Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

It was quite a foray. Just my mother and father to supervise all those kids, including my ten-year-old sister, her “boyfriend” (who grew up to become a cowboy and a blacksmith), and five-year-old me. We got the horses from the Camp Richardson stable, but instead of a horse, my father was given a mule—eighteen and a half hands high, with a mean-looking, close-cropped mane, like a Marine haircut. The animal was so black it appeared to glisten, as if it was wet with oil. My father was beside himself because it reminded him of the mules they used during the war, when he was in the ski troops—the memory of which got him braying (my father did world-class animal imitations and was said to be able to capture subtle nuances like the difference in the moos of Holstein and Jersey cows). The giant mule, whose name was Floppy, took exception to the braying and it was all Dad could do to wrestle the creature back in line.

  Perhaps this is why he didn’t check the cinch on my horse’s saddle. As soon as we were out of sight of the stables, my horse decided to make a break for it, eager to get back on the feedbag. The saddle slipped enough for me to lose the reins and suddenly I was on a big-barreled Arabian mare, swerving under low hanging pine branches, holding on for all I was worth. Shades of my sister’s Shetland pony.

  My mother shifted from singing songs from The Music Man to raving at my father, and he swung out from the front of the pack line and pounded around to cut us off—the mare so terrified of the massive black mule (which at full gallop was simply an awesome/gruesome spectacle of meat and muscle), she about burst her heart and took me clean over a split-rail fence that made me lose my Wheaties. Dad had never done any jumping either, but he drove the mule right at the rail without a hint of hesitation. Floppy cleared it like an Olympic hurdler going over a croquet wicket.

  I was crying—I thought I’d pooped my pants. Dad got me back on another horse without a single word. I think he knew that if I had even half a chance I’d have been overcome by fear, and after my mother had had a fight with the cook for what she considered lewd behavior on the part of the daughters, she wasn’t about to leave me back at camp. So there was no choice.

  Two hours later, while stopped at the Floating Islands, a small lake filled with reedy hummocks that actually drift around, I fell through one and got totally soaked. Even in high summer the water was icy cold. I had to have all my clothes stripped off and to stand by a fire, naked, wrapped in a horse blanket while all the older kids laughed.

  We lurched from near-disaster to disaster. Katy Wyman fell and hit her head. Of course, no one wore helmets in those days—that would’ve been too sensible. As we crossed the Rainbow Bridge, a narrow portion of trail not much wider than a packhorse, the fine line we were walking was made painfully clear. You could look down on your left and watch a thin stream of stones and sand triggered by the horses, tumbling what seemed like a hundred feet into the lake below. One misstep and that would’ve been it. If just one horse had kicked or nipped another right at that moment, we could all have gone over the precipice.

  Then, coming into the valley from the north end, the weather changed, as it does quickly in the mountains. The sky went very dark, smelling of ozone and the greasy cinder chips of the shale. The horses grew tense and jumpy, straining at their bits and bucking, their hooves plinking on the riprap hard enough to strike sparks. Mad white-hot barbs of lightning started slashing the sky, thunder echoing back and forth behind the peaks like mortar fire. We were completely exposed. The air became supercharged with electricity, so that a glimmer of St. Elmo’s fire seemed to ripple over the chain of horses. My father’s mule was so black and wet looking now, it was like it was made of living obsidian, its huge corn-sheath ears with the scissor-pointed tips erect, nostrils dilated.

  It seemed to take hours for us to negotiate the treacherous trail down off the ridge into the valley, hot rain spitting at us like a mist of gasoline. Everyone was silent, concentrating fiercely on the clip-clop stone stepping of the horses and the darkness bearing down on us. Except for my father. He was riding tail-end Charley and he started yodeling. The darker it got, the louder he wailed. Then my mother, who was out front on her Tennessee Walker, began to answer back in full Eastman School of Music soprano, their voices rising to meet each other in counterpoint to the thunder, ringing the line of us kids on down into the shelter of the valley.

  The weather waited until we’d made camp and had the horses carefully tethered in the lee of a huge outcropping of granite boulders, then the god-crack opened and split the summer darkness firehead down. Shrapnel and hail. Storm giants drunk on waterspouts. It was unbelievable.

  Dad had ruled against the two-man tents we carried and, with the help of the older boys, set up a single big lean-to with his trusty oil-smelling canvas lashed to the old circus tent spikes he carried just in case. He wisely figured that in smaller groups in separate tents, some of the kids could get pretty scared, especially if the storm raged all night—which it did—all of us huddled around Dad’s mining lantern, singing songs, the sky so fiery bright with the lightning you could see X-rays of your hands in the air.

  Two days later, when we got back to Glen Alpine, the kitchen staff mutinied for more money, then stole all the frozen chickens and the toilet paper and hit the road. My mother ended by hacking up a soggy corned beef in a kitchen frantic with bluebottles and yellow jackets, as the Turlock contingent, in a nasty parting gesture, had slashed all the window screens. I can see her now. She, who struggled to make oatmeal for a family of four, was now forced to make it for thirty-four. I’m certain she was on the verge of an emotional meltdown the entire last week, but her pride and her energy saw her through (although I came to believe that anyone making meatloaf should be licensed).

  She wasn’t going to let my father’s misguided choice in personnel destroy her dream. It wasn’t even going to slow her down. My parents finished the summer with buckets of rotting fish, two thousand moldy hot dog buns, and 250 gallons of sour milk. They paid too much for insurance, too much for the lease on the camp, too much for equipment rental, too much in utilities, too much in food, too much in wages. Too much. After the kids had all gone home, my father filled up one of the horse troughs and took a bath in baked beans. Why? Well, his answer was that he’d never had enough beans to do so before. This raised many questions in my young mind, and made me consider the possibility that my father had just lost his. My mother knew better, certain that this event had occurred long before.

  It was a financial disaster that almost swamped the family, and yet in another column of figures, Jeff Murcott, who had epilepsy and was so shy he could barely talk, had played Huckleberry Finn in the “Don’t You Know What a Feud Is?” scene in front of a capacity crowd at the Stanford Family Camp. Rachel Steinberger landed a sixteen-inch cutthroat on her own, and gutted it. Brian Rossi, my mother’s favorite student, whose father had a heart defect and couldn’t take him camping and fishing, climbed the front face of Pyramid with my father. Britt Macaskill, whose dad was soon to become a state senator and who had hardly ever even wiped his own butt, changed a flat tire on the green truck in the pouring rain in Emerald Bay and rewired the laundry hall of a campground in Tahoe City when the lights blew during a performance of The Dust of the Road. He never ended up going to Boalt Law School as his father had hoped. He went to San Francisco State to study theater lighting, and then on to the Yale Drama School, and then New York and Broadway.

  As for me, one of the Turlock terrors showed me how girls pee (something a lot of grown men aren’t clear on) and taught me how to throw a steak knife at a ponderosa pine from ten feet away and get it to stick. I saw two martens frolicking in the wildflowers by Lily Lake, and recited the entire “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” by candlelight to a church group in Sawmill Cove.

  Whenever I think about the mistakes my parents made, even the wreckage—the yelling, the guilt and recriminations, the strange cast of strangers, the dreadful business decisions, and all the money dramas and desperation, I think back to times like the summer at Glen Alpine. They weren’
t people to let things like weather conditions or economic realities dampen their spirits—or to stop them from causing their share of damage in pursuit of their dreams. In this I feel sad, for I wonder if I have taken fewer risks of certain kinds in my life, but for the wrong reasons. I wonder if outside my prodigious drug and alcohol intake and minor flirtations with the criminal life, I have mistaken having less faith for having more sense. That would be like me.

  There’s a photograph of my mother and father before they were married, on the flagstone steps of a mountain cabin in Estes Park, Colorado. It’s the summer of 1949, the summer they climbed Long’s Peak together—Dad’s climbing skills still fresh from the Alps of Italy and the war. Mom looks like Merle Oberon (a point she’ll remind me of on my fortieth birthday on a fog-shrouded ferry heading to the San Juan Islands). She’s shining with inner light even though covered in trail dust. Dad wears a smile almost as outlandish as his feather-flourished Tivoli trout fisherman’s hat. They’re poised on the edge of a ridge, a great vista spreading out before them.

  Without knowing it, they’re looking toward the decade of the 1950s. Disneyland will open soon, celebrating the Century of Progress with personal jetpacks and backyard heliports. The Supreme Court will outlaw segregation in the schools, Faulkner and Hemingway will win Nobel Prizes, Rocky Marciano will retire undefeated, Grace Kelly will marry Prince Rainier, the Gold Coast will become Ghana, signaling the end of the British Empire, and a “police action” in Korea will go terribly wrong. But my parents are smiling, eager for what lies ahead, believing in possibility. Experimentation. Discovery.

  Today my mother is in her eighties. She needs money and can no longer drive at night. She’s still looking forward. Her younger sister keeled over in the kitchen doing late-night bookkeeping for her church and never woke up. Her estranged older brother died of colon cancer. Her second husband, my stepfather, sleeps most of the day, but my mother rolls on like a force of nature. It will take a fleet of trucks going full speed or some especially insidious pathology to slow her down. Old age alone won’t be enough.

  My father didn’t fare so well. He died hypertensive, diabetic, florid, bloated, bewildered, incontinent, and probably impotent too. He and his third wife were living on charity in a subsidized aged-care housing complex connected with a Presbyterian Church, a denomination he had many reservations about. He was fifteen years younger than any of the other men in the facility, and forty years younger than a couple of the women. Dad and Wife III were able to live in that cinderblock and barren concrete sanctuary, built on old garbage marshland in San Leandro, surrounded by the decrepit and dying, by virtue of his tenuous job counseling and assisting the senior pastor of the church, a giant Nordic woman who wore his balls around her neck. And yet, despite the harrowing indignity, Dad’s files, the only thing he left to me, suggest that even at the end of the world, he was marshaling his forces to make a comeback.

  In the journal he left behind, which he started keeping after he did some sort of workshop in the mountains of Santa Cruz, there’s a curious progression. It begins with headlines like “Psychic Jack Schwartz Talks about Photosynthesis.” Then there’s a series of entries about creating a Crystal Mantra. Then come the “dialogues,” in which he personifies various issues in his life and has discussions with them, like the dialogue with his “Mystic Thinker” subpersonality, or some lost girlfriend from college days. This degenerates rather hilariously into the dialogue with a bank loan... “I am a person who tried to get a loan to buy a condominium and was turned down for not having a secure income.”

  ME: Why did you have to happen to me on top of everything else that has been coming down on me lately?

  LOAN: You had carefully laid the groundwork for me happening long before I was even in the process of being considered.

  ME: I suppose you are referring to my freelance way of working.

  LOAN: Yes, and your eagerness to pay the lowest possible income tax. You don’t really look too good on paper.

  After this, the journal wanders through embarrassing erotic fantasies and a catalogue of fears about money and health, drinking, and so on. Then, at the end, in the months just before he died, it takes an unexpected turn. Dad was preaching occasionally again, which terrified him—he who had once been so calm and natural before a crowd. Much of the drinking at that late stage may simply have been some means of coping with the fear. But he kept facing it, and as the journal clearly shows, he was fighting his way back.

  It must’ve been horrendous for him to reread old sermons like “The Roots and Fruits of an Enduring Marriage” (twice divorced, untold affairs) or “The Secret Formula for Success” (he’d taken to wearing robes when we went out because he could no longer fit into his old clothes and he didn’t have enough money to buy a new wardrobe). But he reworked these old sermons, modifying and adapting them for the predominantly elderly congregation. And he’d started clipping snippets and articles—quotations and anecdotes that could supply him with ideas for new sermons. For instance, he’d saved a story on Roy Cleveland Sullivan, the so-called Spark Ranger of Shenandoah National Park, who was struck by lightning seven times and donated his lightning-burnt ranger hats to the Guinness World Record exhibit halls in New York City and Myrtle Beach.

  The last few pages are devoted to Thor Heyerdahl, of all people, the Norwegian adventurer-anthropologist, most famous for the Kon-Tiki raft voyage across the Pacific, and the Ra expeditions in papyrus boats. The final entry is a page torn out of an old paperback version of the book Kon-Tiki—Heyerdahl’s account of his invitation/plea to his old friend Torstein Raaby to accompany him.

  Am going to cross the Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea Islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea Islands and back, and you will find a good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once.

  Next day the following telegram arrived.

  “Coming. Torstein.”

  My father decisively circled the last line and placed beside it an exclamation mark. Then he repeated the phrase in his own hand . . . Coming. Torstein.

  He was going to use this excerpt as the basis of a sermon. I think that he recognized in these two words a previously unexpressed motto for his own life. His creed.

  When I think of him like that, I don’t see the Old Crow and the landfill, and the urine stains. I don’t think of him the way he died that night, on the floor of the little apartment with the paramedics trying to revive him. I see him as he was that day in Desolation Valley, astride the giant mule.

  The sky is as black as the mule. The hairs on my arms and neck are anxious, like iron filings around a magnet. Thunder booms out between Dick’s and Jack’s Peaks. The kids’ bodies are stiff with fear. And my father is yodeling. Coming down the steep, slick switchback, the air seems to be raving with static electricity and my father is yodeling. As if that will keep the lightning away.

  And damn me if it didn’t.

  TO END BEFORE YOUR TIME IS WHERE ALL THE TROUBLE GROWS

  HOME AWAY—RETURN TO CODA

  Yes, whatever did happen to that squirrel?

  Once, long ago, they told us in school there was a time when a squirrel could cross an entire state without ever touching the ground. But they didn’t tell us that California foothills that had been golden for centuries would suddenly lose their live oaks and hawks to brick-veneer houses sprouting silver antennae that shone in the sun. Those houses filled the entire valley in less than two years and made us think even more intently about the squirrels of the not-so-distant past.

  Then one night, when the moon was full and there were no good television shows on, the idea came to me—like a magical cure. Like the night I taught myself how to ride a bike.

  Maybe we could turn the houses back into golden grass and trees, if we traveled the twenty-two miles of the valley without ever touching the ground—leaping over the shingles and ceramic tiles of all those roofs—at ni
ght when no one was watching and we were supposed to be in bed. We could reclaim the roofs. All of them. If we started from Noel’s house, in the newer subdivision, we stood a chance.

  There were three of us in on the expedition—Noel, Kim and me. Kim thought we should tell the newspapers or the Guinness Book of World Records, but Noel and I wanted to keep the journey a secret. We wanted to leave while the moon was bright. We wanted to leap between the black-windowed houses with the dogs barking and the water gleaming in the swimming pools.

  It was harder work than we thought. Kim was fat and sometimes almost fell. We heard sirens and got scared, but the air was sweet and biting with the scent of distant alfalfa and freshly watered lawns. We could hear the steady whoosh of the trucks on the interstate as we always could back in our beds, but the sound was more acute and resonant in the open air and made us wonder harder than ever where they all were going.

  We kicked sun-dried, pulpy newspapers out of rain gutters, we whistled down chimneys, we broke off a TV aerial and carried it like a standard, then chucked it like a javelin into an empty doghouse. We were simultaneously explorers and burglars—two very great things to be at least once in life, and no one in the world knew where we were or why we’d gone.

  We learned an important lesson that night. We found out you can hide behind a chimney while a dachshund barks its head off only so long before you realize it’s a dachshund. You can cross a hundred roofs but you will never experience that delicious life-mad fear the same way again. You will never whisper as you whispered that first time, or feel so intimately concerned with the fine fur on a cat’s back, seen in the sudden illumination of a flashlight held in a frightened homeowner’s hand.

  Twenty-two miles is a hell of a long way, and no, we didn’t make it all the way, by any stretch of even our own imaginations. But did we return home? That’s my question. Home is a mysterious place—seemingly the same but forever changed, when you’ve traveled as far as we did that night. So many years later, and I’ve lived a hundred lifetimes’ worth of nights beneath that moon. I’ve scaled derelict oil tanks on a beach in North Africa, and fallen off a camel drunk in the heart of Australia, only to be awakened by wild horses splashing in a red-rock creek. Still I don’t know if I found my way back home that morning or if I just reached a jumping-off place. Jump with me, go higher and higher.