Ch 8--The Coast Ranges

Chapter 8
The Coast Ranges: English Major
San Francisco: 1962-65

At roughly the same time that Europe and Northern Africa were pulling away from the Atlantic Coast, California was being assembled on the Pacific Coast. In fact, the same westward movement of the continent was responsible for both: as the continent moved west, it left Europe behind and accumulated landmass on the other coast. Some of this landmass was probably small countries: a Japan here, and Madagascar there. But much of it was ocean crust along the edge of the Pacific plate, bits and pieces flung up as most of it was disappearing under the edge of the North American plate in a process called subduction.

This always happens when tectonic plates collide—ocean floor that had been created by oozing magma under the ocean floor is now returned to the earth’s mantle where it came from. But sometimes the plates develop lateral motion as well, slipping past each other while one is being ground under the other. These are called transform faults. The largest and most famous, the San Andreas, begins in the Gulf of Mexico and runs into the sea near Daly City, just south of San Francisco. Actually there have been three subductions zones, each of them active at a different times. The first took place along a line that runs through Reno and laid down the roots of the Sierra Nevada mountains. For reasons not well understood, the zone shifted west, forming the coast ranges. The area in between the two zones is known as the Great Valley and is very suitable for growing lettuce. Geologically speaking, the coast ranges, including San Francisco, are mixture of ocean floor, ancient islands, and weathered coastline: hobnail granite, eclogite, blueshist, serpentine, chert, rhyolite, sandstone, siltstone, gabbro, andesite, diatomita--a jumble.
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In the last months of my enlistment, I found myself driving through the shipyard and feeling a little sad that I was pushing myself out of the nest. The military life asks a lot, but it also provides a lot. If I reenlisted, I would, for the next 20 years, be assigned a job I could probably do and not be fired, as long as I were conscientious, and conscientiousness was my middle name. Every Naval base was a self-contained city. I could go to a movie, buy things at the Exchange, work on my car at a fully equipped shop, go bowling, get new glasses, get my teeth fixed, go the doctor or even the hospital, for free or for a fraction of cost of civilian services. I was tempted. But I wanted to learn, and I wanted to write, and I was about to marry a woman who had expressed some skepticism about the military life.

I was due to be discharged in the November of 1962, in plenty of time to prepare for that marriage in late December. But, in October, all enlistments were extended indefinitely by the Cuban missile crisis, and everything was thrown into confusion. Wars have a way of doing that. I had made all the arrangements to turn over my duties to a capable officer, Denny Davidson. He was ready to go, and I was ready to be gone, but there we sat, trying to stay out of each other's way while I offered long-distance counsel to Judy about the wedding plans. I wrote a long letter to the Pentagon, asking at least for transfer to shore duty at a shipyard. They didn’t answer, but in late November, I got a letter authorizing my discharge on December 2. On December 3, I loaded everything I owned into my Volkswagen Beetle and drove north, stopping for a half day in Big Sur to see Peter D. Smith, a friend who was teaching math at the Navy school there. From there I crossed into San Francisco and rented a tiny apartment at 820 London Street, east of the Cow Palace, with a straight shot to San Francisco State College, where I had been accepted as an English Major. I unloaded my car, including the back seat—to make more room for the boxes I’d be bringing—and headed for Montana.

FIRST MARRIAGE

I had met Judy Dieruf when she was a freshman reporter for the college newspaper, The Exponent. The male-female ratio on campus was five to one, but I caught her eye, perhaps because I was a senior, a chemistry major and a columnist for the paper. She was beautiful and smart and talented. As a bonus, she lived in Bozeman and so did not have the rigid curfews that dorm girls had. I was overwhelmed when she agreed to go out and then when she accepted my fraternity pin as a sign of pre-engagement. The agreement was that we would date others, and, if were still both unattached and interested in three years, we would consider marriage. It was a good agreement that gave us some security without tying us down. Long distance phone calls were too expensive to think about, but we wrote regularly. On my twice-yearly shore leaves I would drive non-stop 24 hours through central California, across the deserts of Nevada, into southern Idaho, and down the Gallatin River into Bozeman, even before I went home to the ranch.

I could hardly believe my luck when she finally chose me of the bevy of handsome and talented college men who were besieging her with proposals of marriage. I almost wanted to say, “Are you sure? Do you know who you are talking to? I’m George, the dreamer, the one who’s broke, who has no job, who might after at least two years of graduate school eke out a living teaching in a junior college somewhere?” But she evidently understood what she was doing, and I was happy to let her do it.

In the days leading up the marriage, besides the pre-marital counseling required by the church, we arranged to have our portrait painted by Robert Deweese, a kind and talented member of the Montana State art faculty, who gained some fame as a central character in a best-seller called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I still have the picture. Looking at the portrait now, I see two frightened, vulnerable kids perched tentatively on the knife edge between two decades. We look like we’d be lucky to make it. As it turned out we didn’t, but I am still grateful we had the chance, and that the chance produced two wonderful sons.

ON DIARIES AND DARKNESS

The last five-year diary I ever kept tells me I left Long Beach at 0550 hours on Dec. 3, 1962, and arrived in San Francisco at 1400 hours, that I checked in at Bachelor Officers’ Quarters on Treasure Island and that I drove out to San Francisco State College that day, presumably to case the joint. I moved my things in and stayed the next night in Vallejo with someone my diary calls “ROC,” who may have been Bill Branson, a shipmate we called Rocky.

But in fact, I’m n not really sure who it was, so maybe it’s as well I stopped keeping five year diaries, since so many of the entries are obscure and cryptic and do not serve to prompt my memory. One entry for Dec. 3, 1960 says, “one red-hot steel ingot smoldering in my brain.” One for Dec. 3, 1961, says, “near suicide again.” (December 3 is evidently not a good day for me.) One says, “Watkins problem.” I have no idea who Watkins was or what his problem was.

There probably is a gene for diary keeping, though--a genetic drive some people have to record their lives day by day, no matter how humdrum those lives are. My mother kept a diary all her life, sometimes the five-year variety and sometime on weekly calendars she got from local businesses. When we went through her things in 1978, I threw away most of the bulkier ones but kept the five year books, which do have a kind of laconic power.

I have read through the ones for 1937, for example, with some care. In the spring of that year, my mother was in Wilmette with her parents, pregnant with me. The entries about having lunch with her friends are poignant in light of what I know from other sources—that she was debating whether to go back to my father or not. Later entries say simply “knitting, When I was born, the entry says simply “George Comfort Slanger, born 7:35 a.m.” Later there are many entries that say simply “home alone” which I would prefer to interpret as exclamations of joy at quiet days alone with her new baby, though I see now that it could have been post-partum depression.

When she was dying with a virulent ovarian cancer in 1978, comments about her illness get no more notice in her diaries than the birth of a new lamb on the ranch. The entry for Feb. 3 says she went “to Butte in the afternoon to see Dr. Rorston and to the hospital to pick up slides.” Two days before the last entry, she records that went to “Guild in the p.m.”, that “Ben went to the livestock auction” and that she “worked on bank statements.”

The last entry, on April 15, in a spidery hand, says, “Sick. Jim here. Ben took me in to Dr. Sisk. Just lay around all day.” Fifteen days later, on April 30, my father made a single entry: “Jo passed away.” Twenty-three days later, he began making entries again (“Dolly’s colt born”) and kept that diary faithfully until the end of that year.

SUFFERING AND MEANING

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At some point in the late 60’s, I began keeping a journal, as distinguished from a diary. Until my conversion, most of the entries were elaborate descriptions my mental pain. Those sessions came along every two or three months and lasted from three days to two weeks. The journal entries did not cure them but did seem to objectify them and thus take the edge off. Only a little of this writing survives, handwritten or typed on the backs of classroom dittos. A typical entry from 1969 reads:

Damn! What’s wrong. Everything’s wrong. I seem to be flunking out of this place. The kids are sick. I am working very hard, but for what? Why isn’t it fun? Why do people who know a whole lot less than I do seem happier than I am? All human activity is circular says Hauck. [one of my professors] Well, maybe. I blow in the wind. Inner structires return. I have crying jags and feel like I’m on the edge of of crying most of the time. I’m withdrawn, behind barriers.

This does sound like garden-variety depression that would be treated now with Zoloft or Paxil. Perhaps they might have made me easier to live with and saved my marriage-- though the feminist forces tearing at that relationship were formidable and might well have destroyed it even if I had been the sanest man in America. When I did try antidepressants in my 60’s, with less compelling need, I didn’t like how they made me feel and soon quit taking them. They have become routine in our culture now, but I am not sure that the texture of ordinary life has changed much. The suicide rate is not lower, nor is the divorce rate. Perhaps human happiness and unhappiness are elemental things, like the mantle in the earth’s crust on which the continents float. And happiness is a complex tapestry woven mostly from luck, genetics, common sense, and spiritual warfare, though chemistry is probably a part of it.

All I can really say is that some cases of human suffering have a spiritual dimension and mine was one. Some pain—I will not say all--is sensibly interpreted as God calling us into a deeper relationship with him. Based on my experience, I still feel it is mistake to treat depression (even “clinical” depression) exclusively as a medical problem. Antidepressants can make it possible for people to pull themselves together enough to respond to counseling, but my experience suggests that people who are on antidepressants ought also to be in counseling and that the counseling will be most effective if it includes a spiritual dimension.

After my conversion, the tone and focus of my journals changed dramatically. At the time, I burned almost all the old stuff--and have burned the rest of it since. Then I seem to have stopped doing a journal until after my second marriage, when I began to keep a journal fairly systemically, on three-ring paper (college-ruled) and to think of the process more as raw material for “real” writing I was going to do someday. An entry from 1983 reads:

Pain is a call. Parts of ourselves that we had hidden away because we could not abide the knowledge now stand ready to be revealed. We struggle against the beasts coming to light. We want to go on in ignorance.

The two entries are about a decade apart and the difference is striking. There is a movement outward from self-absorption, toward generalization: “Part of OURselves stands ready to be revealed.” “WE struggle against beasts.” In some ways, it seems more egotistical to project ones feelings outward into the general population than to simply say how one feels. Yet, oddly, the shift to first person plural represents a major advance, a decrease in ego. It represents an attempt to attach oneself to the larger body of humankind, to say how things are, not simply how they are to me.

Another post-conversion entry reads:

Separating from my boys becomes my life. When they are gone, the center of my life is gone. Yearning becomes the essential fact of my life. But this is right. Yearning should be the essential fact of our lives in a fallen world.

In this entry, you can see me developing what might be called a theology of suffering, placing my yearning for my sons in the context of a fallen world. For me, the Christian faith fundamentally IS a theology of suffering. God suffered. That for me is (or at least was) the central fact of Christianity. Suffering is not the only way into Christianity, of course. C.S. Lewis,--the architect of my sensibility if there is one--came to faith by the opposite route, though Joy, as he describes in his book Surprised by Joy., though he makes clear that he is really talking about what the Germans call sehnsucht—yearning, something more complex than giddiness.

Most of these journal entries were done in a quiet 30 or 40 minutes before I went to work in the morning. At some point, began to include notes on my reading and drafts of poems, even lists. One page, again from the early 80’s, contains a list of restaurants in Frostburg, written in Marc’s neat hand: “Guiseppy’s (Italian), Silver Leaf (smorgasboard), Mama Rosa and Fox’s (pizza), Al’s (Italian).” That same page has a quote from Yeats: “Only the dead can be forgiven/ But when I think of that, my tongue’s a stone.” Another page has a diagram showing how a sailboat can go upwind.

Often I accumulated 100 or 150 such pages in a year and bound them, year by year, between stiff covers, even making a kind of table of contents for each year. I have some 2200 pages of this stuff now, a sampling of which will stay behind if I can retain the wit to make a final cut. At some point, I began culling through each year’s production the next summer, typing up anything that looked like a finished poem. By 1998, I had 150 poems--most of them bad--in a thick three-ring binder. It still goes on, though diminished since 2003 when I began using the laptop for fiction and journaling and writing only poems by hand in the three-ring binder.

I also have kept some sort of “plan book” for most of my life, systematically writing down lists of things to do: master lists, weekly lists, daily lists. I tried the pre-printed planners but preferred to devise my own system in a three-ring during my years as department chair. Since then I use mostly spiral notebooks. I still keep a version of a diary in little church pocket planners I have carried for the past 10 years or so. In those, I note appointments in horizontal lines, which is helpful, but then I add and after-the-fact events on diagonal lines Why? I almost never refer to them again and they pile up in desk drawers to no end that I can see, but still, I cannot imagine not keeping one.

SAN FRANCISCO STATE

Actually I had not wanted to go to San Francisco State at all but applied first to the University of California at Berkeley. I am not sure why. Evidently I thought I was good enough for a major school, though nothing in my record would suggest that. I only had two credits of English on my transcript, in Freshman Composition, and I only earned an A in one of those. They quite sensibly turned me down. It is amazing how many events that bitterly disappoint us turn out to have been acts of grace. I was equally bitter when I applied later for a job at Dartmouth and was turned down and equally sure now that I would have been way over my head there and attached to a faddish program that would soon collapse. I would have been fired, and with a lot more trauma than I experienced in not getting the job.

The landlady’s name was Mrs. Cofe, a cranky and impecunious widow who had converted part of her basement into a tiny apartment. There was a curtain across the bathroom door, but otherwise it was all one room with archways to separate the kitchen and bedroom from the living room, which had garish green flower print wallpaper.

San Francisco State turned out to be just right—a tidy little campus with plain vanilla architecture. The teachers were courteous, engaged, and conscientious. My adviser, Ruby Cohn, a hard-working scholar of modern drama, was endlessly attentive and kind. I took five undergraduate classes in English the first semester and got A’s in all of them, although one, an introduction to literary criticism taught by a man named Frey, gave me some trouble. He actually read my papers, expected more than verbal slickness and gave me a D on my first paper. But he allowed rewrites, so I rewrote endlessly and got an A in the end.

I also took the English GRE the first semester and scored well in the verbal (high 90’s) and respectably in the quantitative (high 70’s) .The verbal score is not hard to explain: I had read through Shipley’s Dictionary of World Literature in the navy, and a lot of the test was on the content of world literature. That I didn’t bomb the quantitative is harder to explain: I suppose some of my training in chemistry and math stuck with me. I remember the primary problem, which had to do with Eratosthenes’s measuring the diameter of the earth using the length of shadows cast by two sticks placed several miles apart, one directly north or south of the other.

The work came easily to me and I studied all the time. In my second year there, I did my first college teaching when one of my professors got sick and asked me to teach his classes in World Literature. He shared an office with S.I. Hayakawa, a author of a famous account of General Semantics, called Language in Thought and Action. I was allowed to use that office and sometimes I did, staring in awe at the Great Man’s desk. He never actually came in when I was there, but I used to joke that I had once shared an office with S. I. Hayakawa. The joke only worked for a few years, though, until people forgot who he was. At the height of the student activism after I left, he was named president of the college and was famously photographed tearing the wires out of a sound truck the students had illegally parked on campus to promote their cause.

LIFE AS A GRADUATE STUDENT

It seems odd to say we went to church as a family when we were in San Francisco. Judy had been raised without religion, and I had renounced my faith in my junior year of college. But she had herself baptized and confirmed as a surprise gift to me and as part of preparing herself to good 1950’s wife--bless her heart--and I had continued to go to church occasionally. It was part of the culture. So when we moved to London Street we found a little neighborhood Episcopal Church with a racially mixed congregation. We loved it. The newspaper ran a photo of the socially progressive priest marching at a civil rights parade carrying a sign with a quote from First John 4:20: “If anyone says I love God while at the same time hating his brother, he is a liar.” After we moved across town, we continued to drive to that little church for awhile but we wanted something closer so we started going to a large traditional church near downtown. One Sunday the priest read a letter from the House of Bishops endorsing Fair Housing laws. Several people walked out.

On another Sunday, we were coming home from church and stopped at the grocery storye where we heard that Jack Ruby had just shot Lee Harvey Oswold. When the Cathedral held a memorial service for President Kennedy, I took the streetcar down town too late to get in but in time to crowd around the door to hear bits and pieces of the talk by Bishop Pike, the same Bishop Pike who had recently made the cover of Time Magazine for his iconoclastic views and political activism. He resigned in 1966 and went off the deep end, engaging psychics and mediums to help contact his dead son. He died in 1967 near the Dead Sea when his jeep broke down in the desert as he and his new, young wife were driving from Bethlehem to Masada. The only liquid they had taken along was a can of Coke.

Though Bishop Pike may have seemed a bit far out even for us, we were fully committed to all causes liberal. I read the Humanist Magazine regularly in the library and taunted my mother at long distance with my skeptical views. With another young couple who lived in our apartment complex, we volunteered for one of the activist programs run through the college. This one took young black children from the Filllmore District (the more respectable of the city’s two ghettos) on outings every Saturday afternoon. We would drive to a little store-front office where the children would gather to be taken to the zoo or to Golden Gate Bridge or—once--to our apartment for popcorn. Ahead of time, we would get books from the library about the places we went and we’d read to them from those books on-site. The idea was to “make the connection real” between print and reality.

At the end of each outing, we would take the children back to their homes, which where generally in the high-rise projects that proved to be a disastrous blind alley in the search for decent public housing in the 1960’s. The black mothers would wave to us from the window, and life was good. The high-rises were later deliberately destroyed with dynamite. We very happily did this work for several months before the program was terminated by activist blacks who told us that, whatever we might be doing for their children’s reading, we were contaminating their black identities. Listening to a young black man in sunglasses give that speech in that storefront office was one of the saddest moments in my life,

Money was always a crisis. One summer I worked part-time as a shipping clerk for a chemical wholesale company. Once I tried selling sandwiches bar to bar for a few hours, and another time I tried delivering brooms and dust cloths that had (supposedly) been made by blind people “out in the valley” and sold over the phone by high-pressure pitchmen. Many of the sales were to blacks in Hunter’s Point (the other and less respectable of the city’s two ghettos). All beginners were assigned to there first, though we were told that if we put in our time, we would be moved to white neighborhoods. So for a few months, I dutifully drove across the Bay Bridge to Oakland every week to an empty residence where young men in expensive suits and French sunglasses helped me load the back of my VW Bug with brooms and ironing-board covers. Then with a quaking heart I drove to Hunter’s Point and carried my wares past lines of smirking black males loitering outside the high-rises. I would toil up the graffitied stairwells to knock on the appointed door where a female voice would ask my identity and then tell me to come back on “Tuesday” or some other day designated as “payday.” For awhile I actually went back on Tuesday but then I caught on. At the end of three months, I was $15 in the hole, counting my gas, so I quit to concentrate on my studies.

We lived entirely on Judy’s salary, which I remember as $273 a month. The rent was $75 in the furnished apartment and then $80 in the unfurnished place we moved to, in the Sunset District just south of Golden Gate park, only a few blocks from Haight-Ashberry, which became a center for counterculture life after we left. We furnished it for less than $150. Our couch was an old solid-core door. I installed four screw-on legs and Judy covered it with colorful cloth hand-sewn to fit perfectly, with heavy twine embedded into the corners to make professional seams. Later, I put taller legs on the door and used it for a study table for another 15 years.

I did most of my studying in the library on campus where I experienced my most characteristic California moment, geologically speaking. One afternoon in 1964, I noticed that the building seemed to be moving. It was more a visual than a sensory experience: The people studying at adjacent desks seemed to be jiggling about. Only after we exchanged looks of alarm and puzzlement did I register that anything was really happening. Even then the word earthquake did not occur to me until after I had gone through other possibilities—that boiler might have blown up or that the building might be disintegrating. It felt more odd than frightening—that a three story concrete building would move seemed simply not credible. I had nothing in my experience to prepare me for it. I had slept through a larger quake in 1948 when I was in the sixth grade and had been in Rhode Island when a much larger one damaged Hebgen Lake near Yellowstone park in 1959.

REVOLUTION IN THE AIR

In the second year, some of my course work consisted of studying for comprehensive exams, which I could do at home. The heat in the apartment was turned off from 8:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, so in the winter I would light the gas oven and read hour after hour in utter contentment. For more serious research projects I would drive across the Oakland Bay Bridge to the library at Berkeley. On the way to the library I would stop at Sproul Plaza where students described the wonders of liberated life. I remember one who defended marijuana by quoting Mark 7:15: “nothing that goes into a person from the outside can defile him; no, it is the things that come out a person that defile him.” The speaker’s son, only three or four years old, furnished a running commentary on his father’s speech, and I wondered if the son’s precociousness were really standard in counterculture life.

But a month or two before I left, 0n Dec. 3, 1964, just as I finishing up my time at San Francisco State, the students forcibly occupied Spoul Hall east of the Plaza where the bearded young man had quoted the book of Mark. The students said and perhaps believed that they did so as a last resort after negotiations over Free Speech codes had failed, though I’m more inclined to put weight on the statement a student protester made about a later violent protest at Columbia over its failure to respond adequately to the needs of nearby Harlem—that the student leaders never cared two pins for the black people in Harlem, that they wanted disruption at any cost and if Columbia had met all their demands, they would have added as many more as they needed to provoke a confrontation.

In any case, the students at Berkeley were forcibly removed by police less that 24 hours after their occupation. For me, the violence was a step backward. For most of the two years I was there, the Counterculture life flavored life at SFSC but did not control it. In most of my classes at San Francisco State, there were a few students adopted the hippie dress and hair style. But they were all serious students, the first I had seen who really seemed to live out Aristotle’s idea of seeking knowledge for its own sake. They did their homework and then read beyond it. (So did I actually, though I kept my hair short and wore a suit to class once a week.) They participated eagerly and sincerely in class discussion, not because it was expected but because they really cared about the topics being discussed. Along with the copies of Kerouac in their backpacks, they carried translations of Plato and Heidigger.

MOVING ON

But while my life was more or less an unbroken idyll of study, things were hell for Judy. She had quickly gotten a job with a direct mail firm, doing the graphic work she was trained to do. But when her boss quit she was expected to do her work and her own besides and for no more money. The situation finally became untenable and she quit too, but fairly quickly found another doing statistical typing for Standard Oil. Typing rows of numbers is hard, however, and she wasn’t fast enough. Soon she was given her two-week’s notice. She was crushed. I can remember her calling me from work in tears and asking if I could pick her up rather than her having to take the street car home. I picked her up and we drove north across the Golden Gate Bridge out to Stinson Beach where we walked along the ocean shore until she felt strong enough to go home.

But as it turned out, during her two weeks’ notice she dug in and found ways to do the work. Not only was her firing rescinded but soon she was transferred to the graphics department of the same company, a pleasant office where she could do her work in a humane environment. This happened just as I was offered a job at Columbia Basin College in Pasco Washington in January of 1965. Naturally she hated to leave, but the best compromise we could arrange was that she would stay behind for a couple of months and work at least long enough to get a good recommendation on her resume. The thought that I might turn down the job and do menial work in San Francisco so that she could continue her work did not cross our minds. Or at least it did not cross mine. We both still considered the husband to be the primary breadwinner. At least I did. The wife’s job was optional except as it helped with getting the husband trained and employed so he could support his family.

I came back to San Francisco only once, with Judy, in August of 1968, to attend a workshop of the American Association of University Professors. Judy came, and Brian, then aged 2. We stayed with some college friends, George and Bev Mattson. George has gone to Newport in the same Officers’ Candidate Program that I had. He and his wife had moved to San Francisco just a few months after we had, as had Steve Foster, the best man at my wedding. George and Bev got us tickets to Pink Floyd at the Avalon Ballroom. Outside the door, pale waifs panhandled us for ticket money. Between the Navy and grad school and starting a family I had gotten left out of psychedelic 60’s loop and for that matter even the rock scene, so I was fascinated by the music and the light show (non-digital and primitive by today’s standards), though I was dead tired and kept falling asleep. Later we stopped on a lark at a bar called the Libra, because both George and I were born in that sign. It turned out to be gay bar and George explained that San Francisco had been a gay haven even when I lived there. I hadn’t known--San Francisco had been that much of a jumble.