Back in the early years when Gil Evachevski had first returned to Spearfish Lake, he wondered on occasion why Harold Hekkinan had invited Mark Gravengood to the little ranks of field veterans at all. Whenever anyone ever asked Mark what he’d done in Vietnam, all he ever said was “All I did was work on field phones a bit and mostly sit on my dead ass around division headquarters.” Gil soon learned that Mark was a pretty private guy. He could carry his end of a conversation if it was about something, but he wasn’t much at small talk and didn’t tell war stories. He figured Harold must have known something he didn’t, but never put it to him. Eventually, he realized Joe must know something about it, too, but he never put it to Joe, either.
Gil confirmed there was more than Mark would admit to at Henry Toivo’s memorial service, when he saw Mark in his old dress uniform. He didn’t say anything about it at the time, but when sometime afterwards he heard Mark use the line about working on field phones, he snorted, “I suppose they gave you that Bronze Star, that CIB, and that Purple Heart with a cluster for working on field phones.”
Mark reached for words for a minute, then finally admitted in a soft voice, “Well, I was TDY for a while.”
That’s all he said, and that’s all he ever said. Every now and then, when the topic turned to stories from the boondocks, Mark might give a little sign, like a nod or a word or two, that indicated he knew what was being talked about, and knew the language from having been there. Gil knew he could work the system and find out more if he wanted, but he never did. Whatever Mark had buried he’d managed to bury pretty well, and there was no point in dragging it out. But, after that, no one ever questioned his standing as one of the guys who had put in their share of time outside the green line.
As the years went by, though, Gil learned a fair amount about Mark in other ways. Steve and Joe – and Ryan, a little – knew him from school, and they told Gil he had been a pretty quiet guy back then, and kept to himself a lot, although he did pal around with Steve and Jody Toivo a bit. But, he was never one to run with the crowd, and never played sports.
It seemed that all Mark had ever really wanted to do in his life was fly and work for the telephone company. Although he’d been flying since he was little and got his Private Pilot’s license when he was sixteen, a pair of glasses kept him from flying in the military. On the advice of the local phone company manager, Mark had joined the Army for four years, mostly so he could take a big wad of advanced phone system schooling. He’d spent a year in school, and eighteen months in Vietnam – which made him the longest-serving in-country member of the Toivo expedition. After that, he’d spent a year in Germany, mostly working on dial systems, rather than field phones.
When he was back home on leave, he’d talked to the phone company manager again. There probably wouldn’t be an opening when he got home, but an employee would be retiring about a year after he got back, and Mark was promised the job.
That was fine with Mark. He’d saved his money when he was in Vietnam, and continued to save it in Germany. When he got out of the Army, he didn’t fly straight home, but to Indianapolis, where he’d read that there was a plane he wanted that was for sale.
The plane, a Cessna 140, was sound but the fabric wings had been torn up in a hailstorm. Mark brought it back to Spearfish Lake on a flatbed trailer, and spent most of the winter of 1970-71 rebuilding it. Toward the end of the rebuilding, he’d met a Spearfish Lake girl named Jackie Archer.
If Mark was quiet, Jackie was more so. She had her reasons – first, she was six feet tall, almost as tall as Mark, and she took some teasing over that. Worse, her mother was in a mental institution, nearly comatose with paranoid schizophrenia. The kids teased her about that, too, at least there were a lot of whispers that she heard. She was out of school, working as a waitress with no real plans, when she met Mark and got to working on the Cessna with him.
What Mark planned to do with his Cessna and his free year was to just fly around the country, getting the Army out of his system and curing his wanderlust before he settled down to spend his life working on phones. Jackie really wasn’t a part of that plan, but as they stood on the airport runway kissing goodbye, Jackie asked, “Would you take me with you?”
“How long would it take you to pack?” was Mark’s response.
“Not long,” she promised.
They didn’t stay gone a year, but were gone eight months. They almost didn’t come back at all; Jackie didn’t want to come back and face the teasing and the whispers that she knew would follow her, but the solid job offer from the phone company finally pulled them back.
Neither Mark nor Jackie had been particularly religious, but one of the encounters was with an old black backwoods preacher called “Brother Erasmus.” By word, but more by example, Brother Erasmus gave them much to think about. He gave Mark and Jackie a Bible, and they promised to read it. Several months later, chance brought them back to Brother Erasmus’ town, and Mark had an offer to spend a couple months rebuilding a phone system there. They’d become friends with Brother Erasmus, and he taught them more about being a Christian. Eventually, he baptized them, and he married them.
They came back to Spearfish Lake a little reluctantly, with the idea that they’d try to minimize their contact with the town. They joined the Baptist Church – it was about the closest they could find to Brother Erasmus’ flavor of Christianity, although not particularly close. After a time, the church, needing representation of younger people, asked him to serve on the board, although Mark privately felt it’d be hard to find a preacher who would measure up to Brother Erasmus’ standard. But, like his Vietnam history, whatever it was, Mark never wore his religion on his sleeve. It was his business, no one else’s, and he wasn’t about to press his opinions on anyone else, either.
Shortly after their return from their trip, Mark and Jackie bought an old stone farmhouse about five miles out of town. They got it for a song, along with eighty long untilled acres; the house had been abandoned for a long time, and it needed a lot of work. They bought a small, old travel trailer, moved it onto the site, and lived in it for three years before they could move into the house, and still had years more work before they could consider it finished. As time went on, they built a combination barn and hanger for the Cessna, and mowed an airstrip out of a fallow field. Mark and Jackie never had any kids – she was concerned that whatever her mother’s problem was, it might have been genetic. They did have some moderately unusual toys, like the Cessna, the largest telescope in the area, for which Jackie and Mark ground the mirror, and a sailplane, which they also rebuilt from a wreck.
Jackie turned out to have a talent for making signs, and she started a small business at it. In time, she went to making plastic signs, the first ones in the area, and ultimately wound up with much of the sign business in the local towns. That brought her a little more public contact than she’d expected, but she usually was pretty businesslike, and like Mark, not much of one on small talk.
It was no one’s surprise that Mark was a superb technician with phones, but he had other interests, too. When the first “home computer,” the Altair 8080 kit, was first being sold, Mark bought one and built it, but he could never get it to do very much because it wasn’t capable of doing very much. But, Mark got interested in computers, and got one of the first Apple IIs in the region. That was a computer that he could do something with, and, what’s more, he could understand how it was done and how to fix it. That first Apple II was the only one in the area for a long time, but as others joined, it soon proved that with his technical background Mark was more than a year ahead of everyone else. He was the guy who people turned to when they couldn’t get their Apple to do what they wanted it to do, and by the time the Toivo expedition was organized, he was beginning to charge for it.
The computers only played a small role with the Toivo expedition – Mark used one as a word processor to type up meeting minutes and occasionally summaries of discussions or presentations. The flying and the astronomy were to have applications from time to time, as Mark proved with his revelation about Henry Toivo’s being able to navigate by the stars at night at the first expedition meeting. It was his Baptist Church connections that were to have the first and largest impact on the expedition, and they got started having an impact at the very next meeting of the expedition, the next weekend, again at Gil Evachevski’s house.
The primary purpose of the meeting was to hand out and go over the copies of the various documents that Gil had collected, but it was also a brainstorming session to follow up on some of the ideas from the previous week, and to report on progress. “I found us a language teacher,” Mark reported. “A nice kid, an orphan who made it out of the country on a fishing boat back in ’78. The Baptist Church down in Albany River is sponsoring her, and she lives with a family down there. Our church pitched in some to help out.”
“Kid you say?” Gil asked.
“Well, not really a kid, I guess, but she’s so tiny you’d think so,” Mark reported. “She said she was seventeen when she left the country, and that was three years ago, so she’d have to be twenty, I guess. She speaks English real good, not with that whiny accent, either. Actually, she has a trace of Finnish accent, like Henry had. She probably got that from the family she’s living with, and maybe going to high school down there. Close your eyes and you’d think you were talking to some tall Scandinavian blonde.”
“Interesting,” Gil said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that she’d go with us?”
“Not on a bet,” Mark replied. “She damn near died getting out of there. I told her what we’re trying to do – the short version, that is. I didn’t get into all the details about the search, just our plans to go looking, and anyway, she’s willing to help.”
“Sounds good to me,” Gil said. “We ought to at least talk to her. I didn’t think we’d turn up anyone this side of Camden.”
“Yeah, and with a Finnish accent, at that,” Steve smirked. “We all ought to be able to handle that.”
“Maybe one night this week we could get together with her for an hour or two,” Mark suggested.