by Mark Goode
Although it was too warm for snow, we did have some light rain, which raised plenty of excitement in the community, which was dry as a desert. We had talked my dad into ordering some new trees to plant next spring, hoping to resurrect the tree farm and reignite Grandpa’s interest in growing them. Overall, Dad seemed to be in a better mood and was happier, or at least it appeared so.
It was nearly April, when the trees that were left started budding leaves and were thinking about flowering. Tulips and spring bulbs popped up. Our new trees were en route.
Then one day the electricity went off. It was midmorning. Mom called my father at the co-op and told him the power had gone off. Since the electricity was still on in town, Dad reassured her that the electricity would be back on shortly and that this was not unusual. Mom called again about two hours later and notified him they were still without power at the house. He called the electric company and reported the incident, but they said there were no outages in the area.
The next call from Mom was frantic, and she relayed that she had called the paramedics. She had found Clyde in the barn unresponsive. She asked my father to meet her at the hospital. “It doesn’t look good, honey,” she said, with tears streaming down her face. “They’re loading him into the ambulance and doing CPR.” She had also called me, and I headed directly to the hospital as well.
We all met at the emergency room, where the physician quickly broke the news. He had tried valiantly, but resuscitation efforts were not successful. Grandpa Clyde had passed. The coroner was called in to review the situation, and she initially surmised that Clyde experienced a sudden heart attack while he was out working on the farm, watering the trees or doing a similar chore because the paramedics had reported a garden hose running at the site and that they turned the water off so they could move the ambulance closer to the barn.
When we went out to investigate the following day, we found that the ground was soaking wet where Mom had found Grandpa lying. Immediately above was the electrical panel, which was open. A screwdriver lay on the ground, and we saw evidence of electrical arcing: the tip of the screwdriver was melted and black burn marks streaked across the electrical panel box. It was a surreal experience.
Dad said, “Oh my God, I should’ve seen this coming.” He ran back to the house.
We found him on the porch weeping. He said that it appeared that his father had electrocuted himself. Clyde was a self-taught but competent and knowledgeable electrician. He must have watered the ground to ensure that there would be good conduct of electricity through his body. There was no reason he should have been working in the panel box at that time, and there was no way he would have wasted the water running it on a bare patch of ground.
We didn’t tell the sheriff or the coroner of our suspicions. The official cause of death was a heart attack. A week later, we had a service at the farmhouse and spread his ashes beneath a cottonwood tree next to Hettie’s and Rusty’s graves.
Clyde Jennings’s surviving son, Dale, my dad, had good days and bad days, but for the most part he was always sad. After work he’d stop off at the local watering hole with the guys. Gradually, this became more frequent and he’d arrive home later and later. After a few months, Dad quit his job at the co-op. He stayed home most the time drinking whiskey. Mom voiced her concerns that her husband was deeply depressed and drinking too much. She and I made an appointment with the family physician, who recommended a psychiatrist and counseling.
I remember feeling depressed myself, after all these losses and watching my father floundering while Mom and I stood by helplessly. One evening out on the back porch, I had a heart-to-heart talk with Dad, laying it all out — our concerns about him and how Mom was reaching the end of her rope. I said, “Dad, please don’t do this. Promise me that you will find the strength to get better and that you won’t keep harming yourself like this.”
His response was “I should have seen it coming. I failed my father.” Then he slumped even lower in the lawn chair. “Pop worked so hard from sun-up to sundown. He toiled in the soil his whole life and did the jobs no one else would think of — all for my benefit, for our benefit. He gave his life for me, and when he needed me, I wasn’t there. It’s all my fault. If I had only spent more time with him, recognized his suffering, things could’ve been different. I could have saved him. I hate myself. I should have seen it coming.”
I tried to get him to see how similar his situation was with the one I was in with him. But he refused to let me help him.
The counseling sessions didn’t seem to help much anymore, either. The next thing we knew, Dad was in jail with a DUI. He was released directly to an alcohol detox center. This became a theme for a while, and later the judge threw the book at him with a 90-day sentence in jail.
Mom and I hoped this drastic consequence would be a turning point for him, and it was for a brief period. When he started drinking again, Mom was furious. She told him that she was not going to stand around and watch him slowly kill himself with alcohol. He needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, or she was leaving. Unfortunately, that did come to pass. They divorced and Mom moved far away to Alaska to live with her sister.
“I should have seen it coming,” my father lamented once again.
This left me and Dad alone on the farm. At the time, I was attending college. I hired a hand to help with the chores and to look after Dad.
Nevertheless, one day when he was unattended, Dad drank a couple quarts of whiskey and was unresponsive when I got home. We rushed him to the hospital, where he spent about a week in the intensive care unit. His liver was failing, and his brain was not functioning. He was released from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility. Occasionally, he would awaken, and he would say, “I should’ve seen it coming.”
I was forced to sell what remained of the farm to pay for Dad’s ongoing care; I used what remained of the money to pay for college. The last time I saw Dad alive, he no longer recognized me.
He successfully killed himself. He’d just found another way to do it — through alcohol.
I sometimes thought that it would have been more humane — for him and for the rest of us he left behind — had he taken a bullet to the brain. We were already a family coping with the aftermath of suicide. Ironically, it’s almost incomprehensible that hopelessly witnessing my father’s long, slow, painful fall from grace and self-inflicted death from alcohol was worse than not being able to say goodbye to Clyde.
I returned to school. I was studying hydrology at the state agricultural university, where I had tremendous exposure to the subjects of advanced water management, dam building, pipeline access, and distribution systems. I have to say, I was really good at it and enjoyed working and traveling abroad assisting less developed countries develop their water programs and manage resources. The engineering of these projects was only surpassed by the ever-increasing complexity of water allocation management and regulation.
In addition to my active membership with the AQNS, I worked for the state water board and a nonprofit that subsidized those unable to pay their utility bills. This was the catalyst that led me to apply to law school. I was a denied admission on my first attempt but persevered, with good grades and extracurricular work in the community, and was finally rewarded.
Adjacent to the law school was a nine-hole golf course. I was fairly good golfer, having played in high school when there were actual grass greens and fairways. It was there upon the now plastic course that I became acquainted with fellow classmate Arnold Bitworth, whose family worked in manufacturing. Arnold never divulged exactly what his family did other than saying they had a significant number of government contracts — his own father would not disclose their exact nature even to Arnold — but having something to do with providing food to the military.
We enjoyed playing on the golf course, supposedly relaxing, though conversation frequently centered upon our classes and
upcoming examinations. Law school passed quickly, and we were soon forced to think about our pathways ahead, looking for internships, clerkships, and other opportunities. Commencement came rapidly and we found ourselves playing a final round of golf before parting ways as friends with the agreement to meet up in the future.
I found a job with a commercial farming operation and joined a team of attorneys whose time was consumed by the law and politics surrounding feeding a hungry planet and coping with regulations on everything from water, fertilizer, and pesticides to genetically modified organisms. I continued to work with the nonprofit in my spare time, which was sparse.
I heard from Arnold, who planned to enter the military to honor his commitment for the scholarship to law school he had been awarded. With his advanced law degree, he had garnered a great position and could start out at a higher rank. Joining the military also complemented his interest in sports. I remembered him as quite the athlete, enjoying running, biking, and endurance sports. Although I thought Arnold was not the kind of person suited for direct combat, I knew he’d make a great name for himself as more the architect of enterprises, as he excelled at organizing logistical operations, particularly supply chains. He was a guy who could ensure the resources were available for whatever the mission required.
Chapter 6
Angela Starr,
Child to Scientist
My grandfather Jack told me that one of the greatest but also challenging times of his life was when his children were young.
“I had so much fun just doing things and spending time with your father, Carl, and your aunt Elsa,” he often told me. “I can tell you some great stories about them….” And then he’d launch into wonderful remembrances that brought my father and my late aunt’s youth to life for me.
One Saturday evening at my mountain cabin, when we were on the deck watching the alpenglow light up the mountains, he told me this story.
Your dad and Aunt Elsa were twins, as you know. Unfortunately, you never had the opportunity to know your aunt because she died so young. She and your dad were close, but she looked more like your grandmother. We all spent a lot of time going to the mountains to ski or to hike in summer.
Angela was an accomplished cross-country skier. I could tell you a multitude of great stories about her because there is much to be learned about your grandmother. I remember when she got arrested. I did not know her personally then, just as a distant figure who made the news; however, the day the papers reported her indictment started a chain of events that would fill the history books. The best part was it ultimately led to our meeting. It was a tumultuous time. The world was at war with itself.
I grew up in an agricultural family. My father and grandfather were farmers. I actually worked on the farm a fair amount when I was younger, too. We were all members of the farming community. This war, this terrible war over water, did not end well for anyone, not that wars ever really do. But then entered your grandmother.
Over the years I learned a great deal about her. She was such a unique person. Her family only gradually accepted me as their son-in-law despite our auspicious beginnings in the events of the Water Wars. They were genuinely wonderful people. I can remember talking to them when Angela and I were thinking about starting a family. It was then that I learned what a challenge Angela had presented to them when they were a young couple.
My father-in-law once said, “If you think gambling is uncertain, consider what’s going to happen when God cuts the deck and shuffles the chromosomes in a man and a woman and deals a new hand of 23-card pickup in a newly fertilized human egg.” He went on to elaborate about Angela.
“Parenthood came as quite a challenge for us,” he admitted. “Unlike her older half-sister, Angela presented a number of developmental delays, and although we got her into therapy early, she really didn’t have meaningful speech until almost three years of age. She frequently acted out with crying fits and tantrums. Angela’s favorite activity was drawing.”
Of course, with a neuroscientist and a nurse as parents, they wasted no time getting her speech therapy. Angela liked being alone, preferring to play by herself most of the time, a characteristic she carried into adulthood.
In school, she participated in soccer and joined a singing group. However, following these activities, she returned to her own isolated world.
This scenario was difficult for my father-in-law, an extremely extroverted man, to accept. He quickly had to realize that his authoritarian tendencies were of little value dealing with this particular child.
“I had to let go and let her develop on her own, with the guidance of her mother and the therapists,” he said. “I took comfort in the fact that Angela was an inherently happy person. What more can one ask for but happiness? I could not improve on that,” he said.
Angela enjoyed listening to music and watching movies and had a rather sophisticated fantasy world that she would openly talk about. She would play with the other children, but only when she wanted to. She had friends and acquaintances but spent little time with them outside of school. It challenged her parents to understand that she simply wanted to be alone. or with the family dog and two cats, who she was particularly fond of.
Raising Angela seemed like a great adventure the whole family embarked on together. When speaking of her to me, her father would smile fondly, shake his head in mock exasperation, and tell me what seemed to him a particularly absurd, but eventually appreciated, detail about his daughter: “Once I went into her bedroom and, looking around, discovered music and movies with all kinds of strange labels. Angela had created her own language of symbols! It certainly conveyed meaning to her, but I had never seen anything quite like it, sort of a cross between hieroglyphics and Chinese, I thought.”
On one notable family outing, the family attended a light show. Civic celebrations at that time used laser light shows in place of the fireworks of the past. Sonic transmitters simulated the booms of exploding bombs. Angela didn’t like loud noises and, putting her fingers in her ears, proclaimed, “Daddy, they are going to break the sky.”
She continued to draw and paint through middle and high school and earned recognition for her interesting paintings. She preferred acrylic and watercolor but could make art out of almost anything, including garbage and junk.
“Once we were doing arts and crafts, painting furniture as a family. We methodically painted our furniture pieces, which were bar stools, in the traditional manner. But Angela’s work appeared as random blotches of paint scattered amid bare spots. I was annoyed, thinking she was goofing off. She insisted we keep her chair as it was, so that eyesore graced our kitchen for a long time. Years later I was astounded when a visiting artist discovered the hidden three-dimensional pictures in Angela’s work. Initially, I was unable to see the picture, but once it was pointed out to me, I was amazed. She had painted a three-dimensional picture of a cat in a tree using a technique where the bare spots defined the image! She was a genius. I had nearly thrown those pieces away. I was ashamed about that but took solace in the fact that somehow, I had recognized that my reality was not going to apply to this child. I still have those pieces.”
Even as an adult, Angela enjoyed painting using the concept of negative space. She said her paintings were shadows cast by lights of a higher dimension.
In high school she became interested in the art of fractals. She was intrigued by their unique graphical appearance. She wanted to learn more about them, which led her of course to mathematics and the math club!
She turned out to be quite the little nerd, with her favorite T-shirt decorated with the Lorenz Attractor, known in math circles as the trademark of chaos theory.
Later, she qualified for a diagnosis of autism spectral disorder. Occasionally, such individuals possess savant areas, and hers appeared to be math and art. With the help of a dedicated family, teachers, therapists, and friends, she developed into a won
derful and brilliant young woman I fell in love with after the war.
Angela always told me that she was not thrilled about the prospect of going to college and moving out of her comfort zone. She had taken all the math classes available in high school and started taking college calculus online. The university math department took notice of her coursework and invited her for an interview, ultimately offering her a scholarship. She decided to try college and wanted to study biology. She loved plants and was very interested in photosynthesis, correctly viewing plants as the predecessor to all life on earth, with their ability to harness the sun’s energy and fix carbon into sugar molecules.
Later, it became more evident that she was a savant mathematician. She claimed that the numbers and symbols spoke to her, that she was able to express herself through equations, as if playing a musical instrument, and that mathematics made her comfortable.
One year she entered the equivalent of the mathematics spelling bee competition, enjoying the process of solving complicated differential equations with multiple variables in front of an audience, and she took third place. She was very interested in some of the timeless mathematical conundrums and aspired to solve the three-body problem of describing the relative motion of three planets in time and space.
One day when she went to the student union building for lunch, she visited the financial aid office to update her application and scholarship information. One of the counselors showed her a posting for an assistant scientist position at the Department of Defense laboratory, which was housed in the same city.
The concept was that students in the scientific disciplines could work at the laboratory to gain valuable experience and earn a stipend to help defray the cost of their education. This was a great opportunity for students. Reading through the listings, Angela found a position of interest in a laboratory working on mathematics and high-energy lasers systems. After all, mathematics is central to calculating the trajectories of missiles, navigation, modeling of lasers and nuclear weapons, and just about everything the military does.
