The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  There was another child in the home where I lived, and occasionally we played together. My foster father was a Cub Scout leader; on Saturdays, he did what he could to get me involved in social activities centered on the scouts. For example, I remember building a soapbox derby car and competing against other local boys in a race. Most of the time, however, I was on my own. I spent a lot of time wandering around the open spaces of the town, observing the tracks of animals and attempting to work out which ones had passed through. I preferred to stay secluded, alone with my thoughts.

  Mentally, living in Weaverville was a dark time for me. I had no friends and once again felt like an outsider, alienated from the happy, smiling kids in the classroom and the playground. The warm feeling of belonging I felt during first and second grade seemed to have vanished with the death of my friend, a feeling that was only exacerbated by my isolation from my family. One pinprick of light during this period was a tape my mom sent me—the soundtrack to Top Gun. I listened to the tape incessantly, because it represented some connection with my mother. Aside from this bright spot, the only communication I had with my parents was the occasional letter my mom sent me from jail. I walked around in a bubble of sadness.

  My hairstyle was as eccentric as my circumstances were stifling. I shaved the sides of my head and grew a Mohawk, as if to emphasize how different I felt. My closest friend was a peapod vine I grew for a school competition. All the kids in my school were set a challenge to grow the largest possible peapod vine. I talked to my plant, watered it every day, and even played music to it. Over the weeks of the competition, most of the kids managed to grow their vines to the length of a few inches. I think the largest aside from my own was about six inches long. My peapod, however, grew explosively. It reached a height of around three or four feet. I was proud of that.

  One of the finest examples of my mother’s indomitable will occurred during this period. Sitting in jail and frustrated at being parted from her family, she began to reflect on what she had seen and heard about the cops who had brought her in. The more she thought about it, the more she felt that something about the way the case had been handled was disturbingly wrong.

  Eventually, by piecing together her own experience and other shreds of evidence, she came to the conclusion that some aspects of child protective services in the county were a front for a pedophile ring. She began to believe that some of the local police officers were implicated, and that they were deliberately preying on people living in impoverished, remote communities who didn’t have a lot of resources or connections. This might sound like a far-fetched story, but she was right. The group was taking children into foster care with the intention of selling them into a larger, nationwide pedophile ring.

  Despite her straitened circumstances, my mother connected with a lawyer living in Los Angeles and convinced him that she was telling the truth. He agreed to take on the case pro bono. As the case progressed, the details slowly emerged and numerous police officers were prosecuted and thrown in jail, including the sheriff who had arrested my mother for possession of marijuana. Due to the investigation my mother started, the man who was acting as foster father to my three sisters was caught as he attempted to board a plane and flee the country. He was part of a national sex trafficking operation, into which he intended to sell my sisters.

  At this point, my mom was still unable to demonstrate that she was a suitable parent, so she called her parents, my grandparents, and they stepped in. As soon as they understood the gravity of the situation, they drove from Idaho to California, collected my three sisters and myself, and took us with them to live in Idaho. Meanwhile, Pat and my mother threw themselves into creating a stable family situation so they could reclaim custody.

  Grandma with my youngest sister, Amy, in the Weaverville, California courthouse after taking custody of her and the rest of us kids.

  Lesson: Finding My Center in a World Out of Control

  The years I spent in Hyampom were especially chaotic, even in the context of an unusually haphazard upbringing. My family moved there when I was six and we left when I was eight. For many of us, this is an age where sadness makes an appearance. We realize that not everything in life is wonderful. Perhaps we lose an elderly relative or a dog, or we see our parents fighting, and we come to understand that not every circumstance brings happiness. Living in Hyampom and later in foster care, I got a massive dose of those experiences.

  The biggest wake-up call in this period was undoubtedly the death of my best friend and his family. What’s the difference between staying at a friend’s house for seven days and staying there for eight days? For me, it’s my life. Call it a stroke of luck or a premonition on the part of my mother: I wouldn’t be alive to write this book if I had stayed another night with my friend. At a tender, impressionable age, I got my first taste of survivor’s guilt. Relieved as I was to escape death, I also felt confused. Why me? Why did I deserve to live when my friend and his family had died?

  Exacerbating these troubling questions was my separation from the rest of my family. Not long after the death of my friend, I found myself in foster care. The only connection I had with the people I was closest to came via an occasional letter from my mother, who was stuck in jail.

  It was at this point that I began to ask myself how I could make sense of the events that had turned my young life upside down. I had barely escaped death, I was torn away from my family, and I found myself in strange, alienating circumstances.

  Even at that age, I understood that while we may not always have control of our surroundings, we can always control ourselves. In some situations, that may be all we have control of. No matter what life throws at us, we can always strive to master ourselves.

  In foster care, I found solace in a connection to the wilderness. The town where I lived was small—only around three thousand people—but to me it seemed vast because I was used to roaming freely in the empty wilderness. Even in this disorienting environment, I found pockets of nature. I walked. I encouraged my pea vine to flower. I looked for ways to control my responses to the world around me.

  My victories were small, but they were still victories. My pea vine thrived. I built a soapbox racer that was faster than the racers built by the other boys in my neighborhood. These milestones helped to pull me into a more positive mental space and kept me from wallowing in negativity.

  No matter how much or how little you have, you always own your reactions. Unexpected events will always occur. The sun will rise and the sun will set. The seasons will come and go. The moon will wax and wane. This is true no matter what you do. Ultimately, these events are part of life. What will you do when someone important to you dies? How will you manage your responses to the most painful and challenging circumstances? In the answers to these questions, we discover who we are.

  Nonetheless, please don’t imagine that you are powerless. You are far more powerful than you may realize. Even if you believe your circumstances are unalterable, look again. In my case, the government stripped me from my family. The central axis around which my life revolved was suddenly broken. For all I knew, I might never have seen my parents and siblings again.

  In this deeply challenging time, my mother found a profound sense of conviction. The letters she sent me from jail reassured me that the fire within her burned deeply. In them, she let me know that she was 100 percent committed to getting out of jail and to win back custody of her children. It must have been so tempting for my mother to succumb to despair. Her circumstances looked dire. She had no place to live, no money for an attorney to fight her case, and few reliable family connections. Yet she never wavered in her determination—or if she did, she never allowed it to show.

  Sometimes the best way to handle uncertainty, pain, and loneliness is to find small ways to attain a sense of control in your life. At other times, you may discover that you need to take a stand for what you want or what you believe is right, as my mother did. In the
forthcoming chapters of this book, I’ll share many more stories of both.

  An Oasis of Calm in a Chaotic Childhood

  My grandparents’ ten acres was nestled in a wooded area, with a creek flowing through the back of the property. My grandfather was a keen landscaper and he had used his tractor to dig out a large pond. He kept the lawn between the mobile home—where he and my grandmother lived—and the pond in beautiful, manicured condition. The property was dotted with apple trees and raspberry bushes and was fenced to keep out the hungry deer who would otherwise have paid us a visit. Unfettered by zoning restrictions, my grandfather had lovingly curated the land and dug a gigantic pond on the property.

  With Pat in hiding and my mother unable to take custody of me and my sisters, my grandparents stepped in and gave us a place to live. At the time, however, I had very little information about what was happening. I was excited to leave foster care and see my sisters, but I didn’t know where Pat or my mom were, and my grandparents didn’t tell me or my sisters.

  I think this was because they too were unsure what would happen, and they didn’t want to raise our hopes. They didn’t trust Pat at the best of times, and the ongoing legal uncertainty may have caused them to wonder whether they would need to step in and give my sisters and I a permanent home. Despite the confusion, living with my grandparents was a huge relief after the anguish and isolation of foster care.

  Interlude #1

  3. Restoration

  1985–1986 (Age Eight to Nine), Sand Point, Idaho

  My grandparents owned ten acres of land near a small town called Sand Point, in the panhandle of Idaho, close to the Canadian border. The scenery was stunningly beautiful—that part of Idaho is home to a gigantic lake, Lake Pend Oreille, and a popular ski resort. On occasion, we drove up to the ski resort, from where we could look across the entire valley.

  On the far side of the creek was a huge, fertile garden, which was my grandma’s pride and joy. My grandpa helped to maintain the land, using his tractor to turn over the land. I loved to sit in the garden, with no agenda more pressing than to watch the raspberries as they changed color. When they hit perfect ripeness, I would harvest and eat them. There were so many that they provided a feast that lasted all summer.

  The rest of the property, the part that my grandpa didn’t manicure, was wild. There was dense forest and thickets of ferns, interspersed with paths my grandpa cut through the trees and shrubs for me to run around on. He used his trusty tractor to do this, this time trailing a brush hog attachment. Just below the mobile home, above the raspberry patch, he hung a swing from a couple of pine trees. I loved to sit on the swing, full of raspberries, and propel it as high as I could, singing songs to myself and enjoying the beautiful summer weather while my sisters played in the garden.

  Theme: A Summer of Restoration

  The summer I spent with my grandparents in Idaho was idyllic. The weather was beautiful and, for the first time in my young life, I had few cares and worries. On Sue and Tom’s Mountain and in Hyampom, there was always some form of stress or anxiety. We struggled to earn money, feed ourselves, and sustain our lives. Even when I wasn’t directly involved in these challenges, I could feel the tension emanating from my mom and Pat. Our poverty influenced our lifestyle, our clothing, and our diet. At my grandparents’ place, I was finally able to relax. All I needed to do was run around the woods, swing on the swing, and pick berries and apples.

  My grandparents were retired or semiretired. I think my grandma worked part-time at the local Walmart. They took life easy and made me feel at home. It was a new experience for me, and one that helped me process some of the events of the previous few years. I stopped for a while, with no new challenges to address, and gathered myself physically, mentally, and spiritually.

  The emotional stress of being taken away from my family took a toll on me that required more than a short break to heal. Over the course of several months, I internally pressed the reset button. It was as though the pressure of the previous years fell away from me and I was able to find a clean slate, ready to walk into the next phase of my life.

  This period of restoration had few distinct episodes, which is why I’ve turned it into an interlude between larger chapters. Nonetheless, it was an important time. It was the first period in my life when I had the opportunity to experience the healing power of rest and relaxation, a lesson that later played an important role in my training philosophy.

  An Idaho Idyll

  Grandma loved working in the garden. One of her favorite activities was pottering in her canning shed, which was full to the brim with canned products. I helped her as she harvested fruits and vegetables, prepared them for pickling, cooked them in a pressure cooker, and put them in jars.

  My grandma was a collector of old bottles and, intriguingly, a world-class expert on antique jars. She loved to find and research old bottles and jars, and even wrote a book on the subject, compiling everything she knew about jar manufacturers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book contains pictures of the jars, along with information about where they were manufactured and by whom. The house was full of antique jars that she had recovered over the years: every counter and the top of every cabinet was covered with them. In later years, she received a lifetime achievement award for her books and her research into those particular types of antique bottles.

  Oddly, my grandma was a world-class expert on antique bottles and jars. She wrote this comprehensive book on jars and jar manufacturers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  My grandfather, on the other hand, based his life around his tractor and his tool shed. He liked nothing more than getting out and tilling the ground. Living where they did was the fulfillment of their long-held dream. They saved up and bought a plot of land well before retirement, worked on it until they had made it the way they wanted, and then retired there. For a boy who was used to living in natural surroundings, it was a familiar atmosphere. There were a few other houses visible in the distance, but we had no immediate neighbors. The house was surrounded by trees, the huge pond he had dug, a creek, and other foliage.

  My grandpa loved to tell stories and jokes. He also loved to write poetry, even though none of his work was ever published. He simply wrote for his own amusement. He loved to sit around and read funny poems and jokes to my sisters and me. He was extremely hard of hearing, so to make him hear us we had to yell at him, even when he was wearing hearing aids.

  Me and my sisters at our grandparents’ house in Idaho, after they took us into custody.

  Stoney Comes to Visit

  At some point during the summer, my cousin Stoney and my great-grandmother came to visit us. Stoney and his mother were living with my great-grandmother at the time, helping to care for her.

  I’d seen Stoney before. He lived in Sacramento with his mom, my aunt Susanne, and his older brother, John. During our time in California, my family and I occasionally visited them. When he came to my grandparent’s house, however, Stoney looked very different than he did in Sacramento. He was dressed in nice clothes and seemed as though he was trying to behave well.

  I recall John as a teenager who dropped out of school and was living away from home, sometimes on the streets. It was an open secret that he was working the streets as a prostitute in San Francisco. He liked my mom, so when we were in town, he stopped by to see her. One time, John tried to give my mom a beautiful diamond ring, but she wouldn’t take it. She looked at him and told him that she knew he didn’t have money, so the ring had to be stolen. I remember John getting angry and walking out of the room.

  During our visits to Sacramento, John and Stoney would head out to the trees behind the property. A few times they dragged me along too. They pulled out cans with holes in them and sat there smoking weed. I thought this was unusual: I was used to seeing adults smoke weed, but I’d never seen kids smoking. I never took a hit, though. I just hung out with them while they
got stoned, then we all returned to the house together.

  John didn’t come with my great-grandmother to visit my grandparents in Idaho, only Stoney. During his visit, we played in the garden, ran around the property, and picked raspberries. At the time, everything seemed calm and peaceful.

  Little did I know it would be the last time I ever saw Stoney alive.

  Lesson: The Importance of Recovery

  At the time, I couldn’t have expressed the value of those blissful months in concrete terms. Now, I understand that adaptation to stress occurs in a cyclical fashion. When we train, our performance improves as we adapt to stress. Over time, however, if the stresses are too great or we don’t incorporate sufficient recovery time, gains begin to diminish. To grow and adapt, we require stress, but equally, we need periods of rest and recovery. This is a delicate balance to strike: if we rest too frequently or for too long, we will become soft and move backward. We need stress to create adaptation.

  The longer we stress the body for, the longer we need to rest. In the training world, we call this period supercompensation. First, we apply a huge amount of stress. As we accumulate fatigue, performance dips. Then, at the right time, we take a break and realize all the gains of that accumulated fatigue. Following supercompensation, performance rises to a higher level than it was prior to the rest.