Back To One

After Karen, Guam rebuilt stronger and better, but still it was not the island paradise many thought it would be. i remember being in knife fights on the playground in 4th and 5th grade, needing body guards to go anywhere without my parents, and feeling very very alone through it all.  You see, being white, civilian and female had me with three strikes against me. The military kids all stuck together as did the Guamanian, Philipino, Japanese and all the other subgroups. There weren’t very many “Statesiders” my age at that point who weren’t military in the Catholic schools.  (My mother, devout Irish Catholic that she was, was too afraid of our alcoholic bishop excommunicating her to enroll me in any other kind of school out there.)

So, I passed my time going down to the library to check out the book, writing escapist short stories, and traveling with my folks when the opportunity presented itself. By the time I was 12, I had read all the children’s books, the junior books and was halfway through the adult’s.  I found great delight following trails through Mark Twain’s deep South, burying myself in Sax Rohmer’s sinister Far East and the exploits of the evil Dr. Fu Manchu. Hemingway’s Old Man Of The Sea had a special depth when read sitting under a coconut tree at the ocean’s edge.

In school, English was taught as if it were a second language, as it was for many of my classmates.  We also dutifully learned basic arithmetic from 1943 math books, civics and, oh yes, religion. One of the most fun activities we had were the SRA Reading Skills programs that were self-paced. I could scream along reading and answering the questions and nobody would bother me.

The nuns thought I was too “full of myself” when I completed all the sections at grade level by the first week of class and asked for the next one and sought to enforce a little humility by means of a yardstick across my backside in front of the upper class kids.  They used to come up with all sorts of er, humility building techniques when anyone excelled in their classwork - public humiliation, beatings, forcing us to kneel in front of the class on concrete for hours at a time, shutting us in closets, fun times. So I learned not to excel in any way obvious and my grades started to slip. That brought nine different kinds of hell at home, then, but neither my mother nor my father ever believed me about the punishments until one day, I fell on the playground and cut me knee bad enough to need stitches and my dad got there to pick me up to see the doctor just in time to see Sr. Francis Marie with yardstick raised telling me to get up and stop being lazy. I quickly changed schools after that, but not necessarily for the better.

I matured early. The thing to do with daughters who were of pubescent age was to get them off the island to boarding school and quick. Bad enough there were no co-ed schools on the island. It was a mark of accomplishment for the local boys to get a caucasian girl pregnant, especially if her family had any presence on the island.  My parents were in business and hence I was quite a target. I was 12.

My parents decided that I should be somewhere relatively close, so I was enrolled in Sacred Heart Convent in Honolulu. - That will wait till next time.

Coping skills I learned from this:

• Don’t dwell on day to day drama - keep your eye on the future
• Enjoy the little things, celebrate whenever possible
• Rely on yourself, educate yourself, strengthen yourself; you’re the only one you can count on.

After Karen, Guam had no water, no electricity, barely any food.  What perishable food had survived had been quickly barbecued and shared with friends in fiestas. The attitude was grateful and one of one big family.

I remember standing in long, looooong lines to get a hot meal from the Red Cross that consisted of red rice, Spam and canned peas.  It was hot and it had been flown in. There was nothing left in any of the stores; most of it had been blown away.

All in all, we were among the lucky ones, though. Not too long before the typhoon, my parents had bought a Doughboy above-ground pool. 1950 gallons of water now held who knew what along with a floating rooster and the sign from the neighborhood grocery store.  The pool was a blessing, though, because after my father went around to all the neighbors and showed them how, folks were dipping into the reservoir to bathe and to flush their toilets with a bucket of water instead of digging latrines.  I think that’s probably why nobody in our area got sick.

It was really inspiring to my 10 year old self to see everyone pulling together and digging in to help each other recover from the disaster. We’d lived through it, everything else could  be replaced.  The island ways replaced those of the newcomers just as the waves washed up on the beach: you boiled your water over open fires, if you had canned goods, you shared with your neighbor who didn’t, you slept under mosquito nets with your bed legs in cans of kerosene to discourage roaches and bedbugs and Coleman lanterns gave way to coconut oil lamps.

Three weeks after Karen, my father decided it was too backwards for my mother and I and sent us to Oakland, California on the weekly flight out. Personally, I would have loved to stick it out. I was having an adventure.  At least it was warm.  December in Oakland was a foggy, drizzly, cold experience and one I was ill prepared for. My mother found a Catholic school (of course, but that’s another story), and enrolled me. Once again I was the square peg, the oddball. But it was okay, I had learned how to be self-sufficient during the last 4 years.

We were there for 6 weeks, until Guam got electricity back and was moderately livable and we could go home.

Here’s what I learned from this experience:

• People are like cactus - at first they’re prickly and hold you at arms’ length, but deep inside, they’re soft and juicy.
• No matter what happens, who YOU be is the only constant. The rest of your “world” is changeable.
• Live each moment. All we have is now, now, now. What happened a second ago is history and cannot be changed. The future is supposition and can change in a second.
• When you’ve lost everything, you have nothing to lose
• Find the fun in the moment. Laughter will always bubble to the surface and seek the highest level.

We had ongoing problems with the weather in general in Guam, but in 1962, Typhoon Karen hit and devastated the island. That was the first really big one. We had 95% destruction.  The instruments blew away at 200 knots so they don’t know exactly how bad it really got. I do know that it was two weeks before we got water and power back and even then the island wasn’t really habitable. My father sent my mother and I off to the States for 3 months while the island was being renovated. But what I remember most is during and immediately after the storm.

Usually, when we had typhoons or tropical storms, we packed up my parents’ king size mattress, the cat, food and water for two days , flashlights and a Coleman lantern and went to sit it out in the front office of the plant. It was concrete and glass block and would stand up to just about anything. This time, however, we had friends who were having a Typhoon Party as many did (gather many families and ride it out together) and they invited us to join them - rather stridently.

We had ridden out many storms that had not really amounted to much with no ill effects except maybe a few pieces of tin off the roof, so my parents decided what the heck, might be more fun than sitting alone. So, since the Flockmans had a dog, we left our Siamese cat at the plant where we knew he’d be safe and went on over after boarding up all the windows and such.

It WAS fun at the Flockman’s. There were 6 other kids there from two other families. My dad helped board up their windows and once everything was buttoned up tight, we settled in to figure out where people would sleep. We’d just had dinner since the power was still on when my mother happened to notice that the French doors that lined one side of the house were starting to buckle. They’d been boarded up, but still they were flexing. She mentioned it to the other adults and we all headed into the back of the house through a swinging padded door. You see, at that time, in Guam, lots of us had our bedrooms air conditioned and many times separated the cool part of the house from the hot part of the house with a padded door.

Someone was watching over us that evening for sure. We had no sooner gotten through the door, however, than the entire front of the house which had just been renovated to add a brick front onto it (one of the reasons for the party), caved in. We heard Vera Flockman’s buffet credenza full of china doing its best impression of a shaker jar as it tumbled over and over all around the room. The padded door was not one that had a lock and so my dad, who had a very bad back, sat against it to try to keep it closed. After awhile, even his 240 lbs. couldn’t hold it, so Norm Flockman and his brother stood over my dad to help. They stood there 4 hours holding a one-inch door against 200-mile-an-hour winds (they don’t know exactly how bad it got - the instruments blew away at 212 mph) and my father was sitting up to his armpits in cold water. We could hear roofs tearing off nearby houses and rain was howling outside. All of the rest of us were huddling in the one back bedroom that was the farthest from the door, but even that had water coming in from the hall.

We heard a really loud thud but it was so dark we had no idea what it could have been. We just prayed to make it till morning.

The day finally dawned and the winds stopped. We carefully made our way through the rubble out to see if anything was left outside. After 12 hours of howling winds and driving rain, the silence of the morning was deafening. The destruction of what had been a very nice neighborhood numbed the senses. We felt no sense of anything as we looked around at bare foundations or toilets and shower stalls where beautiful homes had been; just numbness. The thump we had heard had been a telephone pole that had been driven like an arrow into the roof and had stopped a mere few inches from the ceiling above the men’s heads!

We had a brand new Impala that had been zipped open by a sheet of tin as if it were a can of tuna, but we had to see if we still had our business (and our cat). We climbed into the car, brushing the glass and twisted metal aside to sit down and drove over and around the detritus and road hazards the short distance to the plant.

We had water damage since we were across the street from the beach, but that was mostly it. We had one small hole in the roof from a rock, but nothing else, thank God. We opened the doors to the front office to be greeted by a very insulted, very wet cat who told us exactly what he thought of having been left behind. After everything we went through at the party, we probably should have just stayed there.

I see the devastation from Katrina and all the other disasters and I can relate whole-heartedly. The eerie feeling of that morning continues to haunt me. There was no sound, no feeling of anything alive; so very odd on an island normally teeming with life. Even the ever-present sound of the breeze through the coconut tree branches was gone. There were no coconut tree branches left anyway and there was no breeze. There was nothing but a very quiet lapping of the ocean across the street, as if it was trying to catch its breath after throwing a major temper tantrum.

Telephone pole tops dangled from the few remaining wires swaying still from the force that had broken them. Cars passed by as Guam slowly started picking up the pieces and investigating the remains of lives.

God must have been watching over us, though because with all the destruction, there still were only 7 deaths and those were because people just had to go out during the lulls to see what was going on. You see, Karen was unique in many ways. For one thing, she had two eyes; almost unheard of.  Both of them passed over the island.  The worst winds are at the core surrounding the eye of a storm and inside the eye is perfectly calm.  When we were listening to the howling outside, we heard the eyes pass and it was spooky - so quiet, so empty, then picking up with a vengeance, slamming roofs and whole houses against others. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that sound.

Funny, I know better now that I’m 50 years older, but when it’s dark and the wind starts up I still get very uncomfortable.

The year was 1959 and I remember my mother crying when she picked me up from school. My grandfather had passed away in Guam and it made her very sad. She was upset she couldn’t even go to the funeral since she couldn’t bring herself to fly after losing her mother in a plane crash in 1953 and it would take 2 weeks by ship.

It was decided that my father should go to represent the family and she and I would follow as soon as we could. It was the first time I can remember that he was absent from the house. I really had no idea what was going on. I was just going on my merry way, day by day, as little girls do.

My mother got the house packed up and put into storage and we started off on one of the biggest adventures I had had. We left out of Oakland on the F.J. Luckenbach, a freighter destined for salvage after a long Navy career. It was the last trip on the old gal and I think she was glad. She’d seen a lot of water since being commissioned in 1918. The trip was to take 14 days.

With bad weather and worse mechanical setbacks, we chugged our way to Honolulu, Wake Island where we tossed a wreath on the sea for my grandmother, Kwadjelin and finally to Guam and arrived 28 days later. Personally, I had a ball! My mother was a bad sailor at best (hah, all you had to do was sway a little and she’d turn green), so was “indisposed” most of the trip. I spent the month following the Captain and the First Mate around, eating meals in the crew’s mess, helping cue the cranes up on deck when they had to shift cargo (or so I was led to believe at the time), and in general, just having the time of my life.

It’s amazing how little you really follow when you’re 6. What I didn’t pick up on was that my mother was battling intense depression, her traitorous digestive system and overwhelming fear traveling without my father. She was too sick to get out of bed, but felt guilty because she had to be ‘the mother” and couldn’t. I was fine. I’d get up, get dressed, go have breakfast and find my buddies. The other passengers were very kind and took me under their wings while trying to get something down my mother that would stay there.
You see, the reason why we had to go back to Guam was that my parents had taken advantage of an offer in the paper in 1947 after the war, to go out and rebuild the island. My mother and father went, relative newlyweds, my mother’s brother and his wife went and my mother’s parents went out to follow the promise of tax-free, dollars, government housing and civil-service benefits. What that turned out to be was money they had no place to spend, separate barracks for men and women, rainwater showers and occasionally a trip to the PX and a whole lot of boondocking (clandestine acquisition after dark of military surplus goods). Gotta love it.

I was born on Guam as were my cousins. My mother lost two boys and when she became pregnant with me, the whole island was in on it. She had to stay in bed for the last 6 months of her pregnancy so everyone (it was a pretty tightly knit community of Statesiders in those days) brought her stuff to read, stuff to do and stuff to distract her from her imprisonment. When she finally delivered, it was a really big deal.

Guam was the ultimate in small towns — 30 miles long, 6 miles wide at it’s widest point, and most of it covered in boondocks. Not a lot to do so the little drama of John and Alice Eaton and their battle to have a child was everyone’s business.

So, I made my appearance. It was touch and go for about 3 months till Mom and I stabilized, but I was determined to get here and stay here. Now 56 years later, I’m still overcoming odds and doing what most folks think is impossible.

In 1953, their contract with the Navy was up and it was time to return to Boston. On the plane, it was to be my grandmother, my mother and me. Mother would never really talk about what happened, but she refused to board the plane with me, leaving my grandmother to go without us. The plane went down just outside Wake Island. Strangely, out of 90 passengers, they found only pieces of 6 bodies and none of the luggage or plane. The joke in the family was always that they say you can’t take it with you, but Nana did. Since she was heading home, she’d packed all the household goodies and what family jewels there were and they went down with her.

In 1954, my mother and father and I came home to the States on a Navy ship. My grandfather, who tailspun into a severe suicidal depression after my grandmother died, had decided that there was nothing for him back in the States and staying in the islands, at least he’d be close to Nana. To keep himself occupied he bought a small laundry. My mother’s brother said he’d stay and help so we could leave. As I said, my mother wouldn’t talk about that time much, but we wound up settling in Southern California. My father worked selling cars in Fullerton and we lived in Garden Grove.

So, in 1959, we were Guam-bound once again. My dad had gone on ahead to take care of burial arrangements for my grandfather and find us a place to live since we’d be staying out there for awhile. So my mother made most of the trip getting intimate with the porcelain bowl in our cabin and I tripped merrily around the ship - except for the side trip to Wake Island to visit friends, that is.

Wake Island is technically an atoll of three islands: Wake itself is V-shaped; Wilkes and Peale Islands are extensions of the legs of that V, separated from Wake by narrow channels. They surround a shallow lagoon (the crater of the volcano that spawned the atoll), and are themselves surrounded by a coral reef. The highest point is only 20 ft above sea level. As such, you cannot approach the place unless you’re in a dingy or a private plane. There is an airstrip, but that wouldn’t have been much help from the Luckenbach. So, when the Captain announced the option of going ashore, the chance for firm land was just too attractive to my poor mother. And since we had to be there for 12 hours to refuel, and we had friends who still lived there, the decision was made to go. Another adventure was in store.

We cautiously crept down the rope, yes rope, gangplank which was swinging from the side of the ship. Handlers had rowed out to meet the ship in their dingy and were waiting. As one after another of the passengers who wanted to go ashore waited till the gangplank and the dingy rose together and jumped the gap, my mother caught sight of the shark fins in the water circling the boats. I was too little to jump the gap, and she wasn’t strong enough to jump with me after 3 weeks in bed, so the First Mate picked me up to throw me across to waiting arms. Big fun! Now, Mom was behind the man, a fairly burley grizzled seaman so she couldn’t see what was happening. After two false starts, he tossed me to a fellow who caught me easily, but his buddy fell into the water. My mother almost fainted because she thought it was me! I remember the man who caught me saying no, I was safe, but the other guy falls in all the time; not to worry, as he helped the very wet swimmer up out of the water. The First Mate swung her up in his arms and jumped into the dingy himself to show her I was fine. We made shore without further incident and had a wonderful visit until we had to reverse the process (but in the dark) to get back onto the ship that night.

We were so glad to reach Guam. It’s a very pretty island to approach by sea. And my daddy was standing on the shore to meet us. Life was good.

He drove us “home” to the quonset hut that had been my grandfather’s. We were home.

I’ve spent my entire life starting over. I’ve gotten quite accomplished at it. It doesn’t scare me, and I even have come to enjoy the challenge…sometimes.

The expression, “back to one’ is one I heard many years ago when I was working on a television show, The Open Door, in San Jose, CA. As part of the crew of a live to tape broadcast, we didn’t get the opportunity to hear it often, but nonetheless, our executive producer liked to use the term. It means to back up, regroup and start all over as if you hadn’t done anything. That’s actually the best way to start again.

I’ve been told by several people that I needed to write a book about my experiences with starting over, so here I go.