I did a few stories for Sports Illustrated. One of them was on bicycle polo-a sport played during one of our recent recessions and mostly by Argentinians who temporarily could not afford strings of ponies. They pumped furiously around the lovely manicured lawns of Southampton on fat-tired dirt bicycles. They wielded sawed-off mallets. Silver trophies shone in the late afternoon sun. The girls who came to watch wore designer jeans and ballet slippers. I knew a lot of them. Farmington. Garrison Forest. They asked after my sister. They lolled on the grass as if posed there by fashion photographers. Many of them wore large straw hats. The players were completely serious about what they were doing on those little bicycles, as solemn as owls-helmet-clad, rugby shirts with big numbers on the back, the little mallets held aloft as they churned about those ocean estates. There was an entire league as I recall-Westbury, Purchase, Meadowbrook ... all those posh polo centers. Elaborate dinners and dances were given for them in the evening. Everyone knew that things were going to get better and it was only a matter of time before the players were off those little dirt bicycles with the fat tires and back onto their ponies, kept for them somewhere, Texas probably, in the interim.
I had an interesting enough life, full of the unexpected that came up with each assignment. I traveled. There always seemed to be a half-empty suitcase on the floor of my little one-room apartment in Manhattan. I enjoyed being with the people I wrote about, and in the company of my fellow writers. I spent too much time getting down to the Lion's Head in the Village, and coming back so boozy on one occasion, I slept past my stop and ended up in the Bronx.
Then, in 1971, after three lunches in The Four Seasons with an editor who thought I would have a "fresh" eye on the "human" side of things there, I went to Vietnam. It turned out to be a grave mistake. I know writers-a lot of them my friends from the Lion's Head-for whom that place was like walking into a candy store. It was as if they had been waiting around for a story that finally came. My own ability, which was to find little mockeries-like Argentine ex-millionaires pumping around on bicycles playing polo-was overwhelmed by the scale of the buffoonery going on there.
I liked the helicopters. When they tilted flying at a couple of hundred feet, the jungle canopy below seemed as harmless as a thick carpet of grass, almost beckoning, like a pillow, and I got so used to being up there that I felt I could unbuckle my seat belt and step out the open door into the slipstream and float above all that like a balloon. Some journalists who enjoyed helicopter flights called them "joy pops." I even liked the night flights. The enormous clatter of the blades took me through the cottony comfort of the darkness. Even ground fire, rising up in slow orange balls, seemed ethereal and harmless, ornamental rather than deadly.
I wrote a number of pieces from Vietnam-especially about the helicopter people. But what I put down became increasingly frantic, garbled, opinionated, finally unprintable I would have guessed (I have never checked to see) and then suddenly some internal capping took place within my head and the torrent of words stopped.
Officially, I was suffering from something quite novel among journalists, but common enough among the field soldiers-what the Veterans Administration called "posttraumatic stress disorder." The symptoms were identifiable enough: paralyzing depressions, a sense of shame, even guilt; abrupt fits of anger, suspicion, and so forth. In the First World War the affliction was called "shell shock" -a fine description that suggested the incessant shelling of trench warfare, the great range of sounds from the violence of shell explosions to the patter of dirt on the iron of the helmet as one cowered in the trenches. All this simply unhinged one after a while, and he had to be removed to the rear areas. In the Second World War the phenomenon was given a more euphemistic name-"battle fatigue" ... as if what had happened was nothing that a few zzzzzz's wouldn't solve. The victims just got awfully tired.
Now it had a grander name you could really get your teeth into. "Post-traumatic stress disorder." It not only brought my writing to an abrupt stop-a truly astonishing case of writer's block-but I could not get it going again. I was hard-pressed to write out a laundry list. Letters, even to my family, were impossible. I stared at the blank pages of my fold-back notebook.
I stayed on in Vietnam until almost the very end. I hung around. I was like a street person. The magazine disconnected me as their correspondent. Finally I came back home-that swift impossible conversion by jet plane from life in a rice paddy to the Oakland Army Terminalin a kind of bum's rush with very little preparation for the transition. I did not feel I could survive without straightening things out for myself. I called my sister and told her what I was going to do. I leased a little log cabin in the pine forests of the Olympic Peninsula and hunkered down there.
I do not know how you measure bad times. By terms, perhaps, as in "prison terms." My first term was a couple of years-living in a strange niche in the American postVietnam War culture: in the still, pine forests of the Olympic Peninsula with the Pacific on one coast and Puget Sound on the other. In there with me, though I rarely saw them, were others. We were known as "trip-wire veter- ans"-all of us suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." We were called trip-wire veterans because that was how we guarded our solitude-setting out wires around our abodes so that an intruder would trip an alarm device of some sort.
I put a few trip-wires out myself. They were wired to little bells, the kind that ring in antique shops when you open the door. Other people out there in the pines did much more to protect themselves in this savage kind of isolation-huge deadfalls, homemade mines as big as garbage can covers, tiger traps, booby-trap systems, all of these connected with wires stretched thin across the ground like a vast trellis, and there were tunnels into which they could duck, and fox holes, and in the pine-log and tin cabins they had built-like World War I redoubts -they sat staring out across the invisible networks of wires, often with a Winchester in their laps.
When I took walks through the pines I moved carefully, because if I saw the horizontal lines of a log cabin or the glint of tin I knew I could be coming up on someone like that. It was very quiet in the pines. Once in a while the sounds of ships' horns drifted in from Puget Sound, an odd sea-sound amid the tree trunks. Twilight was the frightening time. The sunlight, filtering through the pines, gave way to shadow. The French have a phrase for this time of day-le temps entre le chien et le loup ... the time between the dog and the wolf...
From time to time I'd walk through the forest to the firebreak and from there to the blacktop highway, about ten miles away, maybe more, to thumb a ride to Forks, which was the nearest place for supplies.
Out in the pines the people usually ate what they could catch. They smoked the salmon brought in from the Sound, and there were brook and steelhead trout from the streams. Rabbit and squirrel were all right in stews. I fished almost every day; the noise of a gun made me shake for minutes after firing it, so my fish diet was supplemented by packets of dried food I toted out from Forks in my backpack. Beef tetrazzini was my favorite. Once I had beef tetrazzini for a week.
The magazines kept in touch with me for a while. My sister forwarded the mail. I picked it up when I went in to Forks. It was easy enough to read the letters, but the idea of putting words to paper even to answer the editors was too formidable an exercise. The letters seemed communications from another planet-packets that had dropped down through the tops of the pines. The editors wanted stories on vacation spots-the "Hotels of Bermuda," "Polo in Jamaica," "Fishing the Lochs" . . . as if their way of getting me back on track was to combine the assignment with the pleasures of a spa.
Actually, I mended in there. It was the kind of therapy that comes from living from one day to the next, not expecting too much. Others in the pine forests set up structured programs for themselves. One of the few trip-wire veterans I met out there (when he came to see me the sudden knock on my door made me jump ... not one of my antique-store bells had jangled) said he had been able to collect his wits by days of spying on a herd of elk. He crept up on them b
uck-ass naked, a long crawl from his log cabin on his elbows, infantryman style, to an orchardlike clearing in the woods where the elk liked to spend their days and bed down in the evening. In the early morning there was always a thick ground mist, about two feet deep, through which he crawled, the moisture cool on his bare skin. He would rise up slowly from time to time to see where he was, and then submerge into the cottony gloom, like a submarine, and move ponderously forward across the forest floor. He told me that the elk family never did anything that was surprising, or really very interesting. They grazed, lay their gray bulks down in the meadow grass; they turned their great antlered heads; their jaws moved sideways, and they looked aimlessly into a bovine middle distance. It was their undisturbed life that was so soothing for him to watch; a large ear flicked at a horsefly; he could hear the sound of their breathing, the sound of grazing. The suck of their hooves in the meadow grass. The slow, dull tempo, just about somnambulant, of their easy lives. Even spying on them made him feel good, because he felt he was a part of it. He used to tell me that it gave him assurance that the whole world wasn't caving in.
I was even tempted to ask him if I could creep down through the mists with him. But the suspicion crossed my mind that I would not find the peace he did ... that the size of these great pronged horns would frighten me.
Actually, the guy never really understood why I was in the pines. I was a writer, after all; I was an observer. I had not done any of the things in the paddy fields and the fire lines that had put him in there.
I went to the telegraph office in Forks to wire my sister for money to come home. I think the thought of creeping down on those elk made me realize that my therapy had to take place elsewhere. The girl behind the counter shoved a pad of yellow message blanks toward me. I glanced at the pen, which was attached to the counter by a bead chain. I told her that I could not write. I was an illiterate. Would she mind writing down my message for me. "No problem," she said brightly, as if illiterates were a common phenomenon in her office. I dictated to her. "Dear Sis . . . "
I never went back to the cabin.
My sister met me at the plane. We embraced and she told me I smelled of the woods.
"We'll go down and pick up your baggage."
"I don't have any baggage," I told her.
"You've been gone for three years and you have nothing to show for it?"
"I guess not. I should have brought a gift."
In New York I found very little serenity. I spent far too much time in my apartment. The phone was disconnected. I could barely hear the sounds from the street. I thought about taking the subway down to the Lion's Head, but not seriously. I ate beef tetrazzini. When my sister came she brought the food and cleaned up the kitchen afterward. The income from my family trust was enough to keep me going. I had very few expenses, after all. I went up and spent some good times with my family -my parents lived in Marblehead-but after a while I left, knowing that they were scaling down their social activity on my account. I did some aimless traveling. I went to Africa and took a trip on the Senegal River. I was urged to take notes, which I didn't. By mistake I left a little suitcase in Dakar and once again I arrived in New York with only the clothes on my back.
"No gifts?" my sister asked as I came up the ramp.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Perhaps next time."
I spent a bit over a decade in this kind of shiftless fog -nearly a castaway life ... vegetating (a word my sister dropped on me from time to time). I shipped out as a deckhand for two years on a freighter. We put in at the Seychelles, the island archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean-great granite rocks that rise out of the azure sea as if the coastline of Maine had been transported into the tropics-and I went back there and spent two years living in a small thatched-roof house on stilts set back in a palm grove just up from the sea. The chickens clucked and dusted under the floorboards. The view, down between the palms, was rarely changed by weather shifts. I was frozen in aspic.
An English schoolteacher lived with me for a while. We had interests but very little sharing of them. A patient sort, she was a bird-watcher-the Seychelles being an ornithologist's paradise-which led me to think she didn't mind my long silences. On occasion I worked on a sportfishing Bertram that went out into the Indian Ocean. At supper I would say we had caught two bonita. After a while she would allow that she had spent the day looking for the Black Paradise Flycatcher, but hadn't seen any. I would sink into my curious reveries of the time, and she into what I assumed were hers. I didn't think she minded this sedentary domestic kind of existence, but one day she said to me, "We are the oldest couple we shall ever know. I believe I am now at least eighty," and she left.
I moved myself-west to the African coast to the old slave port of Lamu at the mouth of the Tana River. There was one car in Lamu, the mayor's jeep, and the lamplights were gas. It's a place you can reach only by dropping into the tiny airstrip, or by dhow. There are less than a dozen Europeans in Lamu, at least when I was there. One of them was a famous professional hunter. When the full moon was out he took me down to the water. He said the elephants walked out and stood in the sea, the small rolls of surf washing past their flanks. We were never fortunate enough to see such a sight. I got malaria in Lamu, which didn't help, but I loved the place. I often dream of the wide white beaches, especially the elephants coming out across the sand dunes to the sea.
On the way back home I remembered just in time and in the Dar es Salaam airport I bought a souvenir spear. Its feathers were as bright as new paint and it would not have surprised me to discover it was made in Korea. My sister saw me coming down the ramp with it and she called out, "Oh, Robert, you remembered. Just what I wanted!"
My favorite place was my sister's bungalow in the Pass-a-Grille beach area of St. Petersburg. The artistic hangout of the area, it was a community at the tip of the peninsula with the Gulf on one side, the Bay on the other, and good beaches popular with the young crowd, who at night frequented the little restaurants perched along the canals off the Bay.
The bungalow had a backyard with a frog pond at the far end, which smelled of sulphur. In front was a large stone bird bath on a pedestal. Vegetation had piled up around the side of the house. The sunlight filtered through fitfully, dappling everything within. I walked barefoot on stone floors through a kind of goldfish-bowl hue. The house smelled pleasantly of wet leaves and mildew. A fan turned in the ceiling of each room. The place was larger than I needed-a large living-dining room, a kitchen off it, three bedrooms, a screened porch with a wicker writing table set up with a portable typewriter with a blank piece of paper, curled from the humidity, in the roller, and a large porch out back with comfortable sofas in bright Palm Beach patterns, one of them hanging from chains, and a sliding door on runners that opened out on the yard with the frog pond.
Our parents had given the bungalow to my sister when she got married-a honeymoon cottage. Her new husband was an Army fighter pilot. His face was so boyish and finely sculpted that it seemed age could never affect itas permanent as Cellini's Perseus, whose features it resembled quite astonishingly. It was the kind of face you see in grammar school and can never imagine seeing it turn adult; age would seem as silly on him as a mustache on a child at Halloween. His name was Thorvald. Everyone called him Toby, thank goodness, including my sister, except when she was mad at him.
Occasionally, in the bungalow, I would find evidence of their lives together. In the master bedroom was a large sketching pad ... with designs on it for an oil she was going to paint of him as an aviator. Plane fuselages. A sketch of an undercarriage. She was apparently planning on a portrait of Toby in an old-fashioned flying helmet with ear flaps and in the background what looked like a World War I Sopwith Camel with American markings.
Naturally, I never told my sister about my love of flying -those "joy pops" in Vietnam. In that part of the world, looking down at those green puffy hills from the helicopter, I had on occasion wondered if I was looking at the one on which Toby had "bought it
" as they liked to say. He was one of the first pilots killed in Vietnam.
Our parents lived in Marblehead. When my sister visited from New York, where she had a little studio, my parents took her out in Salty IV, their yawl, and she wrote me about lying in the sun up on the foredeck, the warm teak wood against her cheek and listening to the swells crack against the bow and gurgle back along the sides of the yacht. It was then she understood my absorption with isolation.
Everyone called my father Salty. He vaguely resembled Leverett Saltonstall, the craggy-faced New England senator; the nickname also reflected his obsession with the sea and sailing. When we were younger my sister and I crewed for him. He affected a pipe when he sailed, often upside down after he quit smoking, and he was adept at calling out orders with the pipe stem still in his mouth. We never saw the pipe except when he was on the water. It stayed aboard the Salty IV. My mother made a wall bracket in which it rested just off the companionway.
When my father retired from his investment counseling firm, they sold the apartment in New York City and the country home with the tennis court and the rose gardens in Cold Spring Harbor. They moved up to Marblehead into a smaller house because the country life by the water was what they truly craved and the summer cruising was better. Also, it was easier to get down to Narragansett Bay for the America's Cup trials and the races. It just about killed my father when the Australians took the Cup to Perth.
I don't know what my parents made of the two of us. We followed in their academic footsteps (Amherst and Smith). My sister's determination to paint, and her skill at it, and especially her refusal to be influenced by the abstract artists, delighted them, but my decision to write unnerved them, I suspect. They hoped my writing was an interim period, like being a ski bum for a couple of winters, or joining the Peace Corps, and that I would go on to something sensible and secure-at the very least into publishing. My father knew one or two publishers and felt they were sensible, even "top-drawer"-a description he used for people he truly admired.
The Curious Case of Sidd Finch Page 4