Chapter 6: Metamorphosis
Chapter Six Metamorphosis
In the next five years of my life, between ages 20 and 25, I dropped out of college; got my first job; began to write poetry; traveled to Russia with my husband by way of Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and a 20-hour train ride from Helsinki to Moscow; left my marriage after three months there; traveled alone out again by train to Helsinki; and flew back to New York via Iceland. Returning to California, I worked at UC Berkeley for a minute; spent three months near Monterey in a utopian community school; hitchhiked with a boyfriend from Oregon to New York City; worked at the United Nations; met my daughter's father; traveled with him by freighter to Africa and into Spain, where we lived on the Balearic Islands for six months; and returned to New York by way of Paris, Brussels, and Iceland, once again traveling alone. Within another six months, I would be back in California and never leave the west coast again. In those five years, the direction of my life was fractured like a tree limb in a high wind. My future would become a digging out from the wreckage that followed.
But to begin at the beginning... In August 1959 we drove from Oregon to California, renting our first apartment in Oakland. In September, we began our classes at Berkeley, my husband his first year of graduate school and I, my senior year. The campus was enormous and the system different than it had been in Washington - quarters rather than semesters. I registered for 7 classes, and by the end of the first month I was so overwhelmed that I withdrew from school. I felt panic and guilt to be disappointing everyone's high expectations, but I went immediately to the state employment office and took the first job for which I interviewed. Of all the odd places, it was in the research department of a small plant that manufactured a lightweight panel used in aircraft construction. However, it wasn't the scientific side of this job that impacted me - it was the social aspect. One of only two women in a department of a dozen male researchers, I did secretarial work that was no particular challenge, but I was also expected to participate in lunch-hour bridge games in a tiny library with neon lights in the ceiling. Never having been a cardplayer and certainly not anything as complicated as bridge, I discovered that the learning curve was intense and the game was being played with surprising hostility. To make a long story short, I lasted an amazing 10 months at this job. One day, the pressure of the bridge-playing, hard-driving atmosphere and an impending job review caused me to simply walk out the door and not return. I had just turned 21.
In spite of having developed an intense phobia of confined places after this experience and being prescribed a heavy-duty anti-anxiety drug, I went back out immediately and found another secretarial job with the Agricultural Publications Department at UC Berkeley, but this time the atmosphere was so much more mellow that over the next year-and-a-half I began slowly to unwind. At this time we moved to a little house high in the Oakland hills perched at the top of a long flight of stairs among towering eucalyptus trees. Except for a Christmas visit to the farm in Oregon, this would be our home until we left California in the spring of 1962. My husband spent most of his time in his study working hard toward his Master's degree. It was now that I began to listen to classical music and read poetry on my own. I began to mention drinking California wines in the letters home (which were still frequent). One day I was in a record store and heard Joan Baez, the first memory I have of discovering folk music. I loved it. In the spring of my 21st year sent my first poem home.
That summer our marriage was struggling. I felt at loose ends, out of sync, fluttering around inside myself, the feelings starting to falter themselves out in poetry. I couldn't have been more emotionally vulnerable, and one day through a family friend I met a young man who was also a poet and knew much more about writing it than I. He paid attention to me for qualities that my husband did not seem to see, and from this point on it was just a matter of time before I would strike out on my own. Years later, in my 50's I returned to college to major in French directly due to my introduction to French prose poetry at this time. It has remained the style of my own writing.
I began to think of ways to extricate myself from marriage, including spending time with other interesting men I met - a sculptor, a medical student, a poet. I decided I would go to Israel and live on a kibbutz. I wrote letters to one and was accepted to come, and I began to study Hebrew and attend Israeli folk dancing classes. My husband had decided to apply for a fellowship to study in Moscow during the 1962-63 school year, and I planned to spend this time in Israel rather than go with him if he received it. In the summer of 1961 as I turned 22, one of the last ditch efforts to save the marriage was a hike with two of our student friends along the John Muir Trail taking seven days to cross five 12,000-foot passes. High on this brutal gifted mountain, the noise of its water like a hymn, the stars shining, pure like nuns, in their cathedral, I stand exhausted on the cold, gray rocks - at last a pilgrim.
But in the end, the truly last desperate decision was for both of us to go on the journey to Moscow. The U.S. had an exchange program then which sent 12 students to study in Russia for a year while a dozen Russian students came here. If a spouse had a fair command of the language they could come along and with three years of Russian behind me I passed the test. By June 1962, we were at Indiana University in Bloomington for a summer of preparation, along with all the other American students who were going. As always, my husband was buried in his work and I had much free time. I made a friend during this time who influenced the forking my path was taking. She was a few years younger than I, but very bright and talented, and an early renegade of the type I would soon become. At the end of summer, as we left the country flying East, she traveled West to the coast to a tiny utopian community near Monterey, California called Emerson College. From that moment on, it became a place in the world that I could set my course for when I broke for freedom. I was now 23.
In August 1962, we left Indiana, flying out of New York on Icelandic Airlines with a stopover in Rekyavik and another in Gothenberg, Sweden before landing in Copenhagen. After an overnight stay and a bit of sightseeing, we headed by train through Germany to Paris. We checked into a tiny hotel on the Left Bank and in the next two weeks, while my husband studied at the Bibliotheque Nationale, I wandered about the streets of Paris alone, blissfully soaking up all the sounds and smells of this poet零 dream of a city and even managing a tryst with a handsome young French actor I met quite by chance. My marriage was becoming increasingly tense as we traveled further into our fate. We left Paris, again by train, in the first week of September, and after another few days in Copenhagen took a Soviet steamer to Helsinki, stopping briefly in Stockholm, and there we boarded a train for the thousand-mile ride to Moscow for which the tickets cost $23 each. Once inside the Russian border, it was like stepping into the past. The train itself was fast and modern, created by Stalin to impress the world, but the passengers were dressed in poor peasant clothes and one even carried a small pig. Approximately 24 hours later we arrived in Moscow.
For the next three months we lived a truly surreal life. Housed in a dorm at Moscow University in a tiny apartment that consisted of two adjoining rooms, we watched the slavic trees turn color and then the snow begin by mid-October. We gave American jazz recordings to Russian students who were wildly hungry for music from the outside world where they could not yet travel. We felt the tension toward Americans as the Cuban crisis evolved. We went to the Bolshoi opera and saw Khrushchev and his wife in their special seats. We ate hearty Russian bread and borscht. And before a month was over, I knew I would leave. So in the first week of December I stepped onto the train again, this time alone, and headed out to Helsinki for the long trip home, leaving behind the boy I had grown up with and whom, it turned out, I would never see again. Terrified and empowered, I rode into the dark. It was the first thing I had really ever done independently and I had to break some hearts to do it.
By Christmas I was back in Berkeley, sharing a house with a young woman met through someone I had known in my "double life" before I left the previous spring. I took an office job at the University, but by spring there was no holding me to a rational, responsible 8-5 life any longer. In April I packed my few belongings and hopped a bus to Pacific Grove and Emerson College. The friend I had met in Indiana was already gone but there were a dozen or so "pre-hippies" there doing various forms of intellectual and artistic endeavor. We all lived in a big old three-story house surrounded by a high hedge like the secret garden. For me it was an epiphany, a mini-renaissance. I wrote poetry fiendishly, read voraciously, made metal sculpture and drawings, learned to play the guitar and sang folk songs, and tried marijuana. During this time, we all heard Dylan's first recording. I lived in an attic room and had lovers, finally meeting one who was romantic enough to take the next leap with me on my journey. That July when I turned 24, despite much begging and pulling out of hair by my parents, I left with him to hitchhike from Portland, Oregon across the middle of the country, down a bit south into Louisville, and then on up to New York City. It was hot, dangerous, exhilarating, and successful.
By the beginning of August 1963 we were installed in an apartment where my young companion would write the great novel and I poetry when not working at the United Nations typing pool, a job for which I had to pass an IQ test and a security clearance.
This laundry list of activities should have been enough drama for a five-year period of my life but before the end of this year I would meet the great love of my life and father of my first child. With him I would make one last voyage across the ocean to live on the Balearic Islands, then return to Paris and New York City before I turned 25. I will leave this for the next chapter.
Huge is the shore. Though I whimper with the weight of my shell, the track I carve upon it is futile and anonymous. Incongruously, I dream of the triumph it would be to crack this prison and escape into the street of butterflies.
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