (Journal - Jan. 19, 1987)

After three years of marriage, I did move out briefly, living unhappily in an apartment owned by the newspaper I worked for and normally used by visiting reporters. After a couple of weeks, my boss had to remind me that it was temporary. Back home I moved, back to sleeping alone on the foam pad on the floor outside Toni's bedroom, which tinkled with crystals and reeked of sandalwood incense. I couldn't enter without permission.

Toni declared that she had always wanted to go to Morocco and was going to do it. Without me. She signed up for a Disney tour using our credit card. Off she went on her big solo adventure, flying first to Tampa to visit her old friend, Bobby. Platonic, she assured me.

Soon after she returned from Morocco, she flew to Portland, Oregon, to visit her sister over Christmas. While she was gone, I was working on paying bills that came in the mail and needed to see a previous month's bill. Ordinarily, I never got to see any of our bills. Toni insisted on opening and paying them herself. It had something to do with trust, I think she said, about why I shouldn't need to see them.

I found the bills in her room and went through them. To my surprise, I discovered that we were more than $3,000 in debt. This was odd because just a few months earlier, we had paid off the $8,000 in credit card bills that we previously had racked up.

Before we met, Toni had bought a rental house in Mt. Pleasant, which is about an hour north of Lansing. Her mortgage -- Lord knows how she ever got one -- had a five-year balloon. That meant that shortly after we got married, her mortgage had to be renewed. There was no way she could have gotten a new one on her own, having no job and no assets except one -- her husband. Moi. I dutifully agreed to sign for a new, long-term mortgage. The house hardly paid its own expenses, but it gave a couple of her friends a cheap place to live. One of them, Michael, was a wanna-be musician and photographer who worked at a record store. This was the guy Toni had managing the house -- a quiet, laid-back hippie with no practical skills that I ever ascertained.

For our new mortgage, Toni had insisted on borrowing the maximum the bank would loan us. That's how we got the money to pay off our credit card bills. Now, to my complete surprise, we were back in the hole by $3,000. What shocked me most was where the money had gone.

Turns out, we had paid all expenses for two trips to Morocco: one for Toni, and one for Platonic Bobby from Tampa.

I also found an envelope with my name on it, so I steamed it open. It was Toni's delusional last goodbye, written before she had left for Morocco, in case she died en route. It is fair testament to her schizophrenia.

Dear Wayne,

I love you. I have so many things to thank you for and so many things I either didn't say or didn't say often enough.

Thank you for your encouragement and support of my art work, of my writing, of my attempts at finding personal peace. Thank you for teaching me so many things about the planet, plants, and animals. Thank you for sharing your life with me, your hopes and dreams.

I don't in any way regret the years we've had together. They were full of fun and love. Of course, there weren't enough of them but who knows the mysteries of life? At least I left while on an adventure and you know that's the way I would want it.

Please remember the good times we had and try to be grateful for them. Don't mourn for what "might have been." I know you loved me and that makes me so happy.

In the words of Ruth Gordon ("Harold & Maude") "Go out and love some more!"

Take good care of yourself and please look in on the boys now and then. They really don't have anyone but you and me -- now just you.

We'll see each other again -- you know this is my belief. It's natural to be sad right now, I wish it didn't have to be that way but I understand it can't be helped. I just hope you will feel it -- live through it and come out the other side of it with a good life ahead of you.

You're a wonderful man Wayne. You've made me very happy and wherever I am now -- I'll always love you.

Toni

p.s. Please remember the good times.

What the fuck?! I called her in Portland, ignoring her maudlin, schizophrenic letter, but confronting her with the Morocco vacation-for-two. That led to a four-hour phone fight as Toni got more and more drunk. To my surprise, it turned out that she was the victim and I was the asshole for invading her privacy to look at the bills stashed in her room. She made up convoluted lies about her Morocco trip's expense receipts, denied doing anything nefarious, and said she would straighten it all out when she got back to Michigan.

Nothing ever, ever got straightened out with Toni.

She had a bewildering, though convenient, attitude about our household's finances. Debt was just a concept; when we were interviewed by the bank's mortgage committee, Toni bragged that our credit card debt was still below our credit limit. She truly believed that all available credit (i.e., mine) should be used.

While Toni hated being financially dependent on me, she didn't hate it enough to get a job. Instead, she dealt with her guilty feelings by attacking me. She lived the motto: the best defense is a good offense. Toni proclaimed that she brought a wealth of talent and value to our marriage, which easily compensated for her not earning any money, and that I was the asshole for not appreciating it. No one could imagine how hard her life was. Her contributions -- meals cooked, favors done, anything really -- inflated in her mind. The few paying jobs she took during our marriage were, in her eyes, demeaning, stressful, and under-appreciated by everyone.

Her only job that I remember -- a night manager for a mall clothing store -- lasted but a few wintry months. I had to pick her up after work on any night that I needed our only car. Her store closed at 11:00. Often, she would be delayed with paperwork for an hour or more, so I would try to get some sleep on the vacant mall's benches. Then home, to get up early and take the bus to my reporter job. That year, she contributed exactly five percent of our income. I wasn't sorry to see her quit.

Toni treated me like shit, and I put up with it, and I still don't really know why. I read something the other day that struck a chord: "Narcissists are so powerfully appealing because you feel blessed when, even momentarily, the beam of their self-love turns toward you."

No doubt, Toni was a narcissist, but that description, alone, doesn't capture her intense self-loathing and bitterness. Or the ugliness of her attitude toward those who were closest to her. I'm not a shrink, however, and I began to realize that I could never understand why she was like she was.

I felt cheated, supporting her lifestyle of leisure. Over the course of 18 months, she had traveled to Florida for two weeks, Old Mission for a month, Morocco for a week, Portland for three weeks, and Philadelphia for two weeks. She insisted on taking $200 of my $508 weekly paycheck, to spend on household food and on herself. All other expenses, we had to pay with what was left.

After the Morocco debacle, I finally accepted, albeit, in fits and starts, that my demented marriage had to end. The prospect of being alone terrified me, yet I decided that living without hope was worse.

"I've given up on this relationship," I confessed to Toni in May 1988. It would, however, take me nearly a year to get out.

There was no easy way to extricate myself. I felt trapped, practically and financially. Toni owned half of my house and everything else. As miserable as she was, living with me, she wasn't about to move out. Where would she and her two boys and collie go, anyway? She had no job, no car of her own, and no money.

On my last trip to the Old Mission house that November, I wrote in my journal:

It is the last wind of fall. Howling about the empty house, curtains closed for winter, the gale off the bay sings the rites of passage to winter. Dead brown oak leaves swirl about the yard, defying any attempt at control before the impending blanket of snow quiets them. Over the lake, spits of rain, sleet, and furious waves blow landward, giving substance to the wind's force. Flat, leaden clouds skirt the water, so dense as to be nearly indefinable. White-caps accent the clouds' sullen weight over the lake. The house is so cold a breath's fog holds in the still air several seconds. Porch chairs are stacked about the living room, the final signal that summer is forever gone. Can there be a spring lurking behind this winter already tightening its grip on the house, on our lives? Not if you believe the wind.

As I started to pull away, Toni upped the voltage of her tantrums. One night, she went berserk. It started, ostensibly, when I tried to grill our dinner's steaks on the outdoor grill and ran out of charcoal, when she had told me to use the electric grill. Why couldn't I just do as she told me? Why did I always have to be in control?

Toni stormed out of the house, threatening never to come back, then came back screaming. She grabbed my keys, the money from my wallet, my credit cards, and the checkbook. When that didn't ignite me, she threatened to bust up the entire house \-- stereo, windows, everything. She started hitting me, trying to burn me with her cigarette, threw hot ashes at me. She went for the stereo, and I grabbed her wrists. I forced her back toward her room as she screamed about how the bruises will show what I've done to her, and I'm going to get mine, and I've got to sleep sometime. In her room, she hit me some more, then grabbed a metal sculpture and cocked her arm. I braced for some serious harm, but for a second her sanity returned, and she put down the weapon without much fuss.

She picked up her glass of wine and gestured as if to throw it, and I begged her not to. I liked the crystal glasses so; they were a wedding gift from friends. She pulled back, as if to reconsider, then the glass slid from her hand and crashed to the floor. "Oh, well," she smirked.

As the fighting continued, she smashed the side of my eyeglasses with her hand. I bent them back in shape. She said, "cheapskate Wayne, can't spend $75 on glasses..." What?!

Finally, I just stood there, my glasses off, telling her to go ahead and hit me. I thought maybe that would snap her out of her frenzy.

Whack! Whack!

Twice, she slapped me hard across the left side of my face. With her other hand, she tried again to burn my face with her cigarette.

I pushed her away, went in the bathroom, and locked the door. Her water glass hit the wall. For hours, I sat on the toilet seat and listened to her berate me through the wall.

By 5 a.m., her rage spent, it was over. She closed the door to her room and told me not to do anything with the broken glass. I picked up the most dangerous pieces. My favorite pottery bowl was in pieces, which I collected (and later glued back together). I pulled off the covers and tipped my foam pad upright to get rid of all the slivers and chips. Toni spoke up through her door: "I didn't mean for you to have to sleep in broken glass. You don't have to sleep out there." So I didn't.

First thing the next day, I called my shrink and started regular sessions again.

### Why the Fuck Not?

My escape from Toni's abuse and lunacy finally came on Friday the 13th, January 1989, when my friend, Ray, called me at work. He wanted to hire me to manage his land development company in Lake Havasu City. I would have to move to Arizona right away. Would I do it?

On the way home from work, I stopped at a party store and bought a quart of rum. In my empty house, I sat at the dining room table, thought about moving to the desert, got really drunk, and thought some more. I concluded, with Zen-like finality: Why the fuck not?

It's one of my favorite pictures: In the glaring camera flash I salute goodbye to Toni from the driver's seat of my brand-new GMC pickup. My beat-up canoe is strapped on top. The covered truck bed is crammed tight with nearly everything I own. Even the passenger seat is packed to the ceiling. It's dark outside but will soon be dawn. I am smiling.

In real life, you usually don't get to ride off into the West to start a new life, but that's what I did. Would I have made such a huge step -- taking the weird land developer job in Arizona, leaving my environmental career and friends in Michigan \-- if I hadn't needed to flee my encounter with crazy Toni? I think the answer is "yes," but who can say? I do know this: that was the step that got me forever out of Michigan, with its interminable, gray winters, and that proved to be a very good thing for me in the long run.

There remained, unfortunately, two more encounters with Toni.

Before I left Michigan, we agreed that we would give our separation six months. Toni then would come out to Arizona to see if we could patch things up. If it didn't work out, we would get a no-fault divorce, split everything, and go our separate ways.

Right on schedule, six months later I drove back to Michigan. Things had been going pretty well, long distance, between us, so I tried to be optimistic, psyching myself up during the four-day drive east. All the arrangements had been made. Toni would ride back to Arizona with me. We were going to spend a few days together with Ray and his wife at Enchantment resort in the red rocks of Sedona. Then, Thanksgiving in Lake Havasu City.

But when I got to Michigan, Toni immediately made it clear that her actually moving to Arizona to live with me was out of the question. I said, "You've had six months to think about this, and you couldn't get it together to tell me this, say, one month, one week, maybe even one day before I left to drive back here?"

Next morning, I got the papers for a do-it-yourself no-fault divorce and started the wheels moving. Meanwhile, Toni declared it perfectly sensible that she should still ride back to Arizona with me for a visit. After all, her plane ticket to return home from Lake Havasu City to Lansing was non-refundable.

I called Ray. He told me I should relax, bring her out for the visit, and then send her on her way. He was right. I salvaged as many of my belongings still in the Lansing house that would fit in the truck, and off Toni and I drove together.

Our trip was actually quite civil right until the end. We had a reasonably pleasant time in Sedona. I went through the motions of being pleasant.

On her last evening in Arizona, we went over the divorce papers that I had filled out, and I took her to dinner at a restaurant overlooking the London Bridge on Lake Havasu. It's a beautiful setting, surrounded by water, desert, and mountains. Toni talked of the importance of friendship, how there was no reason not to be friends, and hinted that we should visit one another. It took all my attention to remain composed, centered, and gracious. I was running out of patience.

I asked her to help me understand why she had concluded that she couldn't move to such a lovely place as Arizona. The opportunity for her seemed good, I suggested, and all her alternatives back in Michigan so uncertain.

I don't think I actually wanted her to live with me again. But then, who knows? Had Toni said she wanted to move out and live with me, I might have given it a try. I suppose that's how much I wanted to avoid being alone in life.

On the other hand, maybe I just wanted to push her buttons one last time. See for myself again the real Toni, the ogress lurking just behind her facade. If that was my motive, it sure worked. Toni went on a tirade, reciting her liturgy of ancient hurts as obvious evidence of why she couldn't live with me. It felt like a religious rite from a former life. I engaged her for a few minutes, but my heart wasn't in it.

"You know," I said at last, "I'm really glad this happened to remind me how bad it was between us. I'm just glad this is the last night I'll ever have to put up with your bullshit."

In the morning, her small prop plane, white with a sleek blue stripe down its side, taxied away from the gate at Lake Havasu City's little airport. I watched the blinking light of her 6:30 a.m. StatesWest flight to Phoenix until it dimmed from view in the eastern sky. The plane's light flickered in the desert air so long that I thought time had slowed. A waning crescent moon hung low on the horizon, a faint glow hinting of sunrise.

I drove 20 miles south and found the gravel road that leads through a jumble of lava cliffs that bound the floodplain of the Bill Williams River. After seven miles of dusty washboard, past impenetrable shrub swamps and great vistas of desert, rock, and sky, I stopped at the entry to the long abandoned Roman Esquerez ranch. Skeletons of old irrigation fields and pastures still were visible. It has been turned into a national wildlife refuge. Across a beaver dam on the little river, I found a nook protected from the sun and wind under old mesquite and palo verde trees. Soft, winter-dead grass covered a ledge on a tiny pond.

Dragon flies fought over bits of my cracker on the still water. A soft-shelled turtle, its eyes barely visible, floated like a miniature alligator. Water gurgled through the beaver dam. Wind rose through the surrounding mountains; tall willow, cottonwood, and salt-cedar trees carried its tune. I spread a quilt, took off all my clothes, and lay bare naked in the filtered sunshine for a long time.

Our divorce was finalized a couple of months later. I had to keep paying half the Lansing house bills and sending her money until she sold our house. We split the small profit, she moved to Portland, Oregon, and that was that.

Ah, but unfortunately for me, that was not that.

For a while she wrote me from time to time, including a gushing letter proclaiming: "I am in love. Big time. His name is Mathew Wray. He's 50 and is presently self-employed as a carpenter, having been everything from a poet, UPI correspondent, salmon fisherman, dam builder, and longshoreman. I met him on the first blind date I've ever had in my life." After that, all I know is that they got married, she changed her last name to Wray, they got divorced, etc. Poor sap.

"I Am Not a Cunt"

After a blessed four years of silence from Toni, out of the blue she called me from Portland. (At this point, I was remarried and living in Ann Arbor.) All bubbly, Toni said she had a deal for me. She said that her housekeeper, Michael, was moving out of her Mt. Pleasant house, and so she just couldn't deal with the place any longer. Since its value now was less than what she owed on the mortgage, she was letting it go back to the bank. Because my name was still on the mortgage, however, she was first giving me this chance to take over the house to avoid foreclosure. "I didn't have to do this. You could make money on this. I'm doing you a big favor," she said, presumably with a straight face.

"Let me understand," I said. "You're calling me to tell me that you are going to ruin my credit unless I take over this run-down rental house that's 130 miles from where I live. This is a favor you're doing me?"

"What do you expect me to do?" she said. "I live in Oregon and just can't manage it without Michael."

"I expect you to do what adults do: deal with it. Be responsible and figure it out," I said, knowing it was useless.

The problem was that no matter what Toni and I had agreed in our no-fault divorce, my name was still legally on the bank mortgage for her house. I was stuck. My wife and I drove to Mt. Pleasant just to confirm that keeping the house wasn't a good option. (Mt. Pleasant is neither, as the saying goes.) The three-story house was, indeed, a dump and would cost a fortune to bring up to where it could be sold, if that was even possible. The only bright note was that by coincidence, the bank that held the mortgage was the same bank where my wife worked -- Great Lakes Bankcorp. As a result, we were able to get them to take back the house as in a foreclosure, but to have it not affect our credit. The catch was that we had to pay the bank the difference between the appraised value and the higher mortgage value. It was like flushing $2,000 down the toilet.

The last step was getting Toni to sign the final bank documents. I had FedEx'd the paperwork to her in Portland and then called to explain what she had to do. She started sounding squirrelly, like she wasn't sure she should sign the papers (though in the end, she did). I told her how much this had cost us, noting that it put a real crimp in our Christmas. Always the victim, she was unsympathetic and unapologetic. These were the very last words that Toni and I spoke to one another:

Me: "Toni, you are such a cunt!"

Toni: "I am not a cunt."

### What _Was_ That?

This squalid chapter of my life still gives me the creeps, decades later. What was that? Who were those two unbalanced people?

Toni had troubled relationships with parents, an incestuous cousin, and men in general. She escaped the shackles of her childhood only to get screwed by and, early-on, marry a series of losers. Still, I can gin up no sympathy. She was not the victim of life, as she saw herself. Conflict was a storm cloud she created, and it followed her always. Besides, by the time you're in your thirties, which was her age when I married her, your bad behavior is your own responsibility, no one else's.

Toni learned how to cultivate a beguiling seductiveness, which could override the common sense of horny men like me. She learned early in her life how to wield that allure like a weapon in a war against men. She was burdened with a visceral need to control others.

A profoundly unhappy, insecure woman, Toni couldn't control her own demons, even with booze and her Wiccan religion. I don't know if she ever found happiness, but I doubt it. Nor do I really care one way or the other. Sometimes, however, I do wonder how her kids, Tom and Eric, turned out. I hope that having such a whacked-out mother didn't totally mess them up, but how could it not have?

It wasn't my fault that Toni chose to seduce me, move in with me, and marry me. It was my fault, however, that I chose to let her -- blinded by her allure, my loneliness, our chemistry, and the mystery that was Toni. She didn't trick me into marrying her; I welcomed it, even while sensing the risks. I believed that if my endless hope wouldn't carry me through, my tenacity would. Perseverance furthers, as I had learned from the ancient Chinese book of wisdom, the I Ching.

I certainly persevered. Throughout those dark years when I did a lot of things wrong, I still managed to protect my essential self. I never lost my ability to find happiness in nature, work, and friends. Nor did I sacrifice my faith that eventually I would find the love of my life.

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### POSTSCRIPT

When I moved to Arizona in 1989, I left everything behind in Michigan -- my environmental career and professional network; my wife, stepsons, house, parents, and friends; and the comfort of the familiar Great Lakes region that I loved -- to become a land developer in the desert. It's where I finally found real and lasting love. And from that moment on, life just kept getting better.

Following that stint of building desert subdivisions, I returned east with my new-found wife and family and settled in for 13 years working for the National Wildlife Federation in a variety of jobs, culminating in an executive position as vice president of NWF's Communications Department. That adventure cost me one of the most important friendships of my life, a curious tale, indeed, which I tell in my second ebook: Life with Big Green: A Memoir.

Now, again living in the West, I've had the thrill of rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon -- four times, so far, with two more on my calendar. That obsession was the genesis of my latest ebook: Hubris, A Railroad Through the Grand Canyon, and the Death of Frank Mason Brown: A Parable for Our Time.

► _Return to Table of Contents_

WayneASchmidt@aol.com

WayneASchmidt.blogspot.com

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