-Chapter 11-
November, 1977. Paradox Island, Washington.
Winter closed like a door quietly tugged shut out of politeness and momentum. This is not to say that all was gloom and darkness. Rather, the bright yellow glow of the sun on the snow faded and the crooked wooden slats of the cabin seemed to reflect nothing anymore, at least until tomorrow. Max sat on the edge of the neat, antique bed in the corner of the single room, trying to think of what to write. It wasn't that writing was imperative, or even necessary given the circumstances. When he thought of the physical weariness the days chores dealt him, however, he decided he ought to exercise a bit of intellectual muscle and pen something half decent. Writing was always so cathartic, removed from the sweat and salt and delicious fatigue he felt most days. Whether the track, the wild Pacific backcountry, or the simple chores of daily existence, labor was never at standstill. It was a constant companion, by choice and need, something to savor in times of such uncertainty.
Uncertainty framed the current situation quite well, as the last stray bits of sunlight filled the cracks and inconsistencies of the little wooden cabin. Simple, but not a dump, he’d decided. A dump implied no class, and how could a 19th century fishing cabin on an island in the Puget Sound not have charm? He had lived in dumps; of that he was certain, with embarrassing clarity. The 1970's movie set mirage of Beverly Hills did little to belie the fact that but a tiny fraction of UCLA students could afford to live anywhere close to campus. He’d felt like a modern Anglo-Saxon anthropologist, exploring the ethnic neighborhoods of south central Los Angeles during his 5 1/2 years there. 5 1/2 years, and all he had to show for it was a BA in English and studio Art, he thought with slight unease. Art ought to be capitalized, even in thought, he insisted, because while it had been bastardized by the common suburban hipster, at its core it represented something noble and fresh. 5 1/2 years; an urban refugee exploring the gritty, addictive streets of LA: the sketchiness, the sexiness, the I-might-be-Next-iness.
He recalled with uneven clarity the broken strips of sidewalk and leaning palm trees outside his decrepit house at Venice & Empire, the heat sizzling on the pavement like a gritty urban mirage on late summer afternoons. The fetid chaos of the city was escapable though- driving out to Zuma Beach with his wetsuit and board he’d felt like a refugee seeking solace from something both necessary and unspeakable. He loved how cold and raw the Pacific always felt, scarier and deeper than the Maine coast even, a welcome escape from the tangled gridlock. The ocean up here was wild as well, he thought. Mysterious and ill defined; the Puget Sound was a maze of channels and islands connected by some sort of common thread. Gone were the handsome blonde surfer boys, the statuesque girls like golden apparitions under the palms of the Orange County beaches, the garish beach chairs and umbrellas always seeking shade. Nature at these latitudes demanded a sort of stoic resiliency against the unpredictable tangle of water, mountains, and rain, all competing for equal attention. He liked the thought of this damp outpost in Washington somehow being connected to the sunny beaches of SoCal- the offshore currents flowing upcoast carrying his old thoughts and ambitions across the continent.
In the incessant rain and gray, boiling sky, thoughts of southern California increasingly distracted him from work at hand. The tug of the palm trees and white stucco houses was painful at times. LA has always been a pitstop though, a wayward diversion for the satisfaction of society and parents and programmed ideas of success; he’d felt this from the start. When his parents had separated a week after his 10th birthday, he knew even before mom gently explained to him what a ‘divorce’ meant that Daddy was staying in Haugesund. She’d told him that his father’s life was Lungdren Aluminum AB, not Max and Kate, his ever-loyal fan club. So, his mother and him went to Los Angeles. First to her parents, then when she got a job as a middle-aged woman’s clothing magazine model [her beauty was something that irradiated people, he’d always thought; dangerous like the sun or an X-ray], they moved to their own place, a modest ranch in the fashionable hills above Brentwood. There, Clark learned suburban survival skills amongst the neon plastic and perpetual sprinklers. He learned to play his good looks and innate conning abilities to his advantage in the gritty Los Angeles social scene. It was something both addictive and caustic compared to the sheltered life they’d enjoyed in Norway.
He always knew he needed to go back, to speak his mind to his father, truly and directly. To reconnect with the amputated half of his life he’d felt should have never been taken away. To heal. No house party in Silverlake or beachside bonfire in Malibu was going to substitute or invalidate this. However alluring or spontaneous life in LA could be, it didn't have the consequence of chopping wood in the cold rain on an island in the Pacific. He knew this was his ‘transition’ back to the possibly make-believe pastoral life he saw in Norway, a launching pad from which to organize his thoughts before the return.
The real wild though, he knew, was always over the next mountain, silly as it sounded. It had to be. It sat behind the setting sun, there if you squinted hard enough and imagined a bit. In LA, he caught the edges of it in the wild stares the bums downtown would give you, the way they descended on the steel and concrete jungle at night like the penguins coming in from the sea. That was wild, but only because it was real. Real like the thousands of undocumented sweatshop workers they wanted to deport because they didn't have papers, real like the riptide at Topanga Beach, real like the professor they fired because he spoke out about what was really happening in Russia, behind the dreaded ‘Iron Curtain’. These things made Max seethe, boil with anger but also recoil in fear, scared to face something made so mean and hard-faced by the establishment.
Impossible, that was the real modus operandi in LA. As his mother had said, it was a great place if you had money, and not so great if you didn't. They had money, to be certain, to where money was not something left unmentioned out of politeness. It was of concern, just never too immediate, it seemed. The hollowness of LA resonated with them too though, cause god bless them- they were smart, as his mother’s father would say. On paper, he fit the young urban Angelino model quite formulaically: educated in the ways people expected, clad in slim jeans and pastel striped t-shirts that hugged his smooth frame, sharp angles of black polycarbonate Ray-Ban's rakishly askew on his well-structured face. He had the build all the girls seemed to yearn for these days; all sleek rounded shadows of muscle on nothing. Toned without being beefy, slim without being scrawny. As one panned upwards, the thin shadows met cocky, square shoulders on which sat a northern European jawline, bright hazel eyes lit under thin blonde tangles. He was good-looking without being cheesy; somehow he kept just enough of that middle-school goofiness to render an air of aloof distraction people found endearing.
He loved straddling the barrier of what people found acceptable and comprehendible; the myriad identity boxes Americans loved to squeeze themselves into. He thought with envious intensity of how little he remembered of the first ten years of his life in Haugesund. Still he felt that the inherent freedoms of Nordic culture had somehow helped shape his present situation. He could dance for hours with the 20-something’s and weirdoes in some dark, warm night space, clad in rakish neon stripes, then go rock climbing in Malibu Creek the next day with the guys he liked to call "the alpha-bros." Not that these stereotypes of masculine intensity understood this duality- to them he was just a buddy to swap belays with and maybe a beer or two after. Like a Venn diagram whose spheres just begin to overlap, he juggled a mixture of intentions, least understood by him. None of this affected his current plight, or destiny as it might be. Only the Achilles heel of his vacant narcissism could bring him down out here, among the fallen green logs and pebble beaches. An owl landed on a distant branch, its stoic hoot-hoot-haw a perfect soundtrack to the dull gray drizzle, the sun of the northwest. The general monotony of the weather here was a sort of distant comfort, something predictable after the vicious Santa Ana winds and choking morning smog of LA.
The cabin was perfect- flawed in just the rights ways, livable but also a constant project. An inheritance from his mother's father, one that had surprised everyone. Max and him were always close, to be certain, but with a dozen other grandchildren, the sole bequeath of his prize summer cabin has come out of left field. Somehow it didn't surprise Max, however, he took the news like a quiet investor who waits for just the right moment to revenge the loudmouth masses and cash his check. Before he passed, they’d talked about what came next, what came after LA. They agreed that the logical progression was a retreat to make Thoreau and Hemingway proud, a soul journey but also a re-focusing of priorities after the material mirage of Los Angeles had faded in the north coast fog. Chopping wood was pedestrian and also brilliant, he thought, something so foreign to the flannel and trucker cap clad 20-somethings that constituted his confidants in LA, their lame approximation of the blue-collar ethic humorous in comparison. He thought of all the strange and divergent memories that framed his time in LA and the one he settled on, sitting on the edge of the warm quilted bed, surprised even him. To write was to extract memories from somewhere perhaps not even fully realized, so he dug deep into this one.
It was last that past June and he was piss drunk, stumbling to the men's room of the El Ray. The El Ray was one of the many theaters populating this otherwise barren stretch of Wiltshire Boulevard, awash in their own vague bohemian squalor. He settled on a vacant stall and as he sat on the cold, filthy toilet seat, the drums pounding on the other side of the wall and fluids on the floor he dared not think about, something struck him like a frisbee to the forehead. The handle on the wall next to the shitter- it was silver, not just steely but brilliant metallic white, and he envisioned a world where everything basked in a metallic glow, thoughts and intentions bouncing off each other in space like x-rays. Suddenly the reality of being alone and drunk at another obscure show faded and everything radiated cool silver brilliance, slow motion across the dancefloor as the singer wailed on about something arcane and lost. Sometimes he would daydream about this alternate metallic universe, imagine god dropping a gazillion gallons of gold paint on LA in the middle of the night and everyone waking up shiny and reflective. In a way, he lived in an alternate color dimension now. The gleaming metallic luster of LA was replaced with the simple, predictable grays and whites of the ocean, the forest, and the boiling sky. Everything was primal yet regular here, even the extremes like a rogue wave in from Japan or the distant rumble of the earth's plates struck him as so much more tolerable and necessary than the reflection on a bathroom stall handrail in LA; hollow and cheap.
He missed sushi, he missed waking up and finding the girl next to him to be even more intoxicating than she was the night before, minus the intoxication. He missed the smiles of the Mexicans who served him Carne Asada tacos at 2 in the morning. He missed the smell of the chilly fog burning off in the valley in the groggy hours. This was all a trade off for the beauty and rugged simplicity of the northwest, though; perhaps tomorrow he'd motor in to Bellingham on the little skiff. After all, it was only 20 minutes away. The wild tangled mess of the Puget Sound reminded him of the Maine coast he'd grown up sailing, but here the jolly pastel lobsterpots and granite-rimmed islands were replaced by the shadows of massive, watchful volcanoes and mysterious depths choked with kelp where sea otters played.
The view from the little front porch was the best in the whole channel. On rare clear days, the pearly, whitecapped summit of Mt. Baker loomed on the horizon, an omniscient eye over the ocean. The lights on the nearby islands focused and re-crystallized into little yellow dots and Max tugged at the knitted covers and slipped off his worn workpants, the bed quietly sighing as he slipped in. Tomorrow was so possible, and for what might have been the first time in his life, he cried for no reason or consequence, only because he was so damn happy the future was right now. He fidgeted slightly under the covers with the indecision of a night cold enough that he ought to start the little wood-fired stove, but warm enough where he could just borrow under another layer or two of blankets and be just fine. ‘Ah, the Northwest’, he sighed, and settled into endlessly heavy sleep.
When he awoke just after daybreak, he was alone, as he expected himself to be, only today the solitude felt different. Not alone in the way of the Arctic terns and golden eagles that circled low over the island, but in a way that transcended mere geography and dwelled in the more esoteric regions of the mind. He thought back to the events that brought him here. Here instead of just directly back to Norway per his original plans. The escape from Los Angeles has been vital and impulsive, spurned by nothing more consequential than the metallic sheen of a toilet stall door. In his drunken brilliance, it had reflected all the self-loathing and material filth of the city into something sharp and tangible. That something so absurd had pierced his veil of feigned happiness was only one piece of the puzzle. That alone was not the reason he was here. Max was here simply because this place was home. Home of the conscious moment yet also of something real and inherited- a cabin from his grandfather on an island in the Puget Sound.
On bright evenings, the hazy lights of Seattle filtered in over the jagged pine tree horizon and onto the gray pebble beach where the cabin was perched, an eye over the placid sound. Life now had attained a new clarity, not only of simple routine, but also of understanding that everything henceforth could only go forward, caught in the pull of the impossible. At night, under the dark green blanket of the sea, the shifting forest and steady sky, he hugged himself like there was no one else left in the world. It was not physical discomfort, or even mental angst, but something like the excited, half-irritable unrest of a child, forever kicking and fussing under all the layers of safety.
Even when he had company in bed, which seemed increasingly rare in his last year in L.A, he was forever distracted and restless, to the discontent of friends and lovers alike. It was neurotic impatience coupled with the need to be constantly experiencing something novel and surreal, to be a piece of seaweed in the tide. This was such a blessing and a curse; the high standards for nature and even higher standards for people. Every awkward part of his soul seemed to stand naked for the world to see. Tomorrow he was contemplating a temporary respite from the wild amongst the concrete jungle of Seattle, a 30-minute boat ride through the fog and drizzle to the Pike Place piers. There he could oogle and judge the cool kids and the commoners alike, a number in the grid of the city. In a way, he wanted something spontaneous and beautiful to happen, another distracted soul to happen on him wandering around downtown. He pictured them making love in the cabin after the chilly, anxious boat ride home.
Life was best viewed as a progression of still frames through all the perfect moments; maybe not perfect but real and crystalline, with all the mud and sand of everyday routine sieved out. He might be picky with people, but the kelp and starfish that filled tide pools and the hilly green flanks of the island pleased him immeasurably; their entertainment was simple and sincere. He did not romanticize the cold, damp facts of rural life in the Pacific Northwest, however, and enjoyed the resolve of everyday chores. Simple work was what he’d really needed, a welcome reprieve from the weary motions of school. Education was happening all the time he thought, without reason or consent, while chopping wood and catching fish, mending clothes and tinkering with diesel engines. Experience bred knowledge in the shadowy edges of life here, it seemed.
It was almost December now, 1978 looming expectedly around the corner. Though the perpetually damp and green maritime climate encouraged year round fleece and flannel, the layers of warmth around his body has become more substantial lately as the cold nip of winter moved south from Canada. He thought with detached posterity of the well-paying job at the UCLA art museum he'd passed up, or the chance to buy into the family business and slowly climb the Norwegian blueblood power ladder. He knew that the most intense and joyous moments of his life were always alone. As lost yet prophetic adventurer Everett Ruess had said, "I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?" A-Men. Hallelujah and the chorus too. He didn’t care for the dull confines of religion, but this realness spoke to him each and every day, it seemed.
The Starry black sky and warm firelight triumphed in the end over the stirring discontent bred by cities, he thought. Here he’d learn to love himself amongst the sea otters and watchful gulls; an alien in a place that one day might be called home.
It was easy in this relatively cozy outpost on the fringes of luxuriant American wealth to become an idle romantic, yet somehow he resisted this urge. All the types of people he saw on an everyday basis in Los Angeles, the bums, the movie stars, the small army's of 5'4" blonde sorority clones; they all floated off on the outgoing tide when he first took the little whitewashed motorboat out to the island. He was to be a wiling refugee from his own excess. Everything in LA was disproportionate, yet life there required a sensory over-stimulation he’d already removed himself from. Max was always craving recognition, a neurotic impulse that upset the clarity he saw his life in now.
He thought of the purity he wished to attain, plugged in perhaps by the occasional trip to Seattle to sip Espresso and read the paper idly at some trendy corner spot. Yet also to live removed from the clusters of people who tormented him, his combative uncertainty in a crowd. His standards for people never wavered. Though he was the first to admit his own flaws, somehow these things were less excusable in others, and he knew this was wrong. In a world of Nixon’s and Anita Bryant’s; their fucked up agendas endlessly streaming across CBS, he wanted to find another NPR- another reason to trust someone beyond immediate physical satisfaction. It was mid-morning now and the sun peeked out over the distant, brooding shadow of Mount Rainier, dissipating wispy bits of fog over the dead water. The fog was a familiar comfort; a concession of his youth in Haugesund, he liked to think. It lacked form and predictability, and he remembered the damp, cool August mornings sailing on Gardsvik Bay, the silver sun shards filtering in over the waxy wood deck of his father’s little catboat.
Light was oblique and full of strange shadows here in the Northwest, shades of gray and green that played with rock and water differently each day. Here in the inner reaches of the Puget Sound, sheltered from the full brunt of the North Pacific, it was easy to fall into the illusion of security. The distant clouds always simmering over Mount Baker served as a reminder however that this was not quaint, pedestrian New England. He walked barefoot on the smooth, algae covered pebbles of the beach and deftly slid the old motorboat into the water as the tide sighed and started back in towards land. The crab traps he has set out last week should yield a nice dinner, he hoped, and he idled the motor as the boat slid past a neon buoy. The veins on his sinewy arms bulged as he hauled in the 20-some odd meters of line attached to the trap. In a cloud of mud and seaweed, he pulled the heavy wire trap over the deck. A half dozen ugly, reddish-white Dungeness crabs writhed angrily and snapped their claws and he dumped them into an old 5-gallon pail, smiling and singing the last few lines of some song whose where and why escaped him. The rest of the traps didn't yield much, but he loved the purposeful simplicity of the exercise. He re-baited them with smelly old fish heads, watching the birds hover and otters swim nearby, curious and watchful. Revving the little 40 horsepower Honda outboard, the boat planed up with a low whoooosh and the wind whipped his tangled blonde hair back. The cold nip of the morning air breathed fresh life into his lungs.
People were kind of like those crabs in the bucket, he thought- willing to crawl into a trap for a bit of food and shared space, yet unwilling to look beyond their immediate confines for a greater reality. One on one interaction was so predictable and polite- he wanted a human network that worked on spontaneous gestures with strangers; misunderstood signals sent across a harbor, a bar, a bedroom. It was better to be seen out of context with objective reason and blind faith than to be studied and deduced with cold logic, he thought in passing. The pebbles of the beach squeaked under his weight, walking back to the cabin. 'Where we're going, we don't need roads', he mused, and thought of the steel and concrete edges of the American Dream closing in on the island until all the power brokers and schemers and clones crumpled like tinfoil, a handful of fellow crazies holding out here in the inner reaches of the Pacific.
He lasted another month on Paradox island before the rainy season moved in for good, and the weekend boat trips to Seattle either became too much or failed to justify the tedium between them. It was the day before New Year’s when he finished cleaning and packing up. The cabin looking hurt yet resolute, he took the trusty little motorboat into Seattle and left if tied to the public docks with note scrawled on yellowed wax paper gifting it to ‘anyone in need of an adventure’. That afternoon, he took the bus down to SeaTac airport, phoned his mom from a payphone, and told her he was headed back to Norway for a while. The rain had been sad and wavering. She was so tragically understanding, so proud of her fuck-up son, he thought. It hurt, but perhaps she saw in his wanderlust the type of unrequited, necessary madness he hoped he’d gleamed a bit of over the past 6 months. He managed to find a surprisingly decent fare to Oslo via New York leaving the next day and jumped on it. He withdrew 650 dollars in cold, greasy cash from the Chase bank in downtown Seattle, promptly springing 50 of it for a room at the Moore Hotel and a good dinner. The SAS plane left early the next morning, and he smiled with deep closure as it passed low over Paradox Island and the northern San Juan’s while banking around to the east on its path to New York, the view from 10,000 feet and rising like a final salute.
“And that is how I ended up back here”, he instructed me triumphantly. We made a hasty retreat from the Café, as even another hundred kronor bill had failed to placate the now genuinely irate owner. The hour had just passed midnight. Max was clearly exhausted from the ordeal of recollecting tangents from the past several years of his life, so we went directly back to his flat. It was a small, utilitarian place on the rounded hill near the university I’d seen from the water, which was in fact just an expensive private secondary school. Max went into his bedroom without another word. I was left with a surprisingly comfortable futon, some sort of Japanese-meets-Norwegian fluke of modern design, it seemed, as these things always had a reputation as serving as neither a good couch nor bed. That I was staying with a wanted criminal did not bother me. Max's logic- not rationalizing his acts, but creating some sort of meaning out of our meeting, was so logical and forthright that I felt almost like an obedient child. More than wanting to help him, I just wanted to understand him. I awoke sometime around 3 in the morning and heard Max talking softly in his sleep, odd yet coherent phrases repeating themselves. "Paradox Island, can't, stay, drifting, yesssss... he trailed off, then started again- 'Well, the gold was for sale, wasn't it? No, it isn't mine. No, it isn't mine. No, it isn't mine.' He repeated this several more times, each a child-like protest of some sort of larger inequity not his fault.
The sleep talking bothered me slightly- I’d always felt awkward and undeserving when privy to some stranger's personal life like this. Somehow I felt it would have been ok with Max though- he was so open, so trusting, almost a child himself.
I was up unusually early, perhaps wary of his new, unfamiliar location, but more likely due to the thin silver slivers of light that reflected across the windows of a modern building facing Max’s flat and managed to coalesce just above my head; a late fall Norwegian wake-up call programmed by nature. I needed a reason to rise early, to sort out the order the day should proceed in before others interfered with my own fate. Max came out of his room shortly thereafter and apologized for the rather impolite morning sunlight as if I already knew his thoughts, and started some coffee and eggs. He was already dressed. He looked radiant. No lazy Saturday morning pajamas- this man was all business. Despite his casual demeanor, it was clear he 'didn't fuck around', as my 'cool' friends at Brown liked to say. He wore dark denim jeans; they tapered subtly along his lean, strong legs, and a robin's egg blue Oxford shirt, the collar open 3 buttons to reveal a pale hesitant chest. A few stray blonde hairs escaped the fabric and suggesting some sort of Nordic high stakes gambler or used car salesman, minus the sleaze or age, of course. Max saw me looking at him somewhat critically and deflected my judgment with a sidelong smile, a smirk almost. 'What? You don't like to dress well? Let me tell you something. If there's one thing I've learned in this gig [he really was American; this was not a word one picks up in English grammar books, I noted] it’s that... he continued, pausing slightly on the 'that', as if to emphasize the sage wisdom of what he was about to say, despite his scant 25 years on this earth. "Is that- appearances are everything', he continued, his smirk now a more serious tone, 'you wouldn't believe how much first impressions influence people... I mean, I could be telling them how I am blatantly going to con them out of some cherished valuable, and they’re still thinking how nice it is to see a clean-cut, articulate young man, silently comparing me to their disappointing grandchild who dropped out of Art school in Oslo, and so on...'
Now it was my turn to smirk knowingly, and I let Max carry on in this vein for several more minutes, as if I was actually a refugee from a primitive tribe in New Guinea, and not a veteran of several years of awful "Leadership Skills" classes my always-worried mother had forced me to go to as a teenager. She’d been worried about my lack of social exuberance, or some B.S like that, though I knew it was because she loved me. When Max had finished his little diatribe, I just smiled and said, 'Well, you look nice. That's all I meant by it.' 'You’re a charmer', Max countered, his accent appearing slightly, as it tended to when he was nervous. We ate eggs Benedict and drank strong, black coffee, the kind my Swedish grandmother practically ingested intravenously. We sat again on the edge of the little futon, as there was no table. Max was careful to sit at a distance away from me where he could turn and observe me at full profile, to critique and judge silently. He couldn’t be muddled by the awkward anticipation induced when two people sit aside each other on a small couch in an otherwise empty apartment. We ate in silence. The growing sunlight entered the room as large, confident squares, changed from the hesitant slivers of an hour ago.
I asked about the building next door, partly to break the sounds of chewing, which always bothered me, and partly to talk about something unrelated to crime or travel. 'Well, it used to be municipal offices for the city arts counsel, as well as welfare programs for young people and the mentally ill', he said bureaucratically. I had a feeling he had some personal vendetta against the history of the place, the way he had to explain the multitude of goodwill organizations that had resided there, instead of just 'city offices.'
'But…’ he continued, 'When the conservatives came in power in this Province in 75', they slashed the budget for public services and the arts of course were another early casualty. My father's company, Lundgren Aluminum AB, was given a great deal of the no longer needed space, which he was able to acquire no doubt in part due to his hefty contribution to their campaign that previous fall.' He mumbled something heated in Norwegian, distracted, but then put the business of the building aside and returned to his formerly sunny demeanor. I wanted to inquire further, but sensed the stressed family relationships in his life, probably much like my own, and decided now was not the time.
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