A Desert Reckoning

by Deanne Stillman

  But something else was going on, and in retrospect it’s clear to Kimberly that her first boyfriend was deeply troubled. He would not discuss whatever was nagging him beneath the surface, even when it erupted in unexpected outbursts that would soon subside. But Kimberly Brandon-Watson was madly in love with Steve Sorensen, and he too was head over heels with the girl who once sat on a couch at a party, frightened by the in crowd. It wasn’t until years later that Kimberly realized that her high school beau was tightly wrapped—as others would describe him throughout his life.

  For example, there were little things, such as the fact that Steve had really bad vision. But he hardly ever wore glasses, Kimberly recalls, because he didn’t want people to see him with Coke-bottle lenses. And he did not wear contact lenses, so for Steve, the world was often out of focus. “Things had to be perfect,” Kimberly says, or as another friend recalls, Steve was “insanely prideful.” Aside from concern about cracks in his physical presentation, there were more serious problems as well. Sometimes when Kimberly talked with other men, Steve would simmer and soon erupt. Kimberly would respond in kind, and on occasion Steve would do something like punch a hole in the wall and then calm down. Kimberly would discuss the relationship with her mother, who advised her not to respond to his explosions or his endless displays of affection, but to play hard to get—a common dating motto of that era and one that is periodically rolled out nowadays in best-selling self-help books. The ploy worked, and Steve always came back after long periods of no contact. “It seems when I don’t call you for a while, you are more friendly, or you like me more,” Steve wrote in a letter, marked by florid penmanship and occasional spelling errors, and similar in proclamations and regret to others that he sent to Kimberly when they were estranged.

  I guess for you the old saying Absence makes the heart grow fonder is true. I am not trying to critisize you by saying for me it is a little bit true to, but for me when I don’t see you I get lonely, not just for someone to talk to but to hear your voice and talk to you. One thing that I would like to do is ask for forgiveness for my jealousy. Sometimes it gets out of hand and it rules my actions . . . I now ask you to try and understand me. How I feel when I want to hug you or kiss you and you turn away it hurts because I am still very In love with you romanticly . . . there has been no dimming of the flame . . . I know sometimes I show my love for you buy buying you things, I know this angers you but I can’t help it. I love you . . . P.S. Give me a call.

  The pattern of breakups and reunions continued, and soon they both enrolled at El Camino Junior College in the nearby beach town of Torrance. Steve joined the water polo team, throwing himself as never before into the sport and becoming the team’s star. Kimberly studied art. Sometimes they talked about career plans; Kimberly wanted to paint or go into graphic design, and Steve spoke of joining law enforcement or becoming a paramedic. It was becoming more and more apparent to Kimberly that beyond a love of the ocean, the two had little in common. Gradually the relationship lost steam. The gifts and letters ceased. The pair continued to see each other, but behind all the years of drama, she had already checked out. One day she told Steve how she felt. “He said, ‘Fine,’ and I was like, ‘Wow,’” she says. The relationship had run its course and was over.

  After the breakup, Steve immersed himself in beach life more than ever, becoming an LA County lifeguard. For six years he watched the beaches from San Pedro north to Dockweiler State Beach, a beautiful though noisy strip under the takeoff and landing patterns near the Los Angeles airport. People tend to regard lifeguards the same way as they think of surfers—partying airheads who put the word “dude” at the end of every sentence and not to be taken seriously because their office is outside and they plan their lives around the weather. For sure there was a partying crew among the county lifeguards. While Steve did hang out with them, he was not known to cut loose or get wasted. He didn’t chase after women in a way that would be noteworthy, and he never had to get the last word or be number one. This is not to say that he wasn’t your average jock and didn’t take advantage of situations that presented themselves, but really, more than anything and in his heart of hearts, he wanted respect—at least that’s how it seemed to LA County deputy sheriff Steve Propster as he looked back at the time when both men were lifeguards, before their paths diverged until they ran into each other years later, when both had joined the sheriff’s department.

  “Reality was messy for Steve,” Propster tells me one afternoon in a coffee joint near the harbor patrol, which is now his beat. In many ways Propster was, and is, the opposite of Steve. A self-described man of the warrior-scholar tradition, Propster was a dope-smoking surfer in high school, then went to USC on an arts scholarship, influenced by comic books like the Silver Surfer and wanting to draw comics and write screenplays. Along the way, he was recruited by the Navy SEALS but didn’t join because his girlfriend got pregnant. Having to get a job and finding out that it would take years to sell a screenplay, he enlisted in the Los Angeles Police Department. While perhaps at odds with the creative path, the job was really an affirmation of a family tradition: Propster’s father—his hero—was a Green Beret in Vietnam and then a cop in the LAPD, working his way up the ladder to chief of police in the town of Gardena, a working-class suburb of LA known more for its grit than its gardens. “I became a cop because of my father,” Propster says. Having grown up hearing stories of war, inside a family with its own share of rough-and-tumble characters, he was not surprised by the mean streets of Los Angeles. In fact, as a kid in Gardena, he knew plenty of gang members and why and how they got that way. As a cop, he “signed up to see the world at its ugliest,” he says.

  In his view, Steve Sorensen had little knowledge of the world he would soon enter; having grown up in a cloistered area, he did not have a sense of the way things really were—only of how they should be. “He wanted Camelot,” Propster says. “He was Sir Galahad, he was Dudley Do-Right, he was the guy with the badge striding into town, ready to make things perfect.”

  It was 1984 when Steve became a lifeguard, the year when the Olympics had come to Los Angeles and So Cal icons became international stars. The smell of excellence was in the air and LA was feeling pretty good about itself. The golden dream was broadcast around the world, with images of breaking waves and palm trees swaying and the PCH snaking up the sparkling coast as the backdrop for the Olympic ideal of a perfect 10. It was a time for showing off and, yes, for having a good time, but really it was all about getting validation from the outside world, about how things looked— not the fault lines that crisscrossed the region or echoed of personal turmoil beneath copper skin and fair hair and blue eyes. For foreign news crews, surfers and lifeguards were all the rage; while world-class athletes performed at venues around the city, correspondents headed for the beach, talking with real live wave riders and hoping to snag an interview with the water gods behind the black wraparound shades up in their towers, when they descended at sundown and walked among mortals until the sun rose again and they were called back. It mattered little that these men were often “hard to get,” the dating ploy Kimberly’s mother had offered; being up in a tower apart from and above the disturbances and pleasures of everyday life with an official job rendered them idols, conferring admiration on those who were just beyond reach but so very needed in an emergency situation.

  To get Steve down from the tower, in a nonphysical sense, his friends called him “Stevie.” But that was pretty much as far as the teasing went; Steve could not really take a joke and would rarely get down and dirty with this buddies. “He had been around us for years,” Propster recalls, but he bristled at the rough guy talk and there were just certain things he would not discuss, rarely showing his cards. By all accounts, he was most content when surfing—a solitary activity in which communion with the water takes you out of the world and into the present moment—or on the job, for him, a place where you are untouchable yet needed by all.

  During this period, Steve had been h
anging around with a new girlfriend, a champion swimmer and lifeguard. The pattern was similar to the one with Kimberly, only this time, shortly after a serious eruption that puzzled his friends, he quit his job as a lifeguard and left the beach, left town in fact, and joined the army. It’s not that he had never mentioned wanting to become a soldier; it had come up in conversations with Kimberly and, later, once in a while with other friends. There were no wars going on, and the promise of travel and various other perks was very real. More importantly, it was a way of getting experience for law enforcement. So while it wasn’t a surprise that a member of the LA County lifeguard service would divert to the military, in Steve’s case, his beach crew was surprised that he came down from the tower.

  His next-door neighbor Julie Franks was sorry to see him go. She still had a crush on the good-looking surfer and would miss hanging out with Steve in her backyard, listening to the Stones, Aerosmith, and Led Zeppelin. One day, Julie looked across her driveway and spotted Steve on his front lawn, polishing his shoes. Later that day, he left for the army. He was twenty-nine years old and for the first time in his life breaking from home.

  Steve was assigned to the 527th battalion and stationed at Kaiserslautern, Germany, a large base consisting of both army and air force military communities, including the famous centers of Landstuhl and Ramstein. Known throughout the military as K-town because it’s easier to say, the base is near the northern edge of the Pfalz Forest, a scenic destination spot for tourists and hikers, and one of the biggest forests in Europe. From 1986 through 1989, Steve served as a military police officer—MP—and was fortunate to score living quarters in the air force barracks, which were nicer than the army’s, with carpeting and only two men assigned to a room.

  Dan White was his roommate during Steve’s first year in the army and the designated driver for the guys in his battalion whenever off-base excursions involved drinking. He also provided the car, ironically coming to Germany with a German-made VW bug that he had bought in Arizona, driven to the East Coast, and shipped there. It arrived as it was, complete with some busted parts, and whenever the gang would take a cruise on the autobahn or head into town for pommes frites and beer at Rosie’s Diner or dinner at Dutch Michael’s, something would go wrong with the car. Dan was a mechanic and could fix most things, but Steve often volunteered for the job. For instance, in the winter, frost would form on the inside of the windshield because the defroster wasn’t working, and he was the one who scraped it off so the crew could continue their journey. At the local pubs, Steve partied like the rest of his army buddies and was known for having a good sense of humor, Dan tells me on a phone call from his home in Holland, Michigan, where he has lived since his army days, after a trailer fell on his leg at K-town and he retired with medical benefits. He had not learned of Steve’s death until hours before our phone conversation, in one of those strange moments that seem laden with messages in retrospect.

  While watching the TV show I Shouldn’t Be Alive, he had come across Steve’s business card from the army. He decided to track him down, called the number on the card, found that it was not working, went online, and learned that he had been killed nearly eight years earlier. Stunned, he looked for more information and quickly found out the name of the pastor who had delivered the eulogy at Steve’s funeral, John Wodetzki, now based in Cincinnati. He called John, whom I had met when I first began working on this story. After Dan and John had spoken, John let me know that Dan could fill in a few blanks about Steve’s time in the army, and he put us in touch. Several hours after Dan had learned that his army buddy had been killed back in the States, he and I were talking about his memories of Steve. He recalled Christmas and caroling and painted a picture of how the ex-lifeguard Steve had come down from the tower and was apparently flourishing. “He loved his job,” Dan said, “and took pride in his uniform.” But throughout his time at K-town, Steve talked about the beach all the time, yearning for waves.

  Before our conversation ended, Dan made a point of offering one more story. After his accident, Dan was hospitalized for many months when it turned out that the army had misdiagnosed his injury, and he had a blood infection that snowballed into something much bigger. Steve was the first of his buddies in the 527 to visit, and over the weeks he came back many times. On his last visit he brought him a copy of Somewhere in Time, a time travel movie starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour and set on Mackinac Island in Michigan, Dan’s beloved home state. Watching the sentimental film about a man who visits a bygone era to meet his soul mate helped Dan get through his painful ordeal, satisfying his own longings for his native turf—and echoing Steve’s yearning for home. After Steve brought him the movie, Dan never saw him again. A couple of years later when he returned to Michigan, he filed Steve’s business card in a box along with other souvenirs of K-town.

  By 1989, Steve’s army stint was finished. He returned to California, moved back into his old quarters for a brief period, and got a job as a driver for Rockwell, delivering top-secret documents to locations around the country. He didn’t like the constant traveling and also was concerned about his parents, who had slowed down a bit more in the few years that he had been gone. Wanting to be near them, he quit his driving job and returned to the beach, securing a position again as lifeguard and then entering the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Academy in January 1991. During this period, he shared an apartment with Steve Kirchner, a teammate from his swimming years at El Camino. Back on his home turf, Steve surfed often and made frequent trips to Catalina. He didn’t have many friends and the few he had, he chose carefully, Kirchner recalls. And beware the person who dismissed him—he would not stand for it and there was always a consequence. Yet, as always, you could count on him when there was a crisis, and inevitably someone would call with a problem or needing a favor.

  To get away from things, both Steves would head out to an avocado ranch in Fillmore where the pair would shoot quail. It was a sprawling place, owned by Sorensen’s sister Dixie and her husband, a wealthy man who was a petroleum geologist, active with his wife in the state Republican Party. Out in the chaparral, Kirchner got the sense that Steve wanted the kind of life his sister had, on a big piece of land with a suitable house and a family to go with it—a Leave It to Beaver scenario that Steve longed for, a perfect world where everything looked nice and you were supposed to color inside the lines, the thing he missed out on, having been born to parents who were too old to be June and Ward Cleaver. Even when they were partying and on the prowl, it was clear to Kirchner that Steve wanted to settle down. It wasn’t long before he found himself in a whirlwind marriage to a friend’s sister; the union was annulled a year later. “He was amazingly impulsive,” Kirchner recalls, “always searching for some elusive thing.” Soon after that, he met a woman on the beach, and there was an attraction. A few years older than Steve, Christine was British and divorced; she had a grown son and lived in nearby El Segundo. The two had a couple of important things in common: neither was a social butterfly and both were looking for a second chance. They dated, fell in love, and in 1991 went to Lake Tahoe and got married. By then Steve had joined the sheriff’s academy, and it wasn’t long before the pair moved to Lancaster in the Antelope Valley. Unlike others, Kirchner wasn’t really puzzled by the move. His complicated friend was not cut out for “a major metropolitan area.” He had “loner tendencies.” And being the only sheriff in a remote area—dry though it may be—isn’t that different from being alone in the water and waiting for waves or being up in a tower and watching them.

  After Steve had met Christine, Kirchner didn’t see much of his friend, except for a time or two that he went up to Steve’s new place and they went four-wheeling in the desert. After that, the pair fell out of touch. Then, one August day, after completing a lifeguard competition in the South Bay, he emerged from the water and was jogging up the beach, feeling pretty good as he approached the finish line. “Hey man,” someone said, “did you hear about Steve? It’s all over the news.�
� Kirchner was taken aback, shocked at the brutality of what had happened but not totally surprised. Years later, Kirchner and I are having a conversation on the telephone, and he recalls a moment that has come to mean a great deal. On the day Steve had moved out and headed to his new life in the desert, Kirchner helped him pack up his belongings. “He was a coffee addict before Starbucks,” Kirchner says. “He brewed his own coffee and was packing his Krups grinder.” “Oh no, you’re taking the grinder?” Kirchner joked. Sorensen gave it to his friend, and he still has it, packing it up himself when he moved out of their apartment and into a new home with the woman he married a few years later. Once in a while, he uses it to make his own coffee, and it reminds him of the guy he used to swim with at El Camino.

  When Kimberly Brandon-Watson learned that her high school boyfriend—the best boyfriend she ever had until she met her husband—had been killed, she visited a high school reunion website and listed all of the things she once loved about her late classmate. Steve Sorensen was