Living with Vietnam

I’ve been watching Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10-part film about Vietnam on PBS. It is unsatisfying, and not only because the experience as we lived it fifty years ago was a nightmare.

Perhaps it is because so many things in our country, including this documentary, are paid for by people like the Koch brothers and the Bank of America, and that has influenced the telling of the story.

What is the old saying? The winners write history?

Perhaps because it tells a story that is not my story, or your story. It tells the stories of a few people, and I think Burns and Novick mean to illustrate the whole war in the stories of these few, but I don’t think they succeed.

Do not watch it if you don’t like pictures of dead bodies. The documentary shows piles of dead Vietnamese and Americans, on the ground, on tanks, on armored personnel carriers, carried in bags and in tarps, carried on stretchers or without stretchers or on soldiers’ backs; scattered in fields and in puddles, lying alongside paths in the jungle. I have never seen so many corpses in my life. Broken bloody dolls, formerly human beings and pieces of human beings. The pictures bring home the brutality of that war.

Of all wars.

And those are the guys whose bodies weren’t blown into a pink mist. Of whom there was something left to send home.

Oh, yeah. Home.

I started college in 1965 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the most conservative of the California state schools. How conservative was it? In 1968-9, when San Francisco State was shut down for five months by the strike of the Black Students and the Third World Liberation Front, Cal Poly was considered the safest place for then Governor Ronald Reagan and the UC Board of Regents to meet. The first I knew of it was when I saw a policeman wearing a baby blue helmet and carrying one of those yard-long truncheons.

He looked bizarrely out of place to me. Such force was overkill at Cal Poly – sure, there was a small crowd of protesters, twenty or thirty maybe, but there was another group of students that presented Governor Reagan and the Regents with a welcome letter. They expressed their thanks and appreciation for the fine job the Governor and the Regents were doing. There was a nice article about it in the school newspaper afterward.

In those years the draft and the draft lottery were on everybody’s mind. You cannot exaggerate how large it loomed in  our lives. A young man never knew when he might be drafted and sent off to die, so many young men lived in fear until they got a low lottery number, or a deferment, or failed their physical, or joined some other branch of the service where they thought they’d have more control of their destiny than they would in the Army infantry.

A couple of the draftees I knew came back from Vietnam broken, angry, and bitter, unable to make eye contact. To them I suppose I was this airhead girl who had no idea, and looking at those piles of corpses I suppose they were exactly right.

Some vets drank. Some came home addicted to heroin. Some smoked dope, which they’d started smoking in Vietnam. Grass was easy to get in Vietnam. Rick said it came aboard his ship with the mail. The postmaster was a popular guy.

My husband Rick was a blue water Navy veteran of Vietnam. He was on Yankee Station, North SARS (Search and Rescue) in the Tonkin Gulf, on the USS King. Their job was to pick up pilots who came out of North Vietnam and ditched in the Gulf.

Rick always had a soft spot for John McCain because McCain was shot down and taken prisoner while the King was on station. McCain never had a chance of getting out to the Tonkin Gulf, but his plane’s distress signal was heard, so they knew on the King that he’d gone down.

I feel like I’ve lived with the Vietnam war all my adult life. I didn’t go to war, but I’ve lived with and around guys who did, and their whole lives and in many cases their deaths were deeply affected by the war.

People are still dying because they were in Vietnam.

I guess I’ll keep watching the Vietnam documentary, to see where it goes, but if it is meant to provide healing to our sad old country, I am not feeling it. I confess that I did have hopes. Oh well. Not that many quick fixes in this life, are there?

Blessings on you.

Island Legends: The 3 a.m. Boat

L to r: Mary Litchfield Tuel, Thea Wescott, Dona Bradley.

A couple of weeks ago, Dona Bradley, Michael Shapiro, and I went over to Gig Harbor on a Tuesday night to play at an open mike that is run by Thea Wescott at a place called the Markee.

Dona, Thea, and I got to know each other back in the seventies.

Dona was singing in bands with David Conant and later Fred Schactler. Thea and Steve Fearey were working as the duet Bodacious when I met them. Rick Tuel, Chris Howie, and I worked together as Kanout Manufacturing in the early seventies.

As Dona, Thea, and I talked on that recent Tuesday night in Gig Harbor, the 3 a.m. ferry kept coming up. The 3 a.m. ferry was the boat that musicians took home. You played until the bar or club closed at 2 a.m., then you packed up your gear and beat feet for Fauntleroy.

If you missed that 3 a.m. boat, you either had to nap in your car or go find someplace to eat and hang out until the first ferry left in the morning.

A musician named Michael Murfin who lived on the island at that time had a ’58 Chevy from which he had removed the back seat. He put a mattress that went from behind the front seat into the trunk, and napped on the ferry dock when he missed the last boat. I thought that was ingenious but was not prepared to remove my ’58 Chevy’s back seat.

Later he moved to the city and joined the Love Family and his name was changed to Asaph.

But I digress.

Back to the 3 a.m. boat.

Rick, Chris, and I would go upstairs on that boat and go forward to the shelter deck, the covered area that had wonderful acoustics, and we’d sing a cappella harmonies: Amazing Grace, and I’ll Fly Away, and Daniel Prayed, and sea chanties. That singing was probably more fun than the gigs we played, come to think of it.

I remember being hit one night by the realization of what a miracle it was to be able to sing like that, to be part of making such a beautiful noise, to be filled with it, and carried by it. I was free of my own lousy self-opinion long enough to realize what a gift I had been given.

Thea and Dona have that gift, also.

I always had the greatest respect and admiration for Thea and Dona, because I thought of them as real professional musicians – they worked regularly with their bands and they toured around the northwest, and up into Canada and down into California. That’s what I thought of as the real thing.

I thought of myself as a folkie, playing irregularly at coffee houses and folk clubs and occasionally on the military bases for soldiers who for some reason were unable to get off base that night. My work paid a little, not much, but I thought of it as professional musician light, not like Dona and Thea, who were out there doing it.

We talked about musicians and other island people we knew forty-five years ago. Where are they now? We know where some of them are and what they are doing. Some of them we know are gone now.

The 3 a.m. boat was discontinued at some point, and many musicians moved off the island at that time. For those of us for whom the island was home, moving off was never an option.

The island music community is now booming more than ever. We have an embarrassment of riches here in singers, songwriters, and musicians. I am reminded once more that all art happens despite everything. I do not write because I’m organized and have a perfect little studio that’s all set up, for example. I write in chaos, disarray, and desperation. We do it because we can’t not do it.

Dona, Thea, and I are still singing. Still laughing. Still loving people. Still enjoying each other, perhaps more than ever now because of our long-shared past.

And Michael? Yeah, he was there, too. He was a kid, maybe twenty-one when we met him. But he had big aspirations. And I must say this: he has always had excellent taste in women.

That open mike in Gig Harbor is every Tuesday night at the Markee on Olympic Boulevard. Sign up at 6 p.m. We’ll be going back. See you there maybe.

Peace.

Blackberry Pie

It is blackberry season. I walk thirty yards from my front door carrying an old plastic yogurt container and start picking.

There is no need to bend over, no need to reach through or wrestle with canes to get to fruit that is hidden. This is the first picking, and all that is necessary is to walk along the edge of the patch grabbing the close, ripe berries. I leave the ones that are out of reach, and the ones that are not quite ripe. I especially leave the ones which I might come back for later, when I will bring pruning shears to clear a path to heavy clumps of berries which for now are inaccessible to a person who doesn’t feel like bleeding for pie. Yet.

When the container is full enough, I bring it in and set the berries to soak in cold water in the sink for a while. My hope is that this soak will remove British Columbian wildfire ash and other particulates which have settled on the berries, plus float little bits of vegetation that have been gathered along with the berries, as well as any living creatures that might be in there.

I know, I know – what are insects but a little added protein? And yet I resist their presence in pie. Let’s not bring up the time the cover fell off the range hood fan and all those desiccated bug corpses fell into the spaghetti sauce. It was a long time ago, and I picked out the large pieces. Nobody got sick or anything.

This batch of berries yielded grass seeds, some little leaves, and only a couple of tiny bugs. Having removed the detritus and rinsed and drained the berries, I mixed them with the sugar, flour, pinch of salt, and lemon juice, and set what was now pie filling aside to make the crust.

Just kidding. I don’t make pie crust. I did, back when I was young and trying to be a good hippie earth mama, embroidering jeans and making bread and so on.

My dad was a farmer. He raised apples. I have clear memories of my mother standing at the kitchen table, rolling out pie dough for apple pies. Whole lotta apple pies came out of my mother’s kitchen, each one with a light crust.

When my time came I tried to rise to the challenge of making pie crust, and I knew it was not a sure thing. I put a glass of water, a bowl, and some butter knives in the freezer twenty minutes before starting. Kept the shortening refrigerated. Assembled these cold ingredients and tools and worked fast, cutting the shortening into the flour, splashing in the icy water. Sometimes my crust turned out as light as a fairy’s fart. Sometimes I would do all that and my crust had the consistency of a hockey puck.

One year I was visiting my mother in California, and she had the pumpkin pie assignment at a friend’s Thanksgiving dinner. We were at the store, and she grabbed a couple of boxes of pre-made pie crusts. She said she didn’t bother with making the pie pastry anymore; too much trouble and these were fine. I tell you, it was like the clouds parted and angels sang hallelujah! I haven’t made a pie crust since.

So. Set the oven to 450 degrees, put the first crust into the pie plate, added the filling, put the second crust on top, pinched the crust around rim, cut a cute little “B” for blackberry in the crust and a few other vents in a sunray pattern, put the whole production on a cookie sheet, and after the oven beeped that it had reached 450, put the pie in and set the timer for the first ten minutes.

That was when I remembered that I had forgotten to dot the top of the filling with butter before putting on the top crust.

Oh well. Berries, sugar, pie crust. How bad could it be?

Next morning, I cut the first slice of pie for breakfast. I took a bite. I moaned with pleasure.

These are times that try human beings’ souls. It is good to have the respite of a slice of blackberry pie now and then.

Blackberry pie: 3 cups blackberries; 1 cup sugar; 2 Tblsp flour; 2 Tblsp lemon juice; 1/8 Tsp salt; 1 recipe pie pastry; 1 Tblsp butter. Combine berries, sugar, flour, lemon juice and salt. Line pie pan with pastry, add filling, dot with butter, cover with top crust. Bake in 450°F oven 10 minutes; reduce temperature to 350°F and bake 25 to 30 minutes (or until the pie looks done to you). Makes one 9-inch pie. – Culinary Arts Institute Encyclopedic Cook Book, ©1950