THE EVERMAN JOURNAL
Clark E. Tanner
In the mid 1960’s there was no '911'. There were no cell phones, no internet, and in small communities often no law enforcement within miles. Sometimes a person in trouble had to fend for himself.
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PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
My name is Cole Everman. I’m sixty-two years old and I’m not going to be sixty-three. It is really quite an amazing experience, knowing when one is going to die. If I ever in my life attempted to imagine what it would be like I know now that I would have imagined wrongly. Or at best, incompletely.
I won’t try to impress upon you here, the kaleidoscope of emotions that color the initial revelation and the process of rejection, denial and acceptance that follow.
In preparing you for what you are about to read, it is only necessary that I share with you two immediate results of suddenly being able to see the dark gate at the end of the road. One, is a sense of a fatalistic sort of urgency. Not an urgency to hurry up and die, but to make some use of the brief span of time you have left. Isn’t that odd? Most of us never know when we will awaken to our last day – our last hour – yet if time was water and we were in control of the spigot, every last one of us would be guilty of just letting it run out on the ground, coming to it at our leisure for a drink or a bath or to fill our fish tank. We just let time tick on, while we daydream or spend hours in useless pursuits. Then once in a while a guy like me finds out exactly how much he has left, and all of a sudden he is a time conservationist, not wanting to so much as take a nap.
The other immediate reaction to receiving the news is an overwhelming desire to make known so many things that have not been spoken or even thought of, in some cases for many years. I mean, you start thinking of things you need to say to people that maybe you’ve known in the back of your mind for a long time that you wanted to say, but you didn’t say them, and now it is crucial that you spill it out.
Think about it. Most people love to talk, and whether we’ll admit it or not, the topic we love most is ourselves. As we grow and develop in childhood, if we have good teachers, we learn to be polite and let the attention be upon others. But until we learn that, every kid from one year to whatever wants it all to be about ‘me’ and ‘I’. So no matter our age, if we learn that our opportunity to talk has been closed in discernible brackets, we revert to that early impulse and we need to say as many words as we can while we can still say words, and we want them to be about ‘me’ and ‘I’. Well, that’s my experience. Maybe someone has done a study and published it in some psychology book somewhere. I don’t know and I don’t have the time or incentive to check. Maybe you’ll want to Google it.
If you come across others who have been alerted to the imminence of their demise you might ask them if they share these thoughts and feelings. Just the fact that I am experiencing them does not mean I have some supernatural ability now to perceive all that is of mind and spirit around me – as though being near death automatically imbues a person with special gifts of sight. That’s television stuff, and those shows last about five minutes.
I can really only speak for myself, and I can tell you honestly that I do not want to leave this world without ensuring that someone out there knows my history, my accomplishments that have gone heretofore unnoticed and unacknowledged, my secret thoughts pertaining to a time in my life that was absolutely pivotal in setting me onto the road I have walked.
So here I am, approaching that dark gate, almost close enough to push through. So I write.
One day in the Fall of 1963, on the school playground Frankie Valerio threw a little stone. He meant for it to bounce harmlessly off the front of my shirt, instead it hit the right lens of my glasses. In those days glasses were really glass, so the lens shattered and a couple of small bits of it were trapped under my eyelid. I was taken to the doctor, of course, and he picked out the glass and I was fine; thank you for wondering.
Where this applies to my story is, that during the time I waited for my new lens to come in, and being very near-sighted, I was seeing clearly with my left eye and nothing but fuzzy shadows with my right.
Therefore, when the Methodist Youth played softball on the back lot of the church my dad pastored, although I was required by my parents to play because I was the pastor’s kid, I got to stand in the outfield and do nothing. Well, I always stood in the outfield and did nothing. But this particular day, before he started pitching, my dad held up his hands for quiet and told the youth group, “Now keep in mind that Cole’s pretty much seeing with one eye right now and his depth perception will be affected. So go easy if you have to throw him the ball.”
Well I was just happier than a tick on a fat dog with no rear legs, for two reasons. One was that he had given me the perfect excuse to miss any fly balls that came my way – which I would have missed on any day – and the second was that when it came my time in the batter’s box my dad ‘stood in’ for me and when he hit the ball I got to run the bases. And he always hit the ball, and while I hated sports, I loved to run.
That day has lived as a full-color snapshot in my memory for all these years simply because it was the one and only time I played any kind of team sport that I actually enjoyed it.
At this point you may be wondering why I opened with that particular story. Well, it is because it demonstrates just the seedling of who I became; who I am. You will understand later.
Yep, I loved to run. Ironically, there were times in my life that wisdom would have dictated I run and I chose not to. One of those times got me in trouble. In fact, it almost got me killed. But it also changed me for the better. What I am telling you now I have never told anyone. My parents, Don and Darlene Everman, both died not knowing and the only living person who was involved on the fringes of the following events is my older sister, Nancy, seventeen at that time, from whom I have been estranged for lo these many years so assuming she is still alive somewhere, she’ll never read this anyway, and even she never knew how it all ended.
Well, that school year came to a close and during the summer of 1964 my dad got a phone call from the District Superintendent, who offered him a new church somewhere in central California. My dad accepted. He always accepted. Every eighteen months to two years they would offer a new church and he never said ‘no’. I never questioned it back then. Since that was the lifestyle of our family since I was five years old, I didn’t know anything different. By the time I was ten or eleven I would just pack my stuff when told to and get in the car when it was time to go. Looking back on it now I understand that for my dad the grass was always greener over the next rise.
This time the ‘next rise’ took us to a dumpy little town named Trinidad. Now there is a city called Trinidad in northern California, at the coast, above Eureka. This was not that pretty, seaside fishing community with ten beautiful public beaches. The Trinidad we moved to was eight miles off the nearest main highway and probably the least known hamlet in all of Stanislaus County. It had been a receiving town for logs floated down the nearby Tuolumne River many years past, but since that business had been taken on the railroad tracks and then the highway, Trinidad had stagnated.
Trinidad had its beginning as a gold mining town, just like most places anywhere near Sacramento and almost all places north of there during the mid-1800’s. The rush got its historical start in Coloma, about forty eight miles north east of the Capital, when a logging foreman named Marshall discovered gold flakes at the edge of t
he American river. He took them to his boss, John Sutter, who wanted to keep the find a secret because he owned almost 50,000 acres of land in that area and had aspirations of developing a large agricultural empire and didn’t want prospectors swarming into the region and spoiling it all. But word did get out. And when President James Polk got wind of it he officially and publicly confirmed the find, sparking the gold rush and therefore westward expansion of the country.
Well, Trinidad was one of many “boom” towns that sprung up; this one along the Tuolumne River, and when the gold played out in that area many of the hopeful prospectors moved on. But some stayed, giving up their dreams of instant wealth, and partnered with logging companies still in operation to the north. This kept the small town alive, but it stayed small. By the time the logging business went, a third generation of citizens there knew no other life so they stayed on, finding other ways to survive and raising families of their own. They just never got around to putting their heads together to find ways to entice outsiders to move there and grow the community into something better. That happened to a lot of those boom towns. Many are now ghost towns; some still around for visitors to walk through; most just stayed like Trinidad. Even Coloma, where it all started, still only has a little over 500 residents.
Trinidad had no municipal government that I was ever aware of. There were no police. You need to know that for later. There was a Stanislaus County Sheriff’s deputy named Ramirez who lived there, but when he was on duty his patrol assignment must have been somewhere else because I never saw him in a Sheriff’s patrol vehicle. In fact, I only know of him because I’m pretty sure he saved me once from serious bodily injury.
The first significant aspect of this particular move, in my thirteen year old mind, was that the parsonage was new. That fact alone is amazing since nothing new was going on in Trinidad. But the church had been saving and scraping for a long time, and as the board members explained it to my dad, previous pastors had been living in a hovel that let the weather in through so many places it was difficult to heat it in the winter and impossible to keep the flies out in the Summer. So they had built a new one. By the time they finished it their pastor was ready to retire, so we got to move into the new house. This was significant, I say, because it was the first time in my life that I had lived in something that didn’t let the weather in, or have a tilted floor, or doors that wouldn’t close properly or some other major defect, or combination thereof. I guess it was just the Methodist way, to keep their pastors humble by keeping them destitute and uncomfortable.
That brings to mind another snapshot memory I have from a younger age. One day my dad asked me if I wanted to walk with him to the grocery store for milk and bread. As we stood in line to pay I was surprised to hear him mutter, “I hope this week they decide to pay me something”. I don’t think it was intended for my ears. It was probably more of a prayer than something meant for human ears. It was the closest thing to complaining that I ever heard from Don Everman. The funny thing is, it made me proud of him right at that moment and I think I was only ten or eleven. I was proud because I knew what he was doing with his life wasn’t for money; proud because with the few cents he had in his pocket he was buying bread and milk for me and Nancy.
So anyway, here was this year-old house that we were blessed to move into. It was a ranch style house. I don’t think it was more than twenty five feet from front to back at any point. It was more of a line of rooms, starting with the garage – on your right if you were outside looking at the front – then moving left from there was the kitchen, dining room, living room, then a hallway going the rest of the way, with three bedrooms and a bathroom off the hall in each direction. There was a small half bathroom kind of between the garage and kitchen and toward the back. If you walked in the front door, the living room was on your right and that was the point where the hall started to the left. All the carpet was new, the paint was new, the kitchen appliances were new, and the back yard was big enough for a troop of Boy Scouts to camp in. The only time I didn’t like that was when it came time to mow.
I have to tell you, though, that after the newness of it wore off for me I realized one day that I had felt just as much at home in all the previous shacks in which we had lived. I was grateful and I’m sure my parents were ecstatic. But I came to realize that it’s not the structure that makes it a home. Lesson learned.
The second aspect of that move that struck me initially was the proximity of the town to the innumerable places for me to hike and explore up river. I was pretty much a loner. I wasn’t James Dean. I was just a skinny introverted little kid with very thick glasses who liked to herd by himself. So although I made one or two friends every place we lived, for the most part I liked quiet and I liked doing things alone, and I liked plinking with my .22. Yes, in those days a boy could find a place away from civilization and shoot cans or sticks, or rabbits if he wanted to. Back then, I could walk downtown with my rifle in my hand, go in the grocery store and buy food for camping, and no one thought a thing of it. Things have changed. But I’m getting off track.
Let it suffice to say, the Trinidad branch of the Tuolumne River was a great place for me to spend a good deal of my time.
So, that’s the introduction to my story. It was 1964, the younger kids were playing with Easy Bake ovens and GI Joe’s (Joe was the first action figure for boys – Ken joined Barbie in 1961 but Ken was for girls). John F. Kenney’s November 1963 assassination was still about the biggest topic of conversation everywhere you went, and everyone had their very own conspiracy theory about whether Oswald acted alone or was just a patsy for the Mob or the CIA, and although the United States had advisors in Vietnam since 1957, we were still only there in an ‘unofficial’ capacity and most Americans had no clue where the little country was. In the course of the year, and on the wake of their historical appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February, a band from England called The Beatles would have no less than six number one hits being played on 45’s by my sister and every other girl from 15 to 23. David Jansen was “The Fugitive”, Jim Nabors was “Gomer Pyle” in the USMC, not just Gomer in Mayberry any longer, Mr. Whipple was asking housewives at the grocery store to “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin”, and my big mouth and my Remington .22 caliber bolt action rifle with nylon stock were about to entangle me with people that most folks would say a kid shouldn’t get on the bad side of, if he plans to turn fourteen.
CHAPTER 2
During the time we lived in Trinidad, or “Trinidud” as I often called it, invoking my father’s annoyance and the rolling of Nancy’s eyes, there were five kids that I hung with, almost exclusively. At this point in my life I can’t even remember more than a handful of other names of people who crossed my path during our tenure there. I have a vague recollection of a few faces, and I can dredge up a few of the adults who were either in our church or taught at the school, but that’s all. When you live in a town for less than eighteen months of your early teen years, you aren’t likely to be able to come up with a large number of details, including names, forty-eight years later.
The guy I spent the most time with was Lee Hansen. Lee was a butterball. He wasn’t fat. He was just more interested in reading or assembling model cars than doing anything physical. I remember thinking of him as a little chubby then; by today’s standards he’d be svelte. Lee had a good sense of humor. You never knew when he’d pull some kind of head game just to see if you were paying attention. For example, one Saturday we were alone at my house and talking about walking down town for something. He had been expected home so he said he needed to call home to clear staying out longer. I was at the far end of the kitchen while he dialed the rotary phone. He stopped and stood with the receiver to his ear as though waiting for someone to answer, when I suddenly felt like something was wrong about the sound of his dialing. I asked, “Did you dial all seven numbers?” Lee laughed out loud and as he dialed the final number he said “I was just testing to see if you’d notice”. He was quick with
the corn also. One day when several of us were on a trip with the church youth group and my dad was driving, one of the girls handed Lee her hair brush and asked, “Will you tease my hair?” – If you don’t know what ‘teasing’ is, Google it - So Lee took the brush in one hand, but pointed to her hair with the other and said, “Ha ha, stupid hair; stupid hair”. Yeah. That was Lee Hansen. We spent a lot of time talking about Hardy Boys mysteries we had read, or just lazing around reading Marvel comics. Here’s another little trivia tidbit for you. In those days you were loyal to either Marvel or DC. There was very little ‘crossover’ reading. Lee never went to the woods with me. As I said, nothing physical for Lee other than the few times we visited the girls.
There were three girls, all in the same family although one was adopted. I knew them because they were in the youth group. The Lagorio sisters. We never ran into one another at school unless during a recess time or lunch. I don’t know why I never had classes with any of them. I probably knew then; just don’t remember.
One was Yolanda. I mention her first because she was pretty and she was the one I had a crush on. Her step sisters were Betty, a year older than Yolanda, and Karen, about a year and a half younger. Karen was the one who had her hair ‘teased’ by Lee. Betty and Karen were hard on the eyes. I never said it aloud but I can remember thinking that it was ironic that Yolanda was the pretty adoptee and she had two ugly step sisters. Glass slipper, anyone? Betty had a very round face and a unibrow. Her nose was a bulb at the end and her mouth turned down. When she laughed her expression looked more painful than mirthful. Karen was small and mousey, with so many freckles her face was almost red instead of white, and glasses not quite as thick as mine. They weren’t ugly on the inside though. Very nice girls. Very nice family. Their dad had pear orchards, and there were always fifteen or twenty chickens running around in front of their rosewood colored ranch style house. They lived several miles outside of town and their dirt drive from the county road to the house was about a quarter of a mile. Lee and I would ride our bikes out there once in a while and hang around eating their mom’s cookies and drinking Pepsi. I can’t say whether Lee was there for anything but the snacks, or just to keep me company, or just because he was a more well-rounded person socially than I and simply liked the company of the family. Speaking for myself though, I was there to look at Yolanda’s satin-smooth tan skin, her twinkling eyes, her cute developing figure and her sweet smile.
The Everman Journal Page 1