Chapter 20. The Descent

The trip to Idaho sank me into a marose reflection
that was exactly what I needed

Priest Lake is my spiritual base. It has been a wholesome connection to nature and family since my earliest years. In the beginning, the family drove fifty miles from Spokane Valley to Priest River Idaho and another forty-mile stretch over a gravel and washboard road to a post office, general store, restaurant and bar, called Nordman. From there it was another three miles on a sometimes oiled dirt and washboard road to Elkins Resort and Reeder Bay. Reeder Bay campgrounds had dozen or so campsites above the beach that stretched a half mile of sandy beach from Elkins Resort to a rocky point with twin pines leaning out over the waters.

In those first years Max Senior would rent a small ten to twelve-foot-long rowboat powered by ten-horse outboard engines. The lake waters weren’t at all crowded then. There were only a few grand mahogany Chris Craft power boat on the lake and a few families like ours had the waters to ourselves. Water skiing and Jet Skis weren’t around yet to interrupt the innocent pleasures of trolling for silvers, building a raft for the kids, or paddling out on inner-tubes to where the sandy bottom turns deep blue that we ominously called The Drop-off.  People had to want to be on that lake really bad to endure the trip from Priest River to Reeder Bay. Otherwise, the less committed went to Pend Oreille, or Coeur d’Alene, lakes.

The trip to Upper Priest wasn’t accessible any other way but by boat via a meandering waterway everyone called The Thoroughfare. We’d head out each year from the campgrounds at Reeder Bay on a four-hour ride up through the winding and pristine Thoroughfare to Upper Priest lake. It was an all-day outing that easily turned into a hazardous adventure because, no matter how calm the lake was on the way up the lake, it often came rolling over the gunwales on the way back with waves that white-capped at three feet. Three-foot waves would be nothing in a craft designed for them but these little rentals, crammed to the gunnels with kids and gear, took foolish courage or good boatswain ship to navigate the trip. Later on Dad built a sixteen-foot run-about, of Chris Craft hull design, mounted with a forty-horse Evinrude outboard engine for water skiing. Dad also crafted a pair of skis for the kids. He was living the dream he came home to enjoy after returning from the ravages of war in Europe.

I had fond memories of roasting marshmallows over an open fire on the beach; of the full moon rising from behind Chimney Rock high above the lake; of the Selkirk Mountain range made for a perfect backdrop above the rolling hills; of hills covered with tamarack, lodge-pole pine, hemlock, blue spruce and cedar. And the forests glades were filled with huckleberry and blackberry bushes that nourished a healthy population of black bear. It was then, the first two weeks of August that our Dad timed family vacations.

Labor Day Week:

The trip to Idaho sank me into a morose reflection that was exactly what I needed. I didn’t have a drink until I got to Weed. I pulled Furthurmore over at the rest stop that used to be at the junction of I-5 and Route-97. I’d been playing a Louis Armstrong/ Ella Fitzgerald’s duet of, You’re Learning the Blues, with a dozen other heartbreak songs, crying and singing, all the way up from Santa Barbara. I sang along loud over the rattle of the engine;

The cigarettes you light, one after another… didn’t help you forget her… and the way that you love her… You’re only burning… a torch you can’t lose… but you’re was on the right track… for learning the blues.

Taking a toke off the pint of Jack I kept in the tool box in the back of the van, I stretched on the tool box and drifted off to sleep until I thought I heard a couple of vagrants arguing over one of the barbeque stands. One sounded remarkably like that old stick from Pal’s, Lucky.

“Damn it,” Lucky protested, “I can’t fuckin’ get to him as long as you keep thwarting me at every turn!”

“Don’t blame me. I have no control over his decisions. Even the Kahuna won’t do that.” The vagrant answered.

“Yeh, well, I almost have him,” Lucky demanded, “You keep your bargain and it will be done!”

Long-distance road trips through those wide-open spaces between cities in the West, the hum of a well-tuned engine, and the open road ahead, put me in a state of contemplation that I considered to be a powerful meditation. Automatically mindful of the road and the sounds of the vehicle, I was in the mind as though floating on a carpet. I could never drive like Neal Cassidy… drive until the bolts fell off and the engine burned up. I had too much respect for the machine. A big part of the responsibility I felt had to do with the fact that I owned the machines I drove and Dean Moriarty didn’t. But, nevertheless, a long stretch of highway on the open road was similarly a balm to my soul.

Route-97 through Oregon was a shorter route by miles but a longer voyage on the clock. By the time I got to Coolin Idaho I was ready for a drink. My nephews kept the campfire burning awaiting my arrival at the site by midnight after driving straight through from Weed. This began a three-day binge in which I was able to shove aside feelings for the Fu with feasting and boozing. I kept up with the young’uns, sitting up at the fire long after all the others had hit the sack, and I prayed for the oblivion of alcohol.

Max Senior, quietly watched my dissipation as though the old veteran understood. My mother, Arlene, tried to slow me down with disapproving comments and glances. She once asked me, “Are you going to waste your college degree digging ditches?”

“Awe, Mom, there’s nothing wrong with digging ditches. It’s honest labor,” I defended myself against the stern prosecution of a concerned mother.

My sisters, all mothers and grandmothers themselves, kindly tolerated my excesses until one afternoon I’d arrived at the campfire with a joint in my mouth proclaiming, “My name is Max and I’m an alcoholic, anyone have a light!”

The next day my sister, Colleen, approached me, asking cautiously, “Do you remember yesterday?”

“Yeh, sure.” I thought I had been hilarious... “lots of laughs, eh?”

“There were children… you had a joint in your mouth… do you remember staggering around saying, ‘My name is Max and I’m an alcoholic!’ Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.” I recalled that maybe I wasn’t all that funny.

“You were their hero once. You know that?” She grabbed my arm as I began to turn away, “The kids call their Uncle Max, the old drunk, now. You gotta get a grip on yourself or I won’t have you in my house around my grandchildren.”

Coleen’s admonition didn’t slow me down until the family gathering broke camp after the last Labor Day feast. Everyone had packed their cars heading back to their homes in Spokane Valley and I packed up the van for the trip back to Santa Barbara. My father sat with me at the campfire before everyone departed. The tents were down, the kids packed into cars, and the cabins closed up by then.

“What are you doing with your life now, Max?” my Dad rarely talked with me like that. He hardly ever had to and had been proud of his son’s accomplishments and adventures. After all, his son was the first of his children to get a degree from college and had a future beyond working in a factory.

As the question broke through the fog of oblivion, I tried to answer but had nothing, “There isn’t much goin’ on at this time, dad.”

“When I was on the Rhine, artillery shells were blasting holes a hundred yards wide and a hundred feet deep…,” Dad spoke quietly. He rarely spoke of the war. He didn’t boast of war just as no one in my family knew anything of my sojourn in Nicaragua. Dad continued, “We were there. We had no idea what the Generals had in mind. We did our jobs: the Germans did their jobs too; brutally, but they had a job to do and so did we. There was no way to dig in deep enough. I realized that fate was all that kept my life from any meaning beyond a pair of Dog Tags in an envelope.”

“What are you getting at Dad?”

“You have a job to do now. It’s Ariel. No matter what you achieve from the time she was born… this is your calling.” He put an arm over my shoulder using his unique sense of humor that tempered any serious lecture, affectionately adding, “It is not chasing pussy around with nothing to show for it.”

I got back in Santa Barbara after mulling over the situation with the Fu, and my father’s words, for 1,400 miles. By the time I pulled up in my yard, retrieved Homer from his vacation pen, and checked for messages (mostly from the Fu complaining about the Freeloader), I was ready to tie on a good one. The drinking I’d done in Northern Idaho was tempered by friends and family… but now I hit it hard. I went to Pal’s first, downed a few brews, letting Claire and friends know I was back in town and then I went back home. It had to be the Jack Daniels but against my better judgment I was compelled to check-in with the Fu.

I punched out the Fu’s number. The phone rang a half dozen times before it was picked up, “Hullo?” Bad news, it was a male’s voice.

“Who’s this?” I asked but, of course, I knew.

“Why, who’re you?” the voice on the other end had to know who I was too.

“Oh, you’re the Freeloader.” I couldn’t resist getting in one jab… “Is the Fu … er, Adrienne, there.”

“Is this Max?”

“Yeh, I want to talk to Adrienne.”

I wasn’t sure but thought I heard a doped-up voice, smacked-up, in the background, “Who ees eet? … Ees eet Max? … Lemme talk to heem right now. No, no, I weel call heem later.”

“She isn’t here; can I take a message?”

“I have one for you, Rod.” There was no response, “Go fuck yourself.” I hung up before Rod could respond.

Fresh in my memory was the first time I met Rod. It was an awkward dinner with the Fu in which Rod and I had been the only guests. First off, Rod asked the Fu about her accent. She told him it was French and Rod launched into the usual pathetic apologetic American crap about how the French are so much more sophisticated than us and how embarrassing it is that we have no culture over on this uncivilized side of “The Pond”. When fools talk like this it is to imply, “though my compatriots are bores, I am most certainly not.” These exclamations are usually followed by a subservience that would be complete with the wagging of a tail had it come from the obeisance of a puppy dog. The Fu was cordial and her ego was mildly fluffed but she moved the subject to other topics.

Dinner was winding down, the Fu had gotten a bit tipsy and quipped, “I had a boyfriend who wouldn’t leave after the party was over…” This was a hint that either Rod, or I, should leave soon?

“Oh,” interrupted Rod, “You just let me know who the next one is and I’ll take care of him for you.”

“You don’t know Adrienne,” I was getting tired of this oaf anyway; “She can take care of herself… and you too, for all that matters.”

She laughed, caressed my shoulder, gave me a peck on the cheek and changed the subject. After Rod left she admitted he was a jerk and playing solitaire with a short deck. I was glad that I was the chosen one to stay and figured that this was the end of it with Rod. Because of this incident I was understandably miffed when a month later Rod had moved, not only into her house, but, into her bed. She had been hanging out with Rod in Manuel’s while I had been at work. Rod saw an opening and had affectively moved me out of her life.

I should have been happy to be rid of her at this turn of events but the fact that this Freeloader was in her bed drove me crazy… crazy in every sense of the word. Crazy, yes, but this insanity couldn’t be called jealousy. It was more a feeling of outrage that she had scooped up a bottom feeder that was a lower form of life… even lower than me. Her dalliance with the Navy Seal was tolerable, though it evoked those feelings of jealousy, envy, and of my own inadequacy. By comparison, I thought I had little to offer. After all, the SEAL was a Vietnam War combat vet and an accomplished diver who owned his own house, boat, and diving business. He had done well for himself. So, how was I ever going to compete with that? I rented a hovel, dug ditches for a living, and was drunk or stoned most of the time. I had nothing to offer the Fu above and beyond my complete and total devotion.

The Navy Seal was clearly out of my league. But this creep, Rodney, was several notches down from where I thought I was. I worked hard for a living and paid my bills. I didn’t take a free ride from anybody and couldn’t tolerate the slightest control over me by taking a handout from my parents, any woman, or the government (except for my VA comp). I’d observed that there was a culture of far too many freeloading punks in Santa Barbara that lived off the good graces of all three. Very few had ever known what it was like to bail themselves out of jail on their own dime. I couldn’t understand how she could prefer another spoiled rotten, piece of shit, toy-boy like this in her bed rather than a self-made man like myself and knowing that this bastard lured her in with heroin added fury to the contempt of righteous indignation. My rage and frothing anger had more to do with a betrayal of principles I’d had fought hard to re-establish in my life… principles… yes, a newly awakened purpose inspired by this futile love for the Fu once more denied.