The nightmare recounted here, A6 and Wolves, entered my life as a result of graduate studies in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz. And, of course, because of my recent experiences as a Marine, then journalist, in Vietnam, then also Cambodia and Laos.
This is the nightmare that launched me bodily out of grad school, first becoming a lost soul hitchhiking through Oregon, then to being a deckhand on albacore boats off the Pacific Coast...
Chinese Soldiers
Back at UC Santa Cruz in the fall of 1970, I got a job as teaching assistant in Political Philosophy for Professor Sheldon Wolin, a nationally known professor and writer whose best-known book was Politics and Vision.
During the winter quarter, Wolin had decided to include works by Asian writers, because the Vietnam war was still such a big factor in everyone's lives. Readings from the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung were on the list, in particular On Protracted War, Mao's treatise stressing the importance of the relationship between political and military factors in conducting revolutionary or anti-imperial war.
I had devoured much of that material - obsessively, as usual - along with People's War, People's Army, by Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who had commanded the forces which defeated first the French, then us Americans. As Wolin and I talked, he decided that, although he always lectured to the entire class and the job of teaching assistants like me was to lead discussion groups of a smaller number of students, in this case I should give the lecture to the class as a whole, because of the combination of my experiences in Vietnam, reading, and journalism in Southeast Asia.
I re-immersed myself in the writings of Mao and Giap, even going back to Sun Tzu's thousands-of-years-old classic, The Art of War. When the time for my lecture came, I think I was too overwrought to do as good a job as I might have. What I tried to say was that Mao and Giap had invented a new calculus, which performed a new kind of summation of historical factors to make the answer come out in their favor. I drew on the blackboard a rough outline of the map of China, then put in symbols to represent the massive buildup of Japanese military power there during the 1930's. The map showed that the Japanese Navy controlled the coastal waters of China, and had strong garrisons guarding major port cities, rail lines, highways, etcetera. The Chinese fighters for independence, which at that time - the buildup to WWII - included both Mao's Communists and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalists), had a tiny fraction of the weapons the Japanese possessed.
But, in spite of Mao's famous saying that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he taught that guns weren't the whole story. With the proper political organization, political will, and military strategy and tactics, China's huge population could overcome the Japanese occupation. Since they didn't have enough weapons but had so many people, they'd use people to get the weapons. Attacks would be planned on isolated Japanese outposts, with all the weapons the Chinese could gather in the hands of the leading attackers, who would overwhelm a small number of well-armed Japanese and escape to fight again, next time with more weapons.
I used, as an example, Gunny Rogers' tales in boot camp of waves of attacking Chinese soldiers being slaughtered by U.S. Marines' machine guns at the battle of the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, noting that although the Chinese took huge losses, they drove Allied forces back south of the 38th parallel.
I don't know what effect my lecture had on the class. But soon after I gave it, I had this dream:
Dream: A6 and Wolves
I am sitting at the top of a mountain of wolves. Its surface writhes as they attack me. Though they are so numerous as to form a moving mass that stretches down the hill as far as I can see, I do not experience them as a mass, but rather as an infinity of giant individual wolves, each of which is making a heroic, fiercely intentional effort to kill me. I see each wolf with perfect clarity. They are all identical. They are bigger than any wild or domestic canine, the size of a horse colt too tall to walk under its mother's belly. And all are of that perfect obsidian blackness that absorbs most light yet throws off highlights like electrical sparks. Their heads are the size of a bear's head. Their jaws are all open wide enough to take my head inside, which they are trying to do. Their teeth are pure white, and throw off glints of light like the highlights thrown off by their churning obsidian bodies. Their fangs are the size of my fingers. Their eyes and tongues and the tissue in their open mouths are crimson, like arterial blood. I am firing a machine gun at the wolves. It's a U.S. model A6 .30 caliber, aircooled, tripod mounted weapon with a pistol grip, the kind used in the Korean War by people like Gunnery Sergeant David J. Rogers, one of my drill instructors at boot camp. It is also the same machine gun I'd used as a pillow in the hut in the jungle in Laos, that summer of 1968. The hill itself, and the way it's covered by waves of wolves attacking me, also spring from the pictures my imagination painted when Gunny Rogers told about human wave attacks against Marine positions by Chinese soldiers at the Chosin reservoir, and the slaughter that ensued. I am killing the wolves like those Marines killed the Chinese soldiers, who are piling up in front of the gun. Each time I kill a wolf, it drops, snarling, on the pile of its dead brothers. Before I have time to recover, a new lead attacker takes its place, climbing the pile of dead and writhing wolves with that swift, murderous intentionality I once saw in the movement of the legs of a pit bull terrier that was chasing me as I passed a farmstead on a bicycle. I am allowed to waste no instant. Each wolf moves so that the death of his brother shields his approach, and he is springing for me even as I swing the gun. No wolf dies until I see his wild red eyes up close, until I feel the shock of his great teeth snapping shut barely in front of my face, until I look into the cavernous red maw, open now to take my face inside it, until I feel his hot breath, until I see the bullets slam into his throat and mouth and skull, just in front of the gun's muzzle. So it goes, into the night, wolf after attacking wolf, each attack a new mortal emergency, made more urgent by requirements to change ammunition belts and to unscrew and replace overheated barrels with my bare hands, with never a moment to make a slip, to waste an instant, or to call for help; and no help to call for.
I awoke from the dream, dressed, rode my bicycle to campus, and told Professor Wolin that I would be leaving at the end of the quarter. The evening before the dream, I'd had no inkling that I would be leaving graduate school. The dream had blasted me bodily out of the life I had known, the academic future I had planned.
I lived in a tiny apartment in San Francisco for a month, got rid of everything I owned except what I could carry in a backpack and two small boxes of books I stored with my friend Peter Balcziunas, and hitchhiked to Oregon.
Tumalo
I hitched a ride eastbound in central Oregon. Maybe I’d go visit my aunt Bessie and uncle Lank in Baker. Mostly, I just wanted to breathe the thin, dry air that had felt so right to me as a boy and younger man. Unspoken, and perhaps unthought, was also the desire to touch and feel something which I had known before the war as clean and beautiful and…normal, and healthy. Every day in grad school, and too many of the nights during and following the weeks of preparation for my lecture on the politico-military writings of Mao Tse-tung and Vo Nguyen Giap, had wrapped the war back around me like a bloodsoaked blanket.
I was broke, but had a little food in my pack: oatmeal – my grad student’s stay-alive staple - and some brown sugar and dried milk to mix with it, and coffee. I lived from campground to campground. Fine with me: I was back in Oregon.
Settled in the back of a rancher’s pickup, I was watching the juniper, sage, and Ponderosa pine flit past, when I saw a small road sign with an arrow pointing down a gravel road to Fish Lake.
Fish Lake! I squirmed around and thumped the top of the pickup’s cab, told the driver I wanted to camp here, and lowered my pack to the ground and thanked him as he rolled to a stop.
It was the same Fish Lake where Mom and Bill Gano and Darrell and I and Bessie and Lank had spent a weekend fishing for bullheads, when Darrell and I were still young kids, a few years ago. A lifetime ago. I carried my pack, and the cheap guitar in its gig bag which I’d bought in San Francisco, and settled into a campsite with a picnic table and fire ring near the water’s edge.
The next day a young couple with a daughter 2 or 3 years old drove up and settled into the campsite next to mine. As dusk turned to dark and the family were setting up camp, the man walked into the sphere of light from my fire. “My name’s Jack,” he said, holding out his hand. Jack and Gloria and their baby daughter, Christiann, and I hit it off pretty well and sort of became a little tribal unit. I was good at scrounging firewood, and with the camping stuff they’d brought in their old Chevy, our two campsites became a homey little village. Even my inexpert guitar-thumping seemed somehow right in that time and place. I started writing a little song:
All these green rivers
are followin’ me
trying to carry me
home to the sea…
The next day, Jack and Gloria asked if I wanted to move with them to a favorite campsite back to the west, closer to Bend. It felt good hanging out with them, and the move would put me closer to the coast. I needed work in order to eat, and had been seduced by rumors of the good money to be earned crewing on albacore boats off the coast. So I gladly joined their family troupe.
Tumalo Creek was somewhat more than a quiet mountain stream when we got there. Its steep gradient at that point in the foothills of the Cascade range, and the June snowmelt which was then at its heaviest, combined to make Tumalo a roaring, tumultuous river when we unloaded the car and made camp on its southern bank. It was beautiful. Little Christiann played nearby in the woods between our campsite and the riverbank as we set up camp. Jack and Gloria kept watchful eyes on her, lest she go too near the water, but seemed to have reached a parental agreement not to discipline their child harshly: “Christiann, be careful now. It’s not safe near the water.”
Our shared campsite was in pretty good shape by dark, and we made a meal together. I roamed the woods bringing in dry twigs for kindling, and larger limbs to hold the fire into the night, while Gloria and Jack busied themselves cooking and Christiann darted happily around all of us.
By late the next morning we had settled comfortably into life in our “homestead.” Christiann was playing as if she’d grown up there, and Jack and Gloria and I were relaxing in the June sun…
“Jack! Where’s Christi?!! We all ran to the water’s edge – not there – and searched quickly among the trees nearby. Not there either. “If she’s in the water, we have to get her NOW,” I said sharply, my veteran’s instincts telling me that the child’s life was, in these few seconds, in the balance.
I ran a few yards downstream and jumped in, close to the bank: if she were trapped under the bank, there was still a chance… the unforgiving current, only recently melted off the shoulders of the mountains immediately above us, was pure ice water. And its strength! - the current yanked me sideways with a power I hadn’t imagined, even after looking at and listening to it up close for a day. It was impossible to straighten my legs enough even to touch the bottom, three or four feet deep. I tried for a while to grope under the bank, hoping I would touch something soft. But no: everything was cold, rough, and moving violently. My situation changed: having at first thought only of getting to Christiann in time, I now realized that Tumalo Creek could easily kill more than one person in these few minutes. The bank blurred past. Jack and Gloria were already out of sight upstream. The current was too powerful for me to search in it. I reached for something on the bank strong enough to hold me as I climbed out. My first two tries yielded handfuls of gravel and broken sticks. Then I grabbed with my right hand onto the root of a large tree that grew back from the water’s edge. The current yanked me violently downstream, my grip held – I now realized I was holding on for my life – and my momentum flopped me up onto the bank like a large, terrified fish.
Jack went for help while Gloria and I kept searching the nearby woods, shouting often, “Christiann…Christiann!” and listening after our shouts for any timid, or playful, or pained, reply. We heard only birds and squirrels.
Jack came back with an old man who lived with his wife in a cabin near the bridge which crossed Tumalo Creek nearby. His name was Bob Hendrickson. He seemed a very level-headed man, and knew the surrounding area because it was National Forest, and made his living partly in those woods, cutting and hauling dead timber and selling it for firewood. He said we needed more help, and hurried back to his cabin to phone the Sheriff’s Office. They would put together a search party.
Vehicles and people began to appear. Deputies’ wives and neighborhood women who lived along the river, and those of their husbands who weren’t working that afternoon, or could get off, organized themselves into a search party. Women brought potato and macaroni salads and set up propane stoves to prepare hot dishes for the searchers. They’d all done this before.
In a short time – it was still early afternoon – Deschutes County was mobilized in a way that rural Americans have always done, with people stepping into a breach when one of their own is in serious trouble. This time, it was a two and a half year old girl. No questions asked.
County agencies organized around their leaders. Smoke jumpers arrived from their base near Redmond, a few miles away from the county seat at Bend. Men who were accustomed to being in charge took charge, organizing all of us into search details, communications details, and groups to feed all of us.
All except Jack, Christiann’s father. The head of the local Search and Rescue unit had instructed Gloria to stay at our campsite, which became base camp for the search. If Christiann was found by any of the searchers, she would immediately be brought to her mother at our campsite, which had also blossomed into a paramedics’ station.
But Jack had become useless. Gloria quietly let us know that Jack had previously had a drug problem, had been recovering pretty well, but also kept some pills on hand. She told us, her face a tortured mixture of worry for her child and worry and shame about her child’s father – they weren’t married – that as soon as Jack returned with Bob Hendrickson and the search began to get organized, Jack had taken some pills. Quite a few of them, she said. She called them “reds.”
I joined the search. Jack was flaked out on his sleeping bag, barely conscious, not speaking. At first the search leaders thought I was the father, because I was trying to be part of the effort, and was obviously worried. Gloria and I finally made it clear that I had known them only two days, that Christiann’s father was the man lying on his sleeping bag, seemingly incapable of speech. Eyes searched Gloria’s face and mine, and the camp scene. Shadows crossed all our faces as glances and stares first probed, then were averted.
A team of divers had been called in as soon as the search was organized. One man equipped with wet suit, a belt of lead weights, and rubber boots sealed at their tops, entered the rampaging creek tied to a safety line with one of his teammates holding the other end of the line around his hips and following along on the creekbank.
That effort lasted only a few minutes. The water was too swift, even for a man so equipped, to actually search the creek bottom and under the banks. As the divers conferred with the Search and Rescue leaders, the reality of the situation showed itself: they were now searching for a body, not a live child; and any person, however well trained and equipped, who tried to work in the stream was in immediate danger of losing his own life. The calculus was unavoidable: the risk of losing a second life was not worth the chance of finding a corpse – not even the corpse of a young child. The dive team packed up and left, saying they’d return when the water lowered. The rest of us continued searching the woods.
We searched all night, shouting “Christiann! If you hear me, make some noise, please… Christiann!” Our shouts into the darkness took on a pleading tone, as if all of us were begging God to send some alternate message besides the one that was forcing its truth upon us. During one of my return trips to the campsite during the pre-dawn hours, when I grabbed something to eat before heading back out into the woods, the Sheriff’s deputy who was head of Search and Rescue also appeared at our campsite. He spoke to Gloria, telling her the news: everyone was still searching, but there had been no sign of Christi: not a thread of clothing… nothing. Not a clue. Then he looked across the campfire at the prostrate Jack, looked at me, looked at Gloria, inhaled sharply, and spoke: “Lady, I’ve never said anything like this before; never had to. But I gotta say it now: You’re with the wrong man.”
Gloria stayed quiet, bending her head lower under this new flood of grief.
Dawn brought a reorganization of the search. But it did not bring Christiann. Jack, who had been essentially unconscious all night, began to stir as noon approached, and even to speak a little in quiet tones to Gloria. He’d recovered enough to move himself around some, and he and I were sitting on opposite sides of Gloria, on one of the heavy timbers which constituted the main structure of the bridge across Tumalo Creek. Bob Hendrickson stood beside us as the head of Search and Rescue approached and knelt in front of Gloria and Jack and me.
He spoke to Gloria: “Ma’am, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. We’ve done all we could do, and there’s just been no sign. Not a thread… nothing. A few people will keep searching the woods in daylight, in case something turns up. But we’re formally calling off the search, as of now. I’m very sorry.”
The news cudgeled Gloria and Jack and me and Bob Hendrickson into a long silence. Then Jack spoke softly to Gloria, using some of those words people sometimes use when there are no words, something like, “She’s at peace now...”
Gloria’s grief erupted: “NO! ..NO!..OH PLEASE GOD NO!” Jack and I were on either side of her, both just lending a shoulder as best we could. It seemed to me then, and I remember it now, 41 years later, that the power of her grief was actually making the bridge tremble beneath us.
I stayed and worked in the woods with Bob Hendrickson for two or three weeks. He taught me how to fall a tree with his chain saw, and I would fall snags and buck them into stove lengths and split them with his maul and wedges and haul them to his cabin until we had a load to take to town and sell. For a while Bob and I kept looking in the underbrush as we worked, on the tiny chance that we’d see a colorful flash of child’s clothing pinned under a tree, but finally giving up as we realized that if we found something, it would be something we did not want to see.
A few weeks later Bob gave me a lift to a highway junction, where I unloaded my pack and guitar, shook hands with the man whose friendship I had earned in sadness, and stuck my thumb out in the wind, hitching toward the coast.
I drifted to Astoria and hung around the docks unloading albacore boats for food money, until I met Dick Mathews on an adjacent barstool in the Mermaid Tavern and he took me aboard the Anna Marie, a fifty-six foot converted purse seiner out of Juneau, Alaska.
Dick couldn't afford to pay me. I worked for meals, figuring that the experience I gained could later get me hired on a different boat for a share of the catch.
The wolf dream had been the war's long arm yanking me out of graduate school. I guess I thought the war would leave me, or I would leave it, if I quit the situation where I spent so much time thinking about why humans went to war. But the war followed me to the boats - not, of course, in any way I would have expected.
