I wish I had my born again neo-luddite brother Peter to help me this technical stuff. It's killing me.
I had a note from Penny that woke me the fact that the Del Norte Fire Center, which is where we moved from when we crossed the river, was a special place. To tell you the truth I know very little about what it was like there. I assumed it was much like all the other fire centers I had visited. Remembering that the CCC was under the command of the California Department, and they had, in my experience, very different agendas, and very different missions, which produced a sort case of arrested development for the CCC, at best. I suppose that's the reason all of the fire centers are gone. Apparently CDF is happier working with convicts, which is who occupies the centers now. My sense of it is that for the most part, becuse there no doubt many CDF Fire Capatains, who functioned as crew supervisors, had and have an interest in the development of their crew members, but it wasn't in their job description, and it wasn't part of the culture. For the most part they were frustrated by corpsmembers, many of whom had no work experience, period. And then, when they showed up on Monday morning a two of their best crew members had been sent down the road for failing to attend classes or they violated some dumb-ass rule, you can imagine… And to be fair, training and maintaining a class 1 fire crew an easy thing to do, which, for reasons I ‘ll explain later the CCC couldn’t do on its own.
But the Del Norte center was different. Before the CCC arrived, an Ecology Corps occupied the center, which bled into the life of the community. There were vegetable gardens and chickens, and the whole of the CCC staff, under the direction of Susie Lang and then Patrick Couch, made a good job of accommodating CDF, but also worked very hard to live up to the youth-development mission of the CCC. There was a much used piano, located in the dining hall, I believe. And it was a talented staff, not all of whom were able to make the transition from running a residential program to grade crew supervisors.
But for now, suffices it to say that some of my perceptions were errant. I’m hoping that Penny, Patrick, David and others will correct my misperception, here, in the near future. Crossing the river wasn’t entirely a new beginning, or necessarily even a welcomed beginning, which brings me to the next thing: we are, would you believe, making this stuff up as we go along. Facebook wasn’t adequate for everything we’re trying to do here. Tony Vasquez suggested that we create a community at Google. I couldn’t make it work, partially because of my low technical skills, and partly because the state of the interent is primitive, especially when you’re out in a rural area outside of a provincial city like Udon Thani, which is where I am. So I created a website: https://requacccpeopleshistory.webnode.com/. It may be under construction but it’s up and running.
After fumbling around a bit and getting some valuable feedback from Penny Walker, Tony Vasquez and others, I’ve formulated this process. I’m going to focus on the history of the Del Norte Center in my blog, which I will also post on Facebook. I’m hoping that can provide a sort of spine for this enterprise. People then are free to come onto this site and add to the people’s history of the village at Requa. Please send photos, too. Photos as essays are powerful and will really add texture to the enterprise. And then when we’re finished we’ll edit and shape what we have and publish it as an eBook, a book online. There are lots advantages to an eBook over paper. Just the difference in number of photos we can include here over what we could get into a printed book will be colossal. I mean I’m carrying around at least two thousand pounds on my kindle, which weighs 9 ounces. Once we have the book online, well then you can download it onto a reader, copy it onto a disc. You could print any part of it, and so. Perhaps other options will emerge down the line; perhaps, we’ll be hearing an offer from a major publisher soon. Come on, it doesn’t hurt to listen…
Because of the addition of this site to the enterprise, I’ve had to sort of back up. A good bit of what I’m posting here has already appeared on Facebook. Please bear with me. Today I’m going to publish enough to tell the story of Peter M. I happen to know that George Parker has something to add to Peter’s story. And if everything goes as we hope, George will post his piece here in the next couple of days, and then we’ll see how it dovetails and adds to the peoples story.
So here’s the next installment of the unfolding saga:
Of course the center had brought a lot of past practices across the river. One of them was that, so long as you didn’t drink on center or come home and cause problems, and if you could hold your mud and show up for work, what you did on your own time was nobody else’s business. So when you boiled it down it was, more than anything, starting the driftwood fire was just a most unfortunate accident.
I was a big fan of working suspensions, because corpsmembers who were suspended and elected to stay in the neighborhood were going to be living rough and hungry. I liked giving corpsmembers an option: a one week working suspension, or a two week non-working suspension, which required the purchase of a round-trip bus ticket, which we would take care of until we deducted it from their salary. It seemed kind of fair. It was a better deal than I got in the Marine Corps, not that I’m complaining. In fact, in the end, the working suspension was ruled to illegal by the department’s attorney. But for years it worked just fine. The working suspension kept suspended corpsmembers in the game. Moreover, many of the corpsmembers didn’t have anywhere to go back to. And if they did there was a fair chance they would drift away. Under the working suspension you still had a place to stay and some food. You could keep going to classes. Still, working for free hurt. But, in the end you were a lot less out of pocket if you took the working suspension. And the crew and the crew supervisor would respect that you didn’t let them down.
So, even before I talked to the shame-faced offenders waiting for me, I took my decision to my boss, David muraki. Corpsmembers would have the options outlined above, plus they would be placed on a performance contract specifying that another alcohol-related incident would result in immediate termination, plus, I think, they had to go down and clean up the mess at the beach.
I outlined for him my thinking about the center’s evolution, and what kind of message we would be sending to corpsmembers. I explained how I thought my plan was much more consistent with our youth development values. We wouldn’t just be rolling them up and sending them back to prison, as it were, which is what they do in correction conservation camps and what the CCC was doing everywhere; except, of course, our corpsmember were not being sent back to prison; they were sent home or sent to some place called homeless.
Muraki didn’t bat an eye. “Sounds good to me,” he said, and went back to whatever it was he had been doing before I interrupted him. It was pretty hard to rattle David Muraki. One of the questions he often had about people was: “Can he/she take a knockout punch?” Will she get up or just stay down? Everybody, in David’s experience, sooner or later, was going to get knocked on his ass. That just the way life was. But then Muraki had great examples of courage and perseverance in his own life: his mother and father had been disappeared, rounded up and “interred” in a camp near Tully Lake during our war with the country of their origin.
Somehow they managed to bounce back. They were not angry or resentful people; on the contrary, they were very kind and generous. I was always struck by their calm kindness. Imagine, in the first season of the Backcounty: David’s crew camped in his folk’s back garden during orientation and during the end-of-season debriefing. “Arigato gozimus mommason, poppason.
We didn’t really know each other very well at that point, but I strongly sensed David’s satisfaction with my call and the thinking that got us there. It was such a blessing to work with him. He’s a really smart guy, and a clear thinker. He almost never second guessed me. I mean I was free to create anything that made sense and had the potential to make things better. He wasn’t like a boss at all. He was a collaborator at every step of the way. In fact, the growth of the center would have been greatly stunted except for the protective shield he held up against the unwelcome intrusions of Sacramento. I think he told me one time that he felt like a “prophylactic”. Poor guy. He fought a pitch battle against the colonialism of the state. It was like our colonial masters kept sending us tractors, when there was no diesel, and instruction manuals written in Chinese. However well-meaning the new policies and programs intended were, they just never had a chance of working in the third-world village we lived in. We needed to figure out how to adapt to and harness the resources available to us. Keep in mind that the Klamath watershed was unbelievably rich in natural resources, natural resources restoration needs, and there was a need for a manpower force such as ours. The Klamath Watershed was the goose; all we had to do was to get her to lay a few golden eggs for us. She had plenty…
CHAPTER TWO
So here I am sitting in the breezeway at the house where I’m living. This is the third day of the Songkran festival. 39 people were killed yesterday on the roads and highways of Thailand. I wonder how many people died on the roads of England because of drunkenness on the same day. Both countries support a population of around 65 million?
(I’ve been gone for several hours: I went over to the big house to share a traditional Issan barbeque with about 25 people who came to celebrate Songkran. We ate fish, rice, clams, noodles, and fat pork, and many different kinds vegetables and spices, all hot. At this kind of traditional barbeque guests eat with their fingers. You use a leaf of lettuce or cabbage as a sort of green tortilla, into which you place rice noodles, some meat, garlic, chilies, onions and tomatoes, and then add different sauces, depending on exactly how much heat you can take, and then you eat it with your fingers. However the man who works the farm here, Roon, and his wife Bee, who inherited the farm, developed a taste for Korean food during the five years they spent making furniture there, so there is a strong presence of Korean spices too.
As I was the oldest member of the community at 72 (jet, sip, song), all of the guests lined up in front of me. They dipped cups of cold water and poured them into my cupped hands as a symbolic gesture, hoping that with the wisdom of age I would have developed the strongest relationship with the water spirits and the land, to bring them together, to please both. Behind me was a group of young children hoping I would throw some of the water on them because they liked it. And, after all watering growing children isn’t a bad idea either, it seems to me. Water is good. Please note that after the ceremony the children quickly grabbed their pump-up water guns and gave me a good soaking. Fair’s fair.)
I was about to say that as our vision of the Del Norte Center as a world-class youth development program became clear only with the passing of time. And there are lots of stories along the way: how we established the John Muir Charter High School, how we used community college instructors to help us build the Marine Mammal Center in Crescent City, restore the old De Martin house at Wilson Beach, rehabilitate miles and miles of streams on the north coast and beyond, the trails we built under college instruction throughout the state. Indeed, if you include the miles of trails our back country crews built you could be a fair way to the moon. And there’s lots more, including our struggle, which was our “mother of all struggles,” how to make it possible for two very different institutions to co-exist, in symbiotic partnership if at all possible, in the same space; I’m talking about the top-down, command and control bureaucracy of the State of California, and our small village, in which we were trying to do the best we could for each other. We were caught between a rock, a devil, and the deep-blue see. Indeed we were magnificently isolated. In front of us was one of the greatest bodies of water on earth, to the east a wilderness that seemed to stretch forever.
(It would be great if you guys who started that “fire” that didn’t run up the hill could tell us about how that all came down and worked out. And, please, anybody else in the cyberspace circle up, share your stories at the Del Norte Alumni site. Or is there a better way to do this? But in the mea time I’m going to just keep on putting one foot or word in front of the other.
My plan is to stick to a writing schedule of from 6 to 10 each morning. I’m just going to trust the process. I figure all I’ve got to do is show up. But I really do want to tell our story, as experienced and remembered by you and me. Oops, it’s 12:30)
Part of the routine in the early days, after we made the move across the water, was for me to drive a van down to Eureka, where I picked up and welcomed new recruits who had finished a basic orientation course at the CCC’s training academy in San Louis Obispo. The bus usually arrived in Eureka around noon, so I left the center with sack lunches for however many people who were going to board the 15 passenger van when I met them in Eureka.
It was my practice to hug the coast from Moonstone Beach to Trinidad, and have lunch at some unbelievably beautiful spot along the way (“Welcome to the north coast, where the sixties meet the sea, and where winter spends the summer.”). For a couple of years there we would stop in Trinidad to visit Axle Lungren, who spent his days burning out and carving 16-18 foot redwood logs, which became, under his steady hands, the traditional canoes of the Yurok people. He was my neighbor, and he appreciated what these young people were going to be doing on his ancestral land. (His son Joe and I occasionally play a round of golf.)
Axle showed them how to use the tools, and explained the importance of these sea-worthy vessels to the life of his people. Axel’s boats are may be just ceremonial now the ones you still see around the north coast museums still look sea worthy. (I’ll look for a photo.)
On one occasion, I remember watching a rather distinctive looking corpsmember watch Axle. His name is/was Pedro. He looked like the quintessential east LA gang banger. He wasn’t. He was from the west side. He was looking sharp. His uniform was still crisply pressed, even after the 10 hour bus ride. The collar button on his shirt was fastened. When he stood, his feet were slightly splayed. Heels together, his arms hung down well below the normal because his shoulders were turned in just a bit and his back was slightly tilted forward. I could see the tip of the gang tattoos running up his neck, and the Christian cross displayed between his thumb and forefinger. As he watched Axel work, he had a fixed challenging smirk on his face. He was sending a message: not only did he want all of us just how cool he was, he also wanted us to know how small and insignificant we were. Of course, he was just feeling afraid in this so different world he found himself in. But, as it turned out, he really was a tough guy, but he was tough in ways he hadn’t imagined.
I wondered: you just didn’t see many gangbangers of Pedro’s high caliber at that time up on the north coast; indeed, it was some years before the awful dungeons of Pelican Bay State Prison were built just outside of Crescent City to accommodate his brothers. In fact, I drove Peter up to Pelican Bay some years later so he could visit with childhood friends, shortly after he returned from a two year stint in the Florida swamps at a place called “The Hurricane Island Outwardbound School”, where he took kids on two week sojourns into the swamps as a court-ordered alternative to incarceration. Out there, amongst the mosquitoes, snakes and alligators, Pedro was there to help them work on their “survival” skills. Amazing.
So I was a little worried about Peter, the kind of mischief he might get into. This guy was potentially a cultural Rambo; he was capable of seriously damaging a crew’s unity or, for that matter, the entire center’s culture, everything we were trying to do. I had had a lot of experience with damaged kids like Pedro. But they were CYA parolees. Pedro obviously wasn’t on probation or parole. If he was, he wouldn’t have qualified for a position with the CCC. Being on probation or parole was an automatic disqualification. So, I thought, if this guy isn’t on probation or parole, he must be pretty slick. Well, he was and he wasn’t.
In fact Pedro had come to Del Norte to hide out. Much later, he showed me the scars where the bullets had entered and left his body, amazingly not striking any vital organ. It was simple: there was a price on his head, scores to be settled, and there was just no way he was going to survive. His girlfriend at the time is doing life for three murders. Maybe they’ll still find a way to have a life together after she gets out. But he had no chance of surviving in LA. As fate would have it, he made contact with one of my contacts at the Employment Development Department in Pico Rivera. The CCC was his way out of town. He saw it as a better option than Mexico, where he was born.
So, small wonder that he figured we were going to be easy. Seriously, this guy was a gangster. He was just going to kill time, let things cool down. It was also obvious to me in a fairly short time: he had leadership skills; given the chance, he was capable of starting a race riot or a war between corpsmembers and staff. I could see it in his eyes: it might be fun to destroy this place.
So you can imagine that I was a little concerned when Peter was assigned to crew 4, which was led by Kristin, a quiet young woman who had been recently hired.
Of course, knowing what I know now, there wasn’t anything to worry about. Hiring Kristen was a stroke of genius. Muraki knew her well. And she was more than a match for young Pedro. She had been a Backcountry corpsmember and she had worked as a trail crew technical supervisor. She had imprinted upon her the simple, distilled template and set of
Kristin was a rock you could not roll out of the way. She was going to stay right there in front of you. Simple: do your best and you’ll do better. Push yourself. Listen, watch, learn. Be an example. Be a good person. Kristen believed whole heartedly in the potential goodness of everyone. And Peter was no exception. But I suspect it was her example more than anything else that brought Peter around, made him a Kristin groupie, so to speak. You just couldn’t spend as much time with her as Peter did and not admire her. She worked harder than he could, which was probably slightly embarrassing for the macho boy from LA. She wasn’t phony either, and she had a good heart. You couldn’t intimidate or manipulate her. She asked tough, straight forward questions: why are you here, what do you want out of this experience, why aren’t you doing your best, what’s holding you back?); she didn’t do well with dishonesty or broken promises either. By God, if she could do this stuff, you could too. After all, if you here just for a paycheck, you were in the wrong place. Pick it up or pack it up.
So Peter and I watched each other. He had no idea who I was, except that I was a white guy with authority I probably didn’t deserve. I saw the look of disbelief on his face at community meetings, as we struggled with complaints about the food, the lack of transportation, and our adult education program, or our classes in environmental awareness and career development, whatever. But he was doing better. And the inevitable happened: Pedro joined a group of corpsmembers on a recreational run to the skating rink in Brookings, Oregon. He was caught red-handed carving gang symbols into the door of wooden lockers. Busted.
As per usual, I reviewed the report of incident first thing the following morning, and summoned Pedro into my office. Mind you, this was not unchartered territory: it was one fuck up confronting another. Something that happened more than occasionally. Still, this was a chance for me to get rid of this guy, to send him back to LA or wherever, anyplace where he couldn’t damage our center. But that incident way back there in San Pedro came to me: what about getting rid of someone because they might be a problem down the road—keeping in mind there was little resemblance between the innocent kind who wandered into the dining hall without his shoes and the violent gangster in front of me. I’m still not sure I did the right thing; all of the indicators and the health and wellbeing of the center indicated getting rid of this guy. He was a huge risk. If I had been writing a recommendation to a judge, concern for the safety of the community would have been uppermost in my mind. The problem was, his crime, destruction of public property, wouldn’t have been enough to send him to jail. Still, it was enough to “terminate” his employment with the state of California. Problem is I was both the probation officer and the judge, which made it really difficult for me, and I tried to always keep community as the first priority, over everything else. In situations of this kind, I asked myself: how strong is the community just now? If I felt we were in a healthy phase, then I didn’t need to worry so much about the message a particular decision sent, keeping in mind that fairness and consistency usually look like the same thing, and the perception of fairness---0r its opposite—were very important considerations.
At this point I didn’t have enough information to make a good decision. So we talked. We talked in the broken/English-Spanish language of inner-LA. I told him I thought he was going to be a leader in this community, for good or bad, one way or the other. I told him a little about my past, about growing up in the projects in San Diego, my years as a Probation Officer in LA. It turned out Peter had a more respectable upbringing than I did. His mother and father were still together. His older brothers and sisters had moved away from home, and had started families of their own. He had graduated from high school. He played baseball and soccer and was a big NBA fan.
But running parallel to this life was his growing involvement with a local gang. As you may know, being a member of a serious gang requires commitment, dedication and loyalty, virtues in some contexts—in the context of a CCC crew, for example. As time went on, as Peter grew up, the time and energy he was putting into the gang overshadowed everything else. Hanging out in the park during the day, he and his homeboys were creatures of the night. There were incursions into the territories of other gangs, fights, and homicides, executions, and reprisals.
I asked his reasons for joining the Corps. He told me there was a hit out on him in LA. His girlfriend had been arrested for three murders, and, he said, I’m a dead man if I go back to LA. Now here was a hook.
I told Peter he was docked for the day, and he had to leave the center until 4:30 at which time I would meet him back in my office. I then drove out to the trail project crew 4 was working on; I think they working at Jed Smith State Park, near Hiouchi.
I took Kristin to the side and we had a chat about Pete. I think he had been on the crew for a little over a month; anyway, I brought his personnel folder along because it contained a monthly performance evaluation. As a way to focus the discussion we went over the eval one performance criteria at a time. And then we looked at her comments, and overall rating, and the measures, improvements, and areas she wanted Peter to work on. That part of the document was really contractual. Corpsmembers were always given the opportunity to discuss and even disagree. But hopefully the corpsmember and C1 would end up on the same page. Then evals really had some value as a tool for improvement. We’re on the same side. In short, the eval indicated that Peter’s performance was slightly unsatisfactory over all. He needs to pay closer attention to details, including safety, quality and quantity of work, and, most importantly, for the purpose of this conversation, he needs to do a better job of following directions, and he needed to become more cooperative with his peers and staff. And he had been late to work twice.
Not awful for a newbie (supervisors tended to be more critical in their intial evaluations). The evaluation scale was from 1 to 5. 3s were considered satisfactory. It would be rare for a newbie to see anything above a 3 on their first evaluations, except maybe under attendance and attitude. Peter had something like 4 2s on his. Not horrible.
So we came to her sense of the guy: what did she think of him over all, as a worker and as a human being? Was he going to fit in, and in time be an example for those coming later? Was he going to an asset or a liability? Did other corpsmembers like him? Did he have any friends?
Kristin was guarded. She had to think about the crew. But, she said, she was willing to work with him, if we could draft a tight performance contract, which would spell out a set of conditions he would have to meet, or be terminated.
At 2pm the evening staff came on, and I went around and talked to them. Penny Walker, the Evening Program Supervisor, I think, said Peter was pretty quiet. He seemed to keep pretty much.to himself, which wasn’t at all unusual. Lloyd Thompson, another evening staff member, told me Peter had fair basketball skills but needed to work on his passing skills. No surprise there. Otherwise, Lloyd said he hadn’t had any problems with Pete.
So now I had done my research. I had enough information to make a recommendation, and then to make a good decision. Remember in this game what was important was making a good decision. Whether you liked it or not shouldn’t matter much. Believe me: being in charge of the disciplinary process at the Del Norte Center was difficult. People were watching, and they didn’t always agree with my decisions. In fact, I’m sure that it was unusual for there to be complete agreement on any decision I made. And then, if you actually agreed with me when I made the wrong decision, you probably weren’t going to remember those. Before making the really complicated decisions, I went to visit David, whom I often found, in the later years, sitting at his computer, typing about 60 words a minute, keeping time with his foot, and chewing gum like crazy (quitting chewing tobacco, a nasty habit he picked up hanging out with trail workers, was some kind of difficult). But I don’t remember having a conversation in this particular instance. I mean I was very conscious of the different functions or aspects of making yjese decisions: I was, for all intents and purposes, probation officer, judge and jury. And since none of this happened in a vacuum, I played public information officer and omnibus man. The trick was to try to keep it all headed in the direction of continuous improvement. (Do any of you remember this observation I made at any number of community meeting: “So every now and then we should remember the opportunity we have together. This is still all new, to you, to me, to all of us. But here’s the thing: if we keep working at, it’s just like piss-anting rocks to build a retaining wall in some beautiful and faraway place, we’ll get there. We’ll finally have built a place good enough for your children. Sure, sometimes the rocks just don’t fit. So what do you do (after you’ve had your little scream)? You know you don’t have any options: you tear the damn thing apart and start over, that’s if you don’t plan to just quit. Your supervisor isn’t going to accept it. So, just remember this is about more than just you and me. And what would you rather be doing, seriously, sitting on your ass back home, stoned or bored out of your mind, feeling all sorry for yourself, or would you rather be wet and dirty and tired and know that, even though we aren’t going to build enough trail to stretch from here to the stars, we’re at least going in the right direction?”)
Anyway, Peter showed up on time. I handed him a written version of the deal. I would call the manager at the skating rink and ask him what it was going to take to make it right. On the day after payday, Peter would give me a money order for the amount determined by the manager, and a letter of apology. He would address the community at our Thursday meeting and apologize to them for embarrassing them and the center. He would also sign off on a performance contract specifying that, if he received less than a 3 on all future evaluations under “Attitude” and Cooperation with Peers and Staff” he would be subject to termination. In addition, Peter would forfeit a week’s pay (I did give him the two weeks suspension option but where was he going to go—back to LA?)
Actually, Peter expected to be fired, so the terms and conditions of our offer seemed pretty good to him. So he agreed. He signed the contract.
I then called the manager, apologized, and asked him how much money was it going to require to repair the damage. “A hundred bucks should cover it,” he said. Fine. I told him a money order and an apology would be in the mail by the 2nd of the month.
And then I hung up and told Peter what it was going to cost him. I thought he was going to go right through the ceiling. You know that old expression “his eyes got as big as saucers”? His did. “yep,” I said, “that’s the deal, take it or leave it.” He was furious. I could see he thought this was a con. He just knew I had an arrangement with the manager; we were going to split the money.
And Pete, well let’s see: He recently lived at my house, with me and my wife Carol. He came to stay with us at the end of a two year Peace Corps assignments in Africa. After he got back from the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, which was his first post-CCC job, he worked as a youth supervisor for the Los Angeles Conservation Corps for ten years. Then he started working as a supervisor in the Backcountry for his dear friend Peter Lewis. He did that for six seasons while attending College of the Redwoods. He’s in the Backcountry’s orientation at the moment and he’ll be heading out very soon. Good luck, Pete.
