part0011

One way or another, directly or indirectly, my ancestors were drawn to Colorado by the promise of wealth from the ground. My mother’s people made a living off the fruit that grew on trees, my father’s came for the ore to be mined from rock. It’s as if Terence and I were later compelled on a quest that somehow synthesized theirs, searching for a modern analog to the philosopher’s stone in the molecules of mushrooms and plants. Maybe our journey was the westward trek of our ancestors continued in another dimension.

Looking for hints to our curious fate, I turned to our family’s past. As in any family, there are certain types and quirks that seem to recur over generations, conveyed through biology and learning, of course, as well as other mechanisms understood by no one, but at least acknowledged by storytellers. I can tell you my brother was not the first willful teenager in the lineage to flee home, or the first to imagine he’d find what he was looking for in California. He wasn’t the first to have a way with words, a love of books, or the terrible misfortune of dying young. His private library was consumed by fire on two different occasions, each time destroying an eloquent statement of who he was; but even that, in a sense, may not have been unprecedented.

If family lore can be trusted, a similar fate befell Teresa Aurelia Balena, born in Salerno, Italy, on August 2, 1886. My maternal grandmother’s origins were a mystery, even to her. Teresa’s parents died when she was very young, leaving her alone in an orphanage; all clues to her past were lost when the orphanage burned down, taking her documents with it. Whether she was adopted before reaching America, or arrived some other way, is also unclear. She may have been swept up in the “orphan trains” that beginning in 1854 carried some 200,000 orphans and street kids from the big eastern cities westward over the decades, to be handed out in towns along the way. Though portrayed at times as a shameful practice that forced many children into virtual servitude, many others benefited. There’s some evidence that Honey, as she became known, was not among the fortunate ones, at first. She ran away from her foster family at fifteen or sixteen, apparently fleeing mistreatment. Her luck changed when she eventually reached Riverside, California, where a kindly woman befriended her and gave her a good home.

Honey was twenty-five in 1911 when she met Joseph Kemp, a Coloradan who had traveled to Southern California looking for seasonal work in the citrus orchards. Joseph, my grandfather, was thirteen years older than Honey and a widower with four kids. The earliest evidence of his verbal flair may have been the fact he returned from his fruit-picking sojourn with a new fiancée. After their marriage in 1912, the couple moved into a house our grandfather already owned in Paonia, a town in the North Fork Valley on the western edge of the Rockies. At the time, my grandfather was a fruit worker in that mile-high, temperate Eden, whose tree crops began gaining renown shortly after European settlers drove out the area’s Ute Indians in the 1880s. Well into the mid-twentieth century, the area’s two signature commodities remained cherries and coal.

Our mother, Hazelle, or Hadie as she was called, was Honey’s first child, born on June 4, 1913. Another daughter, Mayme, was born in 1914, followed by Tress in 1921, and a son, Harold, in 1925. Honey died of a heart attack in 1947, a few years before my birth. I’ve never heard her described as anything but exceptionally kind and decent, and I regret I never knew her. Her four children, our aunts and uncles, were very much a part of our world growing up. So were the two middle kids from our grandfather’s first family—daughter Murrie and son Clare. John and Margie, the youngest and the oldest, were rarely around, as I recall.

All told, our grandfather fathered and raised eight children, four with each of his two wives. By the time I showed up, he was known among his descendants as Dad Kemp. He had been born prematurely in Janesville, Wisconsin on December 9, 1873, a child so small he fit comfortably into a shoebox lined with cotton. His mother, Nancy Narcissa Luce Kemp, used the warming oven of her kitchen stove as an incubator, which obviously worked. Dad Kemp enjoyed a robust life until his death in 1959 at the age of eighty-six. By then he’d witnessed two world wars, the Korean War, the Great Depression, Prohibition and its repeal, the Dust Bowl, and the launch of new technologies ranging from the automobile and electric light to radio, TV, and Sputnik. He married his first wife, Margaret Lucretia (Lu) Hossak, in 1900. The story was that Lu’s mother had murdered Lu’s father in his sleep as a result of his constant abuse, which, if so, is perhaps the closest thing in the family closet to an actual scandal. Lu died giving birth to her fourth child, Margie, in 1909.

After returning to Paonia with Honey, his second wife, our grandfather held several jobs, beginning in the local fruit industry. From 1927 until 1932, he served as Paonia’s town clerk and later as an accountant at the local power company, a position he held until he lost his sight to glaucoma in his late fifties. His impact on us was profound and lasting. I only knew him in the final decade of his life, but even then he was a character, and many of the quirks of personality that Terence and I shared can ultimately be traced to that man, whether due to genetics or from traits we picked up from being around him. He loved language, loved using it, loved writing it, and that’s surely one reason why Terence and I, both avid readers, took an early and lifelong delight in books, language, and all their possibilities. He had a touch of the Irish bard in him, though he wasn’t Irish; the Irish side of the family was my father’s. I remember my grandpa using a white cane on the rare occasions he went out. More often I encountered him sitting in a rocking chair in front of the tiny potbellied stove in his living room, always ready to reel off a story about his life on the prairies during the pioneer days. He seemed to have an endless stock of stories and was always happy to share them with an attentive and fascinated grandson.

Our grandfather was famous for his colorful phraseology. For instance, he called something new or unusual a “fustilarian fizgig from Zimmerman.” A summer downpour was a “frog strangler,” and a delicious meal or dish was “larrupin’.” I have no idea where these phrases originated, but they have persisted in our family to this day. In fact, his fustilarian fizgigs from Zimmerman may have been my first introduction to the notion of something incomprehensible and alien, from another dimension or place. Needless to say, that concept became useful much later when we started dealing with DMT and other psychedelics. The things seen on DMT were and are fustilarian fizgigs from somewhere (even if only in one’s consciousness) and the characterization is at least as apt as Terence’s later descriptions of these alien entities as “singing elf machines” or “bejeweled hyper-dimensional basketballs.” I’ve seen fizgigs defined as a kind of fireworks that fizz as they whirl. Even better. It seems quite apt to describe the objects seen on DMT as fizgigs of the mind.

Our mother, smart and well read, had surely been influenced by her father’s love of books and words as well. She was a small-town girl; indeed, our childhood home was on the same block in Paonia as hers, just a half a block or so up Orchard Avenue. All three Kemp sisters were known for their beauty and could go out with whomever they wanted, though what “going out” meant in those days is probably not what we mean today. Occasionally, Hadie and Mayme, being close in age, competed for suitors. Mayme was exceptionally bright and managed to skip a year in school, allowing both sisters to graduate from Paonia High School together in 1931. After graduation, our mother attended a business college in Grand Junction about seventy miles west of Paonia; later Mayme followed her there. Such training was one of few options open to bright young women at the time.

Despite her humble origins, our mother was a remarkable woman who didn’t spend her entire life cloistered in Paonia. After completing her courses, she moved to Delta, the county seat thirty miles from Paonia, and took a job in the clerk and recorder’s office. She was living in a boardinghouse when she met a handsome fellow tenant named Joe McKenna, who had recently arrived from the Colorado town of Salida to work as a shoe salesman. After a protracted courtship, our parents married on June 10, 1937. Our father was an adventurous sort and fascinated by flying; he managed to get his pilot’s license the same year he was married. In 1939, he rented a plane and flew our mother to an Elks convention in Chicago. On the way back, they ran out of gas and had to put down in a cornfield somewhere in Kansas, turning the trip into more of an adventure than they had bargained for.

Our parents eventually moved to Oakland, California, where our father sold shoes again for a while. After the United States entered World War II, he enlisted, opted for flight school, and waited to be called up. He found a better if more dangerous job as a steel rigger in the Kaiser shipyards in nearby Richmond, where many of the new cargo vessels known as Liberty Ships were being built at a great speed. The young couple’s California interlude ended abruptly when the call arrived in 1943. My father’s dream of serving as a pilot ended when he was passed over for flight training in favor of higher-priority cadets. After training, he reported for active duty with the rank of tech sergeant and departed for England to serve in the 615th Bombardment Squadron. By August 1944, he was a top gunner and engineer on a B-17 bomber flying over Europe and Germany.

During that period, our mother worked in Oakland as a personal assistant (the term then was “secretary”) to Henry J. Kaiser, one of the iconic industrialists of the day, now remembered as the founder of Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, the HMO Kaiser Permanente, and the philanthropic Kaiser Family Foundation. How she landed in the office and sometimes, literally, in the lap of Kaiser, I am not certain, but I fantasize that the comely young woman must have caught his eye at a company function staged for the benefit of the shipyard workers. Subsequent discreet enquiries would have revealed her to be fresh out of business school and eminently qualified in all the secretarial arts—typing, dictation, filing—as well as being quite easy on the eyes. Old Henry J. must have made an executive decision that she was just what he needed to give his office a little class, to say nothing of an efficient assistant. I have no idea if there was ever any real hanky-panky between them; I doubt it, but I do remember that Dad used to tease Mom about it. The fact is I think my parents were so much in love and enthralled with each other that there was no room for jealousy. Dad was a very lucky man to have our mother, and he knew it; they were in love right up until the day she died.

After surviving his combat missions, our father returned and became an instructor at what I believe was the Army Air Field in Charleston, South Carolina. He mustered out of the service shortly after VE Day, 8 May 1945, when the war in Europe ended. After reuniting out East, my parents embarked on a road trip back to California. My mother’s job at Kaiser was waiting and my father expected to work at an insurance company in San Francisco. Their itinerary included a stop in Paonia, where, on the spur of the moment, they decided to stay. They temporarily moved in with Dad Kemp, in our mother’s childhood home, until they could build a house of their own.

From my perspective, staying in Paonia was either the best or the worst decision they ever made. I have often speculated about how differently our lives might have been had they stuck to their plan and settled in the Bay Area. Upon reflection, I’d say it was probably a lucky turn of events, because it allowed us to grow up where we did. The perspective of age has helped me appreciate what a special place Paonia was then, and still is, though in our youth both Terence and I hated it and wanted nothing more than to escape, as eventually we did, each in our own way. Now I might consider expending almost equal effort to live there again, though the practicalities of life make it quite unlikely that will ever happen.

One reason our parents suddenly decided to put down roots was tied to the fact that Mayme and her husband already had. Mayme, a homebody, was more timid and less adventurous than her older sister. After the business-training program in Grand Junction, she returned to Paonia and took a job at the Oliver Coal Company. There she met a young coal miner named Joe Abseck from Somerset, a small town just a few miles up the North Fork of the Gunnison River. Mayme kept an orderly house and an orderly life. During that era, women were supposed to find fulfillment in raising kids and being good homemakers, and most men would have been surprised if not offended to learn that a young housewife might have greater ambitions. Yet my mother and her sisters were all smart women—smart enough, I suspect, to let their men think that as husbands they were in charge.

By the time Mayme married Joe Abseck in 1934, he and Joe McKenna, my father, were fast friends. I suspect they bonded in part over getting to double date the two prettiest girls in Paonia. Doubtless many of the young men in town were disappointed when Mayme became the first of the Kemp sisters to be taken out of circulation. In 1941, Joe Abseck moved to Ogden, Utah to work as aircraft inspector at Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base; Mayme stayed on at the coal company. Their two daughters, identical twins, were born in September that year. Mayme and the girls joined Joe in Ogden in 1944; after the war they all returned to Paonia—and stayed there.

The trick was how to make a living in the rather narrow local economy. Joe and George, his younger brother, decided to start an electrical appliance and repair business. When my parents made their fateful stop, the Absecks urged my father to become their partner. The new venture made sense: construction was booming across the country as a wave of enlisted men returned, all looking to forget the war, settle down, build a house, have a family, and live the American Dream. For my parents, the prospect of a “normal” life in a quiet little Colorado town must have won out over the lure of big-city excitement on the coast. My father signed on.

Thus marked the founding of A&M Electric (as in Abseck and McKenna), the name under which the business thrived until it was sold decades later. My father, however, afflicted by perpetual restlessness, was by then long gone. After a few years at A&M, he cashed out and began working for a Denver company, Central Electric Supply, as a sales rep in western Colorado and northern New Mexico. His position at Central Electric, a mid-sized firm managed by a Jewish family, proved a better fit; he worked there until his retirement in 1972. It was the kind of job you could expect in those days, but not anymore—lifetime employment, modest but livable salary, a good pension. He was on the road every Monday, beyond the reach of the home office, and spent each weekend in Paonia with the love of his life. Mom spoiled him outrageously; there was a chocolate cake waiting for him every Friday, and steak and baked potatoes for dinner every Saturday. It was a point of pride with Dad that he could afford steak once a week, and indeed times were good back then on his $20,000 a year.

The good thing about the new job was that it didn’t tie him to a desk. Being in constant motion appealed to our father, though it may have had adverse consequences for the rest of us, given his five-day absence every week. After a few years, he got a small plane and covered his territory by air. This allowed him to be home more. The plane also transformed one of the major stresses of his job, driving the mountain passes under treacherous conditions, to one of the major pleasures of his life, flying the mountain passes under treacherous conditions. He didn’t mind that at all; in fact, I believe it was one of the few times when he really felt free.

Being a weekend father probably made putting up with his sons more tolerable, at least for him. In later years, as we began pushing back against parental constraints, his absence undoubtedly changed the family dynamic in profound ways. His traveling was probably healthy for our parents’ marriage, however, in that it kept them from ever tiring of each other. If “Terry and Denny” had never happened along, it might have been a perfect marriage.

There is little doubt that our presence threw a wrench into their idyllic fifties fairy tale. Elder relatives have told me that kids were never part of the plan, or at least not part of our father’s. Our mother might have had other ideas and “pulled a fast one,” as one relative suggested, by getting pregnant with Terence. After that, another fast one was almost inevitable, and four years later that led to me. Whether I was an accident or deliberately foisted on my unsuspecting father, I’m grateful for the outcome.

Until her death in early 2012 at age ninety-seven, Aunt Mayme was the beloved matriarch of an enormous and tight-knit brood of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren, all of whom can be traced back to her and her daughters, Jody and Judy. Both “the twins,” as we called them, married local boys and have lived in the area their entire lives. Thanks to them, I am blessed with a loving family of cousins, nieces, and nephews, and still feel tied into the ancestral village where it all began. On my rare visits, I am welcomed with love like the proverbial prodigal son, which I suppose I am.

I remember Mayme as a worrier, prone to fret over the littlest things. Snakes terrified her, as did thunderstorms. She’d read somewhere that she’d be safe in a car from lightning because cars were grounded. Accordingly, Mayme would get in her car and wait out storms in the garage. Her daughter Judy’s husband, Laddie, once joked that you could go into her refrigerator on any given day and reach for the half-and-half without looking because it had been in exactly the same place for thirty years.

When I was a kid, the twins were a trip, of course. Born in 1941, they were teenagers by the mid-fifties, the early era of rock and roll—Buddy Holly, James Dean, Elvis. That was the strange, surrealistic decade when the country, still benumbed by the trauma of the war, was yearning to rediscover some semblance of normalcy, either unaware or in denial of the forces that were gathering beneath the surface, ready to burst into what American culture became in the sixties. But for the moment it was an innocent, if less than fully conscious, time.

It must be exceedingly odd to be an “identical” twin, in that no one is really identical even if they have exactly the same genes. In the fifties, that fate had to be even more difficult, because society at the time placed such emphasis on conformity, on fitting in.

That left Judy and Jody not only genetically identical, but faced with the expectation that they should be as identical as possible. They wore the same clothes, listened to the same music, dated the same boys—until finally Judy broke the pattern and fell in with Laddie, a James Dean type and perhaps Paonia’s first existentialist. He looked and dressed the part of a juvenile delinquent: flattop hairstyle, low-cut jeans, leather jacket, and large-buckled belt. It was all just an act. In reality he was something far more dangerous: a brooding, bookish intellectual, fond of reading Nietzsche and Heidegger, who kept such interests well concealed lest he reveal his true identity to his less brainy peers. Eventually Judy and Laddie married, and Laddie became the superintendent of schools in Delta County. He had radical ideas about education, which is to say, he sought to change a local system that in the past had stifled curiosity and the desire to learn. His reforms led to a remarkable crop of well-educated students who actually knew how to think. Unfortunately, all that happened in the eighties and nineties, long after Terence and I had a chance to benefit from the changes. But Laddie was a big influence on us in subtler ways. He was one of the few people in our youth who could actually hold his own with Terence, and in fact could beat him in most arguments. I think Terence was a little afraid of him, because he knew Laddie saw right through him. He remains one of the smartest and most perceptive people I’ve ever known.

Our mother’s youngest sister, Tress, was destined to affect our lives as well. Like Mayme, she started at Paonia High a year early; the fact that one of her half-sisters was married to the town’s venerated football coach may have helped her pull some strings. After she graduated in 1938, Tress did not attend business college like her sisters; instead she moved to Delta and spent the summer with Hadie and Joe, my parents. She had earned a scholarship at the University of Colorado, if I recall, but couldn’t afford the other expenses. That fall she moved to Glendale, California and enrolled in junior college while living with her half-brother John—the oldest son of her father’s first family—and John’s wife. After the school year ended in 1939, she and a classmate, Ray Somers, eloped to Tijuana, where the going price for a wedding ring at the time was ten cents. Tress and Ray had a “proper” ceremony later that year (and remained married until Ray’s death in 1982). They briefly returned to Paonia, where their son, Grant, was born in 1940, followed by their daughter Carolyn in 1944. Kathi, born in June 1947, was the closest in age to Terence.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Somers moved back to Glendale, and Ray got a job building Liberty Ships—a profession apparently open to young men as the war effort mounted. I mentioned how our father found such work in the Bay Area, as did one of his brothers. Ray’s stint in the Los Angeles shipyards lasted until 1944, when he reported to Fort Ord near Monterey for basic training. He figured he’d soon be on his way to Japan, but the war ended before then. In 1946, he landed his first teaching job, in Glendale, at a salary of $2,400 a year. Tress also got her teaching certificate, and the family moved north to Mountain View, California, where they both taught school until they retired in the late sixties. Terence lived for a time with the Somers during his teens, with rather unhappy results—an episode I’ll revisit later.

Despite her West Coast life, Tress’s ties to Colorado remained strong. In 1952, the couple bought a spread in the Crystal River Valley, just across McClure Pass from Paonia, and operated it as a dude ranch during the summers. They continued teaching in California in the offseason, except for a winter in the mid-fifties when they stayed at the ranch so the kids could experience a cold and snowy Colorado winter with no electricity and only a wood stove for heat.

Chair Mountain Ranch—“the ranch” to us—figured large in our childhood. Dad was an avid fisherman, and the Crystal River was known for its excellent trout fishing. Mom and Tress were close, so we ended up spending almost every summer weekend at the ranch. Mom, Terry, and I would leave on Thursday night or early Friday morning, braving the treacherous ride over McClure Pass in our Chevy coupe. It was a scary drive back then, switchbacks and gravel all the way, except when the road turned to mud in the rain. Dad would come off his weekly travels on Fridays and meet us there, and we’d have the most idyllic weekends. Dad got his fishing in, and we’d hang out with our three cousins. During the dude-ranch years, there were horses to ride by day and campfires at night, complete with roasted marshmallows, stories, and games of charades.

Our cousin Grant was good on a guitar and seemed to know all the old folk songs. I was especially fond of “Wreck on the Highway,” a tune made popular by the country star Roy Acuff in the early forties. “There was whiskey and blood all together,” one verse began, “mixed with glass they lay; death played her hand in destruction, but I didn’t hear nobody pray.” The images were just grisly and graphic enough to appeal to me as a seven-year-old. But as a good Catholic boy at the time, I wasn’t deaf to its stark warning about what happened to those who drank too much, drove too fast, and didn’t pray. Although not usually characterized as such, that song was the first I’d ever heard about the dangers of drug abuse—in this case alcohol—and I took it to heart. A decade later, I had a similar reaction to the lyrics of “Heroin,” the famous song by Velvet Underground. I have never tried heroin in my life, and have never wanted to. Hearing that song as a teenager probably helped me avoid getting tied up with one of the more harmful and dangerous recreational drugs. On the other hand, I got very involved with the psychedelics and cannabis, perhaps encouraged by the seductive lyrics of songs like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “White Rabbit,” and so on. The moralists have leveled much criticism at rock lyrics that extol drugs, and I suppose they have a point. But for me, “Heroin,” at least, was a distinct disincentive and probably prevented me from going down a path that is better left untraveled.