By Anna Gustafson

The night surf’s whoosh and rumble
Gives way to dawn.
Pelicans glide in line,
Skirt the crests,
Thread through spray, and wheel.
Way out there, the gray surface
Explodes in a flash of foam
Seizing light.

Grandson and pal
Lie inert in the sand
Fourteen hours now,
Growing cells, storing fuel
For the day’s unceasing patter–
Adolescent giants
Nearing boyhood’s end.

He turned fifteen two days ago
Weeping in the station house,
Caught stealing once again
From those who raised him
To whom he’s offered much occasion
For exercise of generosity.

But on this camping trip
To a place I’ve longed for
To return ten years,
He gave some sweeter recompense:
“Grandpa, we’ll run back down the beach
And carry your pack with ours.”
“We’ll pitch your tent.”
“This food tastes great.”

I stand at the edge of the sea
And watch each wave take form and break,
There a million microseconds
Grinding mountains into dust.
I feel my shrunken spine, my eyelids’ droop.

Behind me on the beach, I hear a laugh
And turn toward arms and fingers
Stretching in the sun.

see: https://www.flickr.com/photos/smarx/albums/72157675418113981/show

(April Wells 1943-2016)

I loved you for your name–
the bloom of youth, the standing daffodil.

I loved you for your voice, in full Canadian lilt
Its high and low note chord.

I loved you for your strength,
To clear the brush and split the wood,
and raise those kids alone
in the dark house across the road.

I loved you for the gifts you brought”grace and song and dance

And for the gifts you gave–confidence and joy

I loved you for your laugh.

I procrastinated until early this morning to look closely at the speaking assignment in the program that Tai had given me:

Tell “Why this reunion and the community of Lund is so important to me.” You have three minutes.

She’s a born teacher and the project which she’s taken on”making a film about this community then and now”is an educational endeavor on a grand scale.  Using the medium that’s most powerful and most accessible to the widest audience, she’s telling the story of young people desperate about the direction that the society they inherited was going and hopeful about creating alternatives for themselves. This is a largely forgotten story that the whole world can still learn from today. This is our story, and she’s brought us together here this weekend to participate in the project, and by so doing, to re-educate ourselves.

Like a good teacher, Tai designed her assignments to tap into the individual concerns of students. The topic that she’s given me, I realized as I thought about it, resonates with what I’d stated in the invitation we sent out last December:

For the last couple of years a number of present and past residents of Lund have tossed around the idea of organizing a reunion of people whose memories of the place go back to the late 1960’s and 1970’s, along with their descendants and friends.

We thought 2015 would be a good time for a couple of reasons. Sadly, the number of us who can share those memories is shrinking.  Happily, Sandy Dunlop has been encouraging people to submit articles about their recollections for publication in The Lund Barnacle and Tai has been working on a documentary film about that time and place, including in-depth interviews, archival movies and photographs, and present-day footage.

A gathering of people who shared the adventure of coming to the End of the Road 35 to 45 years ago would allow us to pool interesting tales of the past, to catch up on what’s happened since then, and to reflect on the role of that place and time in the stories of our own lives.

As I did my homework this morning, the words of another teacher, Henry David Thoreau, came to mind–words which stirred me into undertaking that adventure in 1970 and which today close the great gap of time between then and now:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

http://www.lundcommunity.ca/ESW/Files/Fall_2014-_online.pdf

Lund Farm Day Camp operated for three two-week sessions during the summers of 1973 and 1974. 25 to 35 kids in grades 1 through 8 from all over the district attended each session. The camp was headquartered at the old homestead on the Lund Highway owned today by Ed and Maggie Bereziak and at the time by Steven and Janet Marx, and previously by the Bleiler, Larson and Carlson families. Its original hand-adzed vertical cedar walls housed the cookshack for a logging camp in the 1890’s.

The camp’s activities included caring for a herd of goats, 35 chickens, a pair of ducks, two sheep, six rabbits, and a pig named Snorky Porker. Children also tended, harvested and preserved vegetables from a large garden and fruit from the ancient orchard, baked pies in the outdoor woodstove, built cedar-stave fences, sheared, washed, carded, spun and crocheted sheep’s wool, and dammed up the stream for a swimming hole. Recreational activities included a morning singsong, capture-the-flag in the pasture, writing and performing plays, swinging on a huge zunga and in a gillnet hammock, along with hiking and swimming.

Each day concluded with a gathering at which the children contributed reports recorded in a daily log. A sample: “We played on the big Zunga. Worked on the dam. Found a frog and three water snakes. Peter came and cut hay. Fred came to take pictures. One chicken got away and we caught it again. Chased Laurie and Steven with hoops. Mulched lettuce and corn. Cleaned up cubbies. Fed ducks. Baby goats nursed off Mama. Michael and Val clipped chicken wing. Flag making. Played drama games. Made birthday cake in Joanne’s loft. Waded in pool. Joanne drove Kent to hospital. Went to beach. Drank out of stream. Ken and Pauline learned to swim. Steven took a group to climb mountain.”

The camp’s emphasis was on teaching some of the skills required to live in the bush in an earlier era. According to an article in the Powell River News of July 16, 1973, “The first batch of children at the camp have almost completed a scale-model of nearby Craig farm. They were taken on a tour of the farm by its owner, learned its history and are now reconstructing the site¦”

Families paid $10 per child per session. During the first year students were brought to camp by carpool. The second year’s budget included a bus and driver for daily pickup and delivery. Each week included a one-night sleep-over, either on the farm or on Savary Island, transportation provided by local tugs and fishboats.

The original idea for the Camp was dreamed up by Janet and Steven in early January 1973, when their unemployment insurance ran out. It started to materialize as a result of brainstorming and collaboration with Kenneth Law, who settled on the farm in mid-February. It was funded by Opportunities For Youth, a federal program encouraging local community development.

In addition to the organizers, the Camp offered ten weeks of gainful employment to Gerry Karagianis, Laurie Derton, Joanne Power, Elaine Sorenson, Anne Wheeler, Pam Huber, Randy Mann, Mike Nelson, Rob Dramer, David Creek, Gae Holtby and Janet McGuinty. It was supported by the Powell River School District, the Sliammon Band and many community volunteers.

[Updated June 30 2013]

Soon after their move to San Luis Obispo in 1989, my parents, Lise and Henry Marx, presented Jan and me with a gift they’d been working on for several years: a collection of German proverbs they had learned from their parents and grandparents.

I remember continually hearing these sayings from my earliest childhood until their final days. Each time one was uttered there was a moment of satisfaction”the speaker pleased to have found a way to make familiar sense out of some new experience and the hearer gratified to grasp the connection.  Growing up as a first generation American, I reacted to these old-world pieties with boredom and embarrassment.

(more…)

Louise Marx  of San Luis Obispo,  died at the age of 94 on Wednesday January 19 2005 at a San Luis Obispo Care Center after several years of failing health. She was a devoted and loving wife and mother.

Louise (or Lise) was born in Stuttgart Germany September 6, 1910, daughter of Adolph and Mathilde  Gruenwald.  After the early death of her mother, she was raised by her father and stepmother Paula, who bore three siblings,  Hannelore, Gabrielle,  and HansPeter.  She attended public  and private schools in Germany and Switzerland where she learned English,  French and Spanish, and she also completed two years of business college.  During the early 1930’s she moved to Berlin to work for a sheet music publisher and to be near her fiance, Henry Marx, businessman.  Because the Nazi regime outlawed Jewish marriages, she and Henry married in secret in 1934.

Louise and her husband emigrated to New York City in 1937 and after one year brought his mother from Germany to live with them.  Her father, stepmother and siblings fled Germany to Sao Paulo Brazil, where the family continues to reside.  She worked as a secretary and then parttime as a masseuse after their son Steven was born in 1942. Besides serving as a Den Mother for the Cub Scouts, she was active in Hadassah, the Jewish women’s service organization, and was one of the founders of the Riverdale Bronx Chapter.

When their child left home, she worked  as a secretary for physicians,  scholars, the Jewish agency and the Leo Baeck Institute.  Later she tutored elementary school students in Harlem and attended to veterans in hospitals. In 1972 Louise and Henry retired to Denver Colorado, taking full advantage of its opportunities for hiking and skiing. She volunteered and took several Community College courses. In 1989 they moved to San Luis Obispo to live near their son and his family.  Here she continued  to do volunteer work and to take college courses, now at Cal Poly.  Her husband of 63 years died in 1995. Shortly before he died,  she completed  a memoir of her life experiences that spanned most of the twentieth century.

Louise Marx is survived by her sisters Hannelore and Gabrielle,  her son Steven and daughter in law Jan Howell Marx, her grandchildren Joe and Claire,  and her greatgrandchildren Ian Fisher and Ethan Marx.

Louise Marx: September 6 1910”January 19 2005

I wake up at 3:30 am  praying for Lise’s smooth passage, knowing the end is near.  When the alarm goes off at 5:30 I feel weak and vulnerable from a lingering cold that  I suspect results from teaching anxiety,  stage fright about two presentations last week,  and unconscious stress from the impending end.  Instead of my regular swim,  I  take a hot bath to relax tense muscles and  reduce sinus pressure.  I decide to wear a white shirt, tie and sport jacket and carry a cell phone to work in case the call should come today.  My morning meditation brings a burst of tears when I think of Jan and the transiency of life.

I give my all to the morning composition class and a lecture on Shakespearean  tragedy. When it’s over at noon, I’m drained but exhilirated.  As students leave the room, the phone rings in my pocket.  A person at the nursing home reports that Lise has just died.  I say I’ll be there soon.  I phone Jan while walking to my office; she’s just pulling up to Cabrillo to check on Oma on her way to the gym.  I tell her the news and she comes to get me.  I reluctantly decide not to try to get back in time for my 1:30 class and ask the secretary to run a videotape of Othello for the students to watch.

We enter Cabrillo for what may be the last time, the odor more pungent than usual.  Josephine, the reserved  nurse’s assistant who tended my father Henry in 1995 and who has been with my mother for the last four years,  is tearful and gives me a hug.  Curtains are closed around Lise’s bed.  She lies flat, skin silken smooth, facial bone structure,  nose and closed eyes in fine relief: a perfected mask.  There is still color in her cheeks and warmth  on her brow.   She feels receptive to my stroking and comfortable with my presence for the first time in many years, the ever- thickening wall between us now departed along with her spirit.  I feel free to start replacing the resistant body and resentful soul that it irked me to call Mom with  memories of the delight I enjoyed in her presence as a young boy”the one she called “Schlumbie.” Those memories have been recalled lately when  I am with  Ian,  our three year old grandson.

We sort through the closet and nightstand, selecting the few items to keep, the rest to leave in the communal  pool of nursing home laundry, hearing aids and spectacles.  Long ago we’d liquidated Lise’s condo and then her unit in the Assisted Living facility at Garden Creek. While Jan takes a load to the car, I go to the storeroom to find the scissors I used to cut the stem bottoms off the flowers I brought every week.  I clip a lock of her white  hair, which is still thick and wavy.  The empty hearing aid box I place it in slips into my pocket.  By 1:15 we  leave  through the main lobby making no eye contact with  those remaining.

At home,  I collapse on the bed, sleep for an hour and then walk to Cal Poly for my 2:50 office hour.  Thankfully nobody shows up, and I meet Jan at the Benefits Office at 4:00 for a long planned conference with the retirement  counselor.  We spend an hour figuring out how to maximize the monthly sum we will receive until our deaths.  Neither of us mentions that we have just come into an inheritance.  Right now,  loss means gain.  May it be so too for Lise.

We walk home and I nap again,  then call our son Joe.  He knew this was coming,  and finds words to amplify the positive that  we  no longer need to think of her as the presence in the nursing home, the wraith awaiting transport across the river, but as someone we can remember fondly.  There will be no funeral or memorial,  though he’d be willing to come  for one.  He suggests a scattering of ashes on a mountain  in the Rockies, which she and Henry made their own, when we visit in March.

I phone our daughter Claire, who has asked about Oma at one of our infrequent encounters.  I leave a message suggesting this might be an occasion for her and Jan and me to get together for the first time in a year.

As evening comes on I feel briefly energized for the task of remaking Mother,  of undoing some of her last ten years.  It was at the memorial for Henry in November 1995 that she said her life was over.  A year before that she concluded her autobiography, “My Story.”  I will go back to it, add some scanned photos and print a second edition.

Jan and I go to Tsurugi’s for Sushi dinner and walk in the dark along the creek downtown.   We share our sense of the solemnity of the day, of our own mortality,  of the awareness that gain also means loss. Recent long-needed rainstorms have caused the creek to crest and wipe out a large chunk of the bank.  The fence protecting the natural riparian vegetation will have to be moved  back.

When we  get home there is a voice message: Ethan, our two year old grandson in Idaho, warbles  “Hello Boppa, Hello Boppa, I love you.” It’s the first time he’s spoken to me on the phone.  This is followed by expressions of sympathy from Amy his mom.  A few minutes later,  Claire calls and agrees that we three should meet.  We are,  as always during these conversations,  halting, guarded, over polite.

I open the packet that had arrived in the morning from British Columbia.  It’s Steve and Juliet’s Christmas letter and photo calendar loaded with pictures of  Lund folk– including three generations of Marxes–and news of deaths and grandparenthood among our contemporaries.

I dig in the closet and find the pictures that Jan had put together for Lise and Henry’s sixtieth anniversary showing them in their twenties and eighties,  radiant in both pairs.  I set them on the bureau and get into bed with “My Story,” which I havent  looked at since editing and typing it with her.  For an hour, I read and marvel  and pity and laugh.