sonora2sonoma

A collection of short essays on my recollections of growing up in the Sierra foothills in the 1950s.

By
Tim Konrad

My wife, Michelle, is fond of listening, each morning, to a segment on KQED-FM titled “Perspective.”  Each episode features a short essay submitted by a listener. The topic could be just about anything, so long as it’s informative,  positive and uplifting.

One morning last week, the show ran a piece by Santa Rosa naturalist Michael Ellis titled “Mistletoe,” that centered on mistletoe and the origins of its uses in northern Europe and beyond. Listening to it put me in touch with my experiences with mistletoe growing up.

The species of mistletoe originally associated with holiday tradition is European mistletoe. In North America, a close cousin, the oak mistletoe, fills that role. In times past, the plant was thought to possess not only medicinal properties but even magic powers. The practice of kissing under the mistletoe was first developed in England and was once believed to lead to marriage.

I used to gather and sell mistletoe as a kid. I got the idea from an old Donald Duck comic book. In those comics, Donald’s nephews, Huey, Louie and Dewey, were always on the lookout for new marketing schemes. The success they enjoyed from those ventures inspired me to seek out ways that I, too, might profit similarly.

As Christmastime grew near, I’d climb up into the live oak trees behind my house and harvest clumps of the stuff to package in small bags. Then I would take them around the neighborhood in search of obliging widows and spinsters willing to shell out a modest sum. Making  my customers happy with their purchases brought joy to my endeavor.

It never occurred to my young self to stop and reflect on the cognitive dissonance inherent in the act of peddling a parasitic pest to people who were as likely to use the herb in the traditional way as the skies were apt to suddenly fill with a preponderance of porcine aviators.

          My endeavors were not limited to mistletoe. In springtime, I would collect and package leaf-mold, the brown decaying matter found at the base of the trees in the woods behind my house. Packed with nutrients, the stuff could make a potted plant outgrow its container in no time at all.

Since it only took a small amount of mistletoe to fulfill its intended purpose, it had been relatively easy to package and transport. Leaf mold, on the other hand, was most useful when it was dispensed in larger quantities. Between the difficulties encountered in transporting, and then packaging the stuff, it soon became apparent that the success I’d enjoyed selling mistletoe would not be mirrored by the leaf mold venture.  

I also sold Christmas cards door to door for several holiday seasons. These various ventures  proved a good way to meet people. In this manner, I made the acquaintance of a number of the older folks who lived within the confines of the three or four block radius I canvassed.

One of those people was Miss Ethel King. She lived on South Shepherd Street a block north of our house. I routinely walked past her place en route to and from grammar school. One day as I was passing by, I spied a commotion on her front lawn. Moving closer to investigate, I found a cedar waxwing that was choking on a pyracantha berry. I quickly summoned Miss King, who came out armed with a pair of tweezers. She instructed me to hold the struggling bird and keep it still while she carefully grasped the offending fruit with her tweezers and freed it from the relieved bird’s throat.

Miss King explained to me how the fermenting berries would attract the famished waxwings, who would devour them voraciously, sometimes choking as they did so. To further complicate matters, the fermentation process produced alcohol that would intoxicate the birds and sometimes affect their judgment while exacerbating their feeding frenzy.

Another woman I met during this time was an elderly member of the Baer family who once invited me into her house and showed me old photographs of her and her late husband traveling the far corners of the earth. I remember being fascinated by one particular image of her sitting astride a camel somewhere in Egypt.  

Yet another of these folks was diminutive Miss May, a pleasant and kindly-disposed woman who lived on the west side of Washington Street. To my young mind, her face resembled the image of the Queen of Hearts featured on playing cards. She was older than my parents, which meant she was REALLY old, but then, at the time, everyone a few years older than my parents seemed really old. For that matter, so did my parents.

Miss May once led me down to her basement and showed me an antique bird cage supported by a floor-length stand. Inside the cage was a single perch suspended, trapeze-like, from its ceiling. When I expressed my admiration for the object, she offered to give it to me. Happy and grateful, I took the thing home, where it sat in my parents’ basement for the next handful of years until, when I was a senior in high school, I found a use for it.

By that time I had become interested in spelunking, or cave exploring.  On a recent outing I had come upon some bats suspended from the ceiling of a passageway. Fascinated, I decided I wanted to capture one of the critters. I emptied the two ‘C’ batteries from a spare flashlight, slipped the empty flashlight housing over one of the bats and quickly screwed the end cap back on, effectively trapping the bat inside.

When I returned home, I immediately sought out the birdcage in our basement and released the bat inside it, naming the bat “Radar” as I did so. Keeping the lights off in the basement mimicked the environment of the cave Radar had hailed from. I was delighted, when I returned a few hours later, to find Radar clinging to the perch, upside-down, looking appropriately bat-like and mysterious.

***

Two days later, the Friday night high school football game was followed by the traditional after-game dance in the school cafeteria. My good friend Russell Smith joined me and the two of us brought Radar and his cage along with us to the dance. Our pet was playing his part spotlessly as he dangled from his perch, looking the polar opposite of the songbirds I imagined had once graced the enclosure.

Some cheerleaders from the opposing school’s team came by to look. One of them asked, “what happened to the canary?”  “Radar ate it,” I replied. The girls shrieked at this news and Russell and I knew bringing the bat to the party had been the right move. Our elation was short-lived, however. After a while, the noise and commotion from the whole affair aroused Radar and, when we weren’t looking, he slipped through the bars and darted off to freedom.

***

At another of the after-game dances our senior year, Russell and I had been flirting with some cheerleaders from the opposing school when another student, Barry Boylin, walked up and muscled in on our action while putting us both down in his own inimitable fashion. Barry was one of those “cool” kids who had a knack for putting people in their places whether they deserved it or not. As he walked off, with the cheerleaders following in tow, Russell turned to me and said “I hope he dies!” (accent on last word)

Six nights later, some kids were drag-racing on State Route 49 where it ascended the grade heading north a short ways past the high school. One of them lost control of his vehicle and crashed it into a tree on the east side of the road. The crash cost him his life. That kid was Barry Boylin.

***

Russell joined the Navy after he graduated from high school. He was stationed in the South, where he trained to become a photographer. Along the way, he was sent to photograph a fellow seaman who had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a service pistol.  

Following that incident, Russell suffered a mental decline. He received a medical discharge and returned to Sonora, where his mental state continued to deteriorate. As his thoughts drifted farther from reality, he endeavored to rebuild his little two-cycle motorcycle from a pile of parts so he could use it to travel back to North Carolina, where he’d been stationed, to visit with friends.

His mother, Edna, fearful for her son’s safety, contacted authorities and had Russell detained. He was placed on a 5150 hold at the county hospital. While there, he set fire to a mattress.

What followed was a Court proceeding that resulted in Russell’s being committed to the state hospital system for treatment. There were two types of commitments—voluntary and involuntary, or Court.  A person who agreed to a voluntary commitment could revoke it at will at any time. A person, like Russell, who was Court committed had no such option; the duration of such a person’s stay was up to the Court.

I attended the hearing where Russell was committed to the state hospital system. I was confused by the outcome, so the presiding judge, Judge Carkeet, kindly set aside time to explain it to me afterward. Russell had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, the judge told me. What that meant, he said, was Russell was experiencing an inability to tell fantasy from reality. He had been placed into custody, the judge said, for his own protection.  

Although the judge’s words made sense, I wouldn’t be able to really understand what schizophrenia was all about until years later when I was in graduate school working on my masters’ degree in psychology. I still struggle at times with the question of who is in a better position to look after someone’s best interests than the person whose interests are the subject of debate.

In Russell’s case, looking after his best interests involved decades of treatment with an antipsychotic drug called Thorazine (chlorpromazine) that left him suffering from tardive dyskinesia, a neurological disorder characterized by repeated uncontrolled movements, a shuffling gait and lethargy.

As his confinement proceeded, Russell’s cognitive abilities also appeared to decline. His formerly brilliant wit and his originality of thought gave way by degrees until they were finally replaced by a general dullness that was dispiriting to behold.

Russell’s  institutionalization continued until his death. At that point, he had been granted privileges to visit his sister, Terry, on certain weekends. This went well at first until Russell began to have ‘accidents’ while sleeping on her couch. After that, a hotel room was provided for his visits.

One night, Russell fell into a deep sleep after he’d had a couple of beers in his hotel room. In his slumbers, he somehow managed to hang his head off the side of the bed with his neck resting on the edge of an open drawer of the nightstand that stood beside his bed. This restricted the flow of blood to his head long enough for his metabolic processes to cease functioning. A sad ending, indeed,  to a life so full of promise!

It seems highly likely, given the timing of Russell’s decline relative to the suicide he was assigned to document, that that incident played a role in his mental problems.

I can’t help but wonder, though, given the problems those affected with early onset schizophrenia can experience on account of their abnormal interpretations of reality, if Russell’s condition  might have also been exacerbated by the timing of Barry Boylin’s demise relative to his (Russell’s) having wished him dead.

It’s all academic now, just one among the many anecdotes collected along the way—one among the many reasons why I find such resonance with the lyrics of that Grateful Dead tune “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”

To be continued: