Along the Way

by Martin Sheen

  Jorge stumbles out of the river dragging the backpack, and crew members rush to wrap him in towels. Back up on the bridge, he peels all the wet layers off his upper body.

  “How was the footing?” I ask. I’ll need to go into the river later for the close-up shots and I want to know what to expect. “Was it slippery?”

  “¿Escurridizo?” my grandson Taylor translates for me.

  “Muy, muy escurridizo,” Jorge says, nodding. “Sí, sí. Y muy peligroso.”

  “Slippery and dangerous,” Taylor says.

  We’ll need Jorge to go back in the water and do another take. Emilio explains the situation and asks him to enter the river downstream next time, where the rapids are faster.

  Jorge calmly shakes his head no. “Muy peligroso,” he says again. “My thing is horses, not swimming,” he explains through Taylor as he leaves.

  We don’t know exactly how to proceed so we break for lunch. Shooting the script in sequence as the characters move along the Camino means we have to get the river shots today, because this evening we’re moving the crew on to Pamplona. But now we’re suddenly minus a stuntman, and there’s no time to find another. We either get the river shots today or Emilio will be forced to cut the whole river sequence from the film. Nobody wants that to happen. David has already invested time and money into getting several boats with safety crews on the river. The lifeguards are on set in their red life vests and red helmets, waiting to pluck Tom from the water as soon as the cameras stop rolling.

  The only solution is for me to go into the river myself, but I’m apprehensive. I didn’t learn to swim until the age of thirty-six for Apocalypse Now but even then I was on the river in the navy patrol boat, not in it. I’ve never done a scene that has required me to swim and I’ve never filmed in rapids. Also, I haven’t been swimming in . . . I can’t even remember how long.

  “Aw, you big sissy,” Taylor chides me during lunch. “I’ll do it in my skivvies, if you want, to show you how safe it is.”

  Taylor and I have an exceptionally close relationship. I have adored him all his life. We joke around endlessly, and I know he’s only trying to pump up my confidence now. Even so, I don’t know if I should let a twenty-five-year-old with professional lifeguard training be the benchmark for what I can accomplish in the river.

  “We’ll be right downstream,” Taylor assures me. A rope has been extended across the river for me to grab on to, he explains, to keep me from getting too close to the waterfall fifty meters downriver.

  A waterfall? That’s the first time I’ve heard of a waterfall.

  “Four lifeguards are out there in two separate boats, ready to pull you out,” Taylor says.

  I make my choice: I have to go in. We need to get this scene. And the whole thing was my idea in the first place.

  Emilio and I stand together on the bridge while Juanmi readies the camera on the river. Emilio talks me through the backpack’s fall to improve upon the last take of that shot.

  “You took it off last time and then it looked like it got out of control,” he says. “It looked like the weight of it pulled you back.”

  “Right, on the left side,” I agree. “Okay.” I know how to fix that.

  Emilio leans over the bridge’s thick stone ledge and shouts down to Juanmi in the boat below. “Okay, Martin’s gonna go in the water now!”

  First, the camera operator on the bridge shoots me as Tom leaning back against the edge, unhooking the bag and accidentally letting it fall over the edge. This time I maintain better control over the bag. After it hits the water I run off the bridge and down a gentle grassy slope to the riverbank, where I see the bag passing by. I quickly run to the next clearing on the bank. I have to time my entry into the water just right, making sure I leave enough time to reach the bag before the current carries it away.

  I see the bag heading this way, almost in line with me. I can’t hesitate. I run into the water.

  Jorge was right; the bottom of the river is slippery. I stumble a little going in and enter face first. The water is freezing, colder than I possibly could have imagined, the shock of it indescribable. All the breath is sucked out of me. My limbs become blocks of ice and my hiking boots are cement bricks dragging me down. I raise one arm over the other and do a quick crawl stroke toward the bag but I don’t know if I’ll make it in time. My blue parka fills with air between my shoulder blades—I didn’t expect that—and drags against the water, slowing me down even more.

  I have a desperate few seconds in the water when the bag nearly passes me by, but I manage to grab a strap and pull it toward me. I cling to the bag while the force of the current flips me over onto my back, and then back onto my stomach. The buoyancy of the bag acts like a little life raft and gives me a moment to catch my breath. No sooner do I feel relief to be holding the bag than I have to deal with the current. The bag and I are speeding downriver and I don’t know where we’re heading. The word “waterfall” lodges uncomfortably in my mind.

  A little cluster of low trees sits in the middle of the river just ahead of me. Everything’s happening quickly yet I still have time to think, If you miss that little island, I don’t know where you’ll end up. As the water carries me close I instinctively reach out with my right hand and grab a branch. It’s wet and mossy and slips away from me, but I manage to hold on to the next one.

  “Cut!” Emilio yells. A red safety boat motors over and the lifeguards help me onto the bank of the little island. I shiver and smile with relief as I make the sign of the cross and thump my chest in gratitude.

  Then I look down at my hiking boot, where a big, four-pronged fishhook, a relic from some long-ago fishing adventure, is lodged in the sole. The boots weighed me down considerably in the water but thank God I wore them. I wouldn’t have wanted that hook to catch me in the foot, or anywhere else.

  We pry the hook out of my shoe, motor me to shore, dry me off, and get me back into wardrobe to do a second take. This time, I know I can grab the branches on the island, but I’m afraid of missing the bag if I enter the water too fast. Still, Juanmi gets some good shots and in post-production frames from both takes will be edited together to create a tight, convincing scene.

  Afterward, we all assemble near the bridge while I towel off my face and hair.

  “And now,” I announce, brandishing the towel like a matador’s red cape and swirling it theatrically through the air, “I want to go into bullfighting.”

  The crew laughs. The tension of the day is broken. Together, as a team, we’ve proven that a sixty-nine-year-old man without training, who’s been on the Camino for only two days, is capable of running into a raging river and retrieving an errant backpack to save his son’s ashes. As we pack up and head on to Pamplona I’m feeling content. Not because I, Martin, dove into the river to catch the backpack and made it safely back to shore—well, maybe just a little—but also because today the little community we’ve created here on the Camino made it look like Tom could do it on his own.

  CHAPTER SIX

  EMILIO

  1972–1974

  In the summer of 1972 our family relocated to La Junta, Colorado, in the southeastern part of the state. Far off to the west, you could see the outline of mountains, but southeast Colorado was farmland, ranchland, rolling miles of short-grass prairie and sagebrush. We befriended a local family that lived outside of town, and one of the sons taught me how to drive their flatbed truck, an enormous piece of machinery when you’re ten years old, especially when you’re the one behind the wheel.

  A few days after my first lesson, I was somehow considered qualified to drive a truck full of kids and friends and hippies to the soybean field across the eighty-acre spread our friends, the Cranstons, owned and farmed. “Let Emilio drive!” one of the kids had said.

  All right, I figured. I’d better get behind the wheel.

  Poised on the driver’s seat, I couldn’t believe I was taking workers into the fields. Driving! My friends back in Malibu wouldn’t believe it if I
told them. I could barely believe it myself. I looked back over my shoulder through the rear window to make sure what I was seeing was real. One of the workers gave me a two-finger wave.

  I couldn’t believe how cool this was. I was driving.

  “Watch it!” someone shouted as the truck started veering off the road. The Cranston boy next to me grabbed the wheel and yanked the truck back toward the center.

  “Easy,” he drawled. “Eyes on the road.”

  I’d almost run into an irrigation ditch. If I’d run us off the road, people would have sailed off the back of the truck. For sure some would have gotten hurt. Letting a ten-year-old drive a truck is one level of madness. Letting him be responsible for the safety of a dozen other people is another. I got off easy that day. I’d never take the responsibility of driving lightly ever again.

  Our family had come here for the summer so my father could shoot a film called Badlands, the directorial debut of a twenty-eight-year-old philosophy student and former Rhodes Scholar named Terrence Malick. The film told the story of a rebellious twenty-five-year-old South Dakota greaser and his teenage girlfriend who take off on a shooting spree across the upper Midwest. Loosely based on the real-life eight-day killing rampage of Charles Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate in 1958, the film cast an unknown actress named Sissy Spacek in the role of fifteen-year-old Holly Sargis and my father as the aimless greaser Kit Carruthers.

  Remorseless and cocky, Kit was a latter-day James Dean, which was a good fit for my father. A veritable who’s who of up-and-coming actors had auditioned for the role: Richard Dreyfuss, Robert De Niro, Don Johnson. As my father would later tell the story, he knew when Terry Malick offered him the part that he was being given the chance of a lifetime. On the way home from receiving the offer, my dad pulled over to the side of the road in his car and started weeping because someone had faith enough in him to give him this chance. And so in early July we packed our bags, climbed into our Ford station wagon, and headed out to Colorado for the four-month shoot.

  We left Malibu in early July to make the long, hot drive to La Junta—1,100 miles and two full days on the road. On road trips I liked to sit in the very rear of the car tucked in among the luggage with a book, usually science fiction. That summer on the way to Colorado I read Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, the story of a lethal alien virus that arrives on earth and the scientists who race to stop its spread. I read the book cover to cover three times. The film had come out in 1971, directed by Robert Wise of West Side Story and The Sound of Music fame. I saw it ten times. The actor Ramon Bieri, who played Major Manchek in The Andromeda Strain, also had a role in Badlands, giving me an early lesson in the inner workings of Hollywood. From the outside it looks large and impenetrable but once you’re on the inside you quickly learn it’s really a very small group of people coming together, breaking apart, and coming together in different configurations, over and over again. If you liked working with someone in the past, chances are you’ll find yourself working with him or her again before long—maybe even two or three times.

  In Colorado we rented a house across the street from a big park, met the neighbors, got to know the local kids. La Junta was a tiny town, maybe seven thousand people, along the Arkansas River about an hour east of Pueblo. We could walk downtown to the grocery store and to the Fox Theater for movies, and it didn’t take long for us to meet many of the people who lived there.

  My father said living in La Junta was just like growing up in his boyhood neighborhood in Dayton. To me, it was like stepping into the Wild West. Ranchers would come into town in their Stetsons and cowboy boots. Our next-door neighbors were an elderly couple who claimed to have migrated west to Colorado in a covered wagon. Every morning the wife would come across our lawn shouting, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo!” to catch my mother’s attention and they would spend the day cooking together and swapping stories. For my father’s birthday in early August, my mother paid each of us kids fifty cents to sit for half an hour while she painted our portraits, then gave them to him as a gift. They still hang in the hall of my parents’ house today.

  Malick was brilliant on that set and pulled stellar performances from his cast, many of whom revere him to this day. He was fond of using whatever assets he had available on location because the movie was being shot on such a low budget.

  My brother Ramon and I both made our acting debuts in Badlands, in a brief shot where Holly looks out of her bedroom window at night and sees two boys playing in the light of a streetlamp. Terry had asked if we’d step in, but when we showed up on set the evening of the shoot, he froze in place and stared at us. Immediately, I could tell that we were not what he’d had in mind. Badlands was set in the clean-cut crew-cut era of 1959, but Ramon and I were kids of the scruffy ’70s with hair down to our collars.

  I didn’t want to cut my hair and I didn’t particularly want to be in the movie, so that was fine with me, but Dona Baldwin, who was doing hair and makeup and who also played a small part in the film as a deaf maid, assured Terry, “Give me a minute with both of them, okay?” She sat us in the makeup chair and smoothed our hair with Brylcreem. Then she pinned it up and under with bobby pins.

  I’d never felt so humiliated in my life. Pinning my hair up like a girl’s?

  It worked, though. When we returned to the set, Terry was pleased. What the grease didn’t accomplish, the bobby pins took care of, and the shot was in the dark and from so far away that nobody could tell our hair was a good six inches longer than it looked in the scene.

  Soon after arriving in Colorado we became friendly with the Cranstons, the farmers who had eight kids. They gave my mother goat’s milk and she learned how to make ice cream. I liked to run around with one of their sons who was about my age and, when harvest time arrived, the family invited me to stay with them for a while. I moved onto their farm for three weeks to help harvest corn, to bale the hay, and pick soybeans and melons. For them harvesting was a predictable annual event but for me it was like spending time at farm camp. School started in Malibu that month but I was getting a better fourth-grade education on the land than I ever could have gotten in a classroom by the beach.

  The set of Badlands could get turbulent at times: crew members would leave for other jobs or get fired; the film went past schedule and over budget in hundred-degree heat with thunderstorms every afternoon; and a special-effects man was badly burned during a fire scene. But over on the farm, operations proceeded in smooth, easy, lockstep motions. If we had extreme heat and daily thunderstorms I don’t remember them. I was so caught up in the work of a farmhand, it would have taken a tornado to distract me, and maybe not even that. Every day was a different harvest—one day soybeans, another day lettuce, then melons. We’d go out into the field till late afternoon and come back to grind our own wheat and make our own bread. While my father pretended to shoot victims at close range for the camera, I was learning how to milk goats and churn butter. Even my mother with her macrobiotic cooking hadn’t gone that far.

  In summertime, the Cranston kids slept in old boxcars on the property that were rodent-proof and used for storing grain. At the top of each boxcar was a hatch and we’d lift it and climb down into a space that held mattresses and sleeping bags and pillows. Charlie was seven at the time and became curious about what I was doing on the farm, so my parents let him come out and spend a night with me. In the morning we woke up before everyone else and climbed down the side of the boxcar. The fields stretched out in front of us as far as we could see. Eighty acres is a lot of land.

  “I’m hungry,” Charlie said. “What do you do for food here?”

  “Follow me,” I said.

  I led him into the nearest field, where watermelons and cantaloupe were ready for harvest.

  “Here,” I said.

  Charlie picked up a melon and stared at it. “How do we open these things?” he asked.

  I felt around in the pockets of my Toughskins and found a quarter. By digging deep stripes into the mel
on I was able to cut it open. We tore it apart with our hands and ate until the juice ran down our chins. That was breakfast. Charlie didn’t care much for that kind of living—it didn’t speak to him the way it spoke to me—but I loved it. The communal lifestyle, the freedom, the responsibility, the gratification of a long day out on the land, all of it. I didn’t ever want to go home.

  Back in Malibu that autumn, my driving privileges were quickly and wisely revoked. My father was zipping around town in a little orange Mazda he’d come home in one day after an impulse buy—Orange? we all said—and my mother drove the Ford station wagon, but I was back to biking around to get anywhere. My prized possession that year was a new white Raleigh ten-speed I’d seen at a bike shop in Malibu. It cost $109. “If you want that bicycle, you’re going to have to earn the money and buy it yourself,” my folks had said. It took me a whole year to save up enough, earning a dollar a week from my parents for feeding the dogs and making all four of our lunches every morning before school. My grandmother in Ohio would send five dollars for my birthdays and that helped, too. Working for so long to get the bicycle felt like an ordeal but it makes a difference to earn something as a child instead of having it handed to you outright. I treasured that bicycle like I treasured nothing else during those years, because I’d earned it myself.

  Our local Point Dume Plaza had a coffee shop, bank, pharmacy, hardware store, bakery, dry cleaners, and health food store, as well as the Mayfair Market, our local grocery store, with Malibu’s first recycling center newly installed out back. “Ecology” was a buzzword of the early 1970s—that and “littering.” Kids at my school were encouraged to collect newspapers and tin cans and TV dinner trays and participate in a massive recycling drive on the school lot. As a country we were just starting to gain a consciousness of humanity’s long-term impact on the environment and the legacy that would be left to us kids if we didn’t start turning the damage around.