Chapter 39

At least partly because we were already living together, we decided to take our time about getting married, and do it right. We weren’t so rushed that we had to hurry off to Las Vegas and get hitched without having friends and family around. It would take a while to set a date when everyone could come, so it was October before we finally had the ceremony, which was held on a beach near Sausalito with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.

My folks were there – it was the first time they’d come out west to see us, although we’d been home to Simsville a couple of times in the past year or so. Joey and Cindy were there, bringing Anita with them; they didn’t often take vacations, but Joey was able to wrangle a week off from his transcontinental truck run. Pat, Donna, Dick, and Shannon all flew in from Montana to be there; it had been a while since I had seen them, but it was good to have my old climbing friends around again. Bruce even sent his best wishes, but he was working in the Antarctic again at the time and couldn’t get away. His work there was sporadic, but it had funded him to climb all over the world, so he had to take the opportunity while it was there.

Just out of courtesy I had sent a wedding invitation to Jonas Logan, my old contact at American Schools Worldwide. I had figured there was no chance that he would actually show up, but he surprised me on that one; he was on his way back from an inspection trip around schools in the Far East and happened to be going through San Francisco at the right time. I was apologetic about the fact that I had dumped my job on him without much warning, but he said that was all right.

Dave only had one actual relative there, a great-aunt who lived in the Bay area whom he only saw rarely, but at least she was there. The rest of the people who showed up for Dave were workers and managers in some of his various companies; I’d met some of them, but not all of them.

On the night we’d agreed to get married, we had both said who we would like to have for a best man: Moose, the former Spec/5 who had ridden the Huey down with us outside of Phan Loc many years before. He was the guy who had carried Dave from the wreck to Chainsaw Dombrowski’s dustoff. Moose proved hard to find, and Dave had to finally set a detective agency to looking for him. The agency finally managed to track him down in Burlington, Massachusetts, where he was working as a mechanic in a small garage.

The years since Vietnam had been tough for Moose. It had been difficult for him to find work, at least partly because of his having been a Vietnam veteran and proud of it; the job was barely enough to allow him, his wife, and two small children to scrimp out an existence. Dave not only offered to pay Moose’s expenses to come to the wedding, but after a little investigation and discussion, he’d offered him a job as a service department assistant manager at the dealership Dave owned, at a considerably higher rate of pay. Needless to say, Moose jumped all over it, and had just moved to Marin County. We both felt we owed Moose a good deal; this was a way we could start repaying him. Within a year he was the service manager, and he went on upward from there in the years to come.

Of course my matron of honor was Cat, who had flown out with Steve for the ceremony. They even took their kids out of school to come to be with us on this special day. She was still the special friend she had been ever since we’d met at Venable more years before than we liked to think about, and I was happy that she could be with us.

We had almost everyone who meant something to us there for the wedding; friends, family, co-workers. It wasn’t a big crowd, but it was a very special group for us.

The ceremony was a little non-traditional in that it was non-religious; neither Dave nor I held any special convictions, and we would have felt a little hypocritical to get that traditional. But it was enough for us to show that we really meant our vows.

That evening I gave Dave a special wedding present: with him watching, I threw away my birth control pills. I had given careful consideration over some weeks to the question of having a baby, and despite my misgivings I decided there was no reason not to do it. I had reached the point in my life where it seemed like a good idea, and now there was no good reason to put it off any longer.

Since Dave and I did a lot of traveling, the question of a honeymoon was a little perplexing, but in the end we decided to go back to Japan, to tour Tokyo like we had considered doing right after our time in Taiwan, and to climb Mount Fuji. It was late in the season and cold, so the usual crowds present on the mountain were largely absent, and by taking our time we made it to the top all right. It was a special moment that we thought we owed ourselves.

It was three weeks before we made it back home to Sausalito. It does not get terribly cold there in the winter but it can be quite damp, so our outdoor activities were muted while we got back into our routine. That didn’t keep us from having several tender moments, often in front of the small fireplace on the houseboat. Dave went back to keeping an eye on his various business interests, and I helped him where I could; that still kept him busy from half a day to several days each week.

In the time we had been together I had told Dave about the hot rod Karmann Ghia that I had driven through much of my college career. I had also told him about my attempt to set a world record speed for it in the mad rush that Cat and I had made from Venable to my parent’s house when Joey came back from Vietnam. It turned out that gave him an idea.

After we got back from Japan Dave and Moose took me to the garage where Dave stored and worked on his cars. There in the middle of the work bay sat an old battered and worn-out Karmann Ghia – not my old convertible, but a coupe that Moose had found in a junkyard while we had been in Japan. “Are you going to restore it?” I asked.

“No,” Dave smiled. “We’re going to find out just how fast a Karmann Ghia really will go.”

It turned out that Dave and Moose had plans to give me a rather special wedding present out of the car, although I spent a lot of time over the next few months working on it with them. Once again, it had a Corvair engine stuffed under the rear deck, but this wasn’t a stock hundred and ten horsepower engine; it was one of the hundred and eighty horse turbocharged jobs, and that was before the two of them started working on it. Afterwards, well, we never found out, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was well over four hundred.

The following summer the four of us – Moose’s wife Shirley came along – took the Karmann Ghia and the Corvette to the Bonneville Salt Flats. How fast will a hot rod Karmann Ghia go? I have a timing slip that reads 202.782! It was actually scary as hell to drive that fast even on the salt flats where there’s nothing to hit, but Dave said it was my car and I ought to be behind the wheel.

In years to come there were to be other cars built or restored in that shop, and some of them were real showpieces. If Dave didn’t have anything else to do, he’d be down there working on a car, and I would often be right with him. He never was the master mechanic that Moose proved to be, but he did a lot of the dirty work. If ever I needed Dave and couldn’t find him, I knew where to look and was usually right.

Building the Karmann Ghia and running it on the salt flats went a long way toward making the four of us very good friends. Up until this time neither Dave nor I had developed many real friends in the Sausalito area. Dave had many acquaintances he was friendly with, but no one close; the rest of us were pretty new in town, so we had that in common. The four of us wound up spending a lot of time together at our homes and at the garage, and from time to time we even traveled together.

Moose thought I was absolutely crazy to be as involved in climbing as I was, but Shirley found it a little interesting and I got her going with some bouldering. She would never be the climber that Cat had been, but I was not willing to push things like I once had, either.

(I should probably add that we often called her “Squirrelly.” What? You never watched The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show when you were a kid? Wow, were you ever deprived!)

Despite working hard at it, I didn’t get pregnant right away, and I thought for a while that I might not be able to at all. I didn’t know it at the time I drove the Karmann Ghia on the salt flats, but figured out in the next few days that we were going to have a child after all.

Being pregnant was strange; it was something I really hadn’t considered as Joan, and of course would never have entered my mind when I had been Joe. But I had learned over the years that sometimes I just had to accept the reality of what was happening to me, and for the most part I found it interesting, if not exactly the most comfortable experience I ever had – but I had experienced a lot worse.

In the middle of April of the next year my labor pains started in, and we wound up going to the hospital. It was not entirely a new experience to me; after all, I had been through it when I had been Joe, as I had been in the delivery room when Anita had been born. It felt a little surreal to be the center of attention this time though.

Considering the memory of that experience, I had decided I was not going to try to deal with a natural childbirth no matter how much the true believers tried to dissuade me. The epidural made it much simpler; while I can’t say I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, it wasn’t intolerable, either – not that I had much choice.

After several hours, our daughter was born. Dave and I had spent several hours discussing potential names, and we had settled on “Jade” for a girl, named after Jade Mountain, of course. It proved to be a good one, since Jade had deep green eyes that seemed as if they were indeed jewels. In later years, as a teenager wishing to show her individuality, she was to change the spelling to “Jayde.” I understood what she was trying to do and went along with her on it, even though I still liked the original version better.

Having a baby in the house changed our lives considerably. Although I couldn’t tell Dave, of course, I did have a little baby-raising experience that dated clear back to Anita in my time line; that and some help from Shirley got me off on the right foot. I don’t want to say we had no problems with her, just the normal parenting ones, but I found the whole experience less odious than I had expected.

Even before Jade was born Dave and I had decided that while we loved living on the houseboat, it was no place to be raising a child. It really was small; as it was cozy for the two of us, we could see that it would be cramped for three. Worse, once Jade reached the toddler stage, being on the water could be very dangerous for her, so we reluctantly put the houseboat up for sale.

We wound up buying a house in the hills overlooking town, and it turned out to have an even better view of the city than we’d had on the water, along with it being less humid. It still wasn’t a huge house, but we had a reasonable yard and a small pool (fenced off, of course) that was isolated enough that I could sunbathe nude if I happened to feel like it and the weather was appropriate, which wasn’t always the case in the Bay Area. The poets weren’t joking when they talked about the San Francisco fog.

Having Jade limited our travels considerably, which was also something I knew was going to come. That wasn’t all bad since I had experienced plenty of traveling over the years, and it was good to be able to stay in one place for a while.

The next few years went by more quickly than I had believed possible. It is said that time seems to pass more quickly as you age, and that was true for me. Looking back on it, it seems like the years between Jade’s birth and her starting kindergarten went by in a flash, and the house seemed empty when she was in school.

By then it had been several years since I had done any teaching, but just to help pass the time I became a substitute teacher in several of the local school districts. I stayed with it for a while, but I did not get the pleasure out of it that I had when I’d actually had to do it full time for a living, and eventually I let it tail off as Jade got older.

As our daughter entered the middle elementary school years we took to traveling some more, although not up to the level that Dave or I had managed before we got married. We still chipped away at Dave’s bucket list, and made some progress on it, even though it had been clear from the beginning that it could never be completed.

But now there was even less chance of it. Dave was slowing down a lot, and had less energy. His legs were not in the shape that they had been when we climbed Jade Mountain or Mount Fuji; by this time there was no hope that he could do anything like those ever again. So slowly that we hardly noticed it, his strength and stamina was fading away, and by this time he was hard put to walk even a few hundred yards.

It was clear that something was wrong, but the gradual way it came on made us complacent. Also, because of his injuries, Dave had had enough of doctors in his life to hold him for a long, long time, so he was reluctant to seek medical attention. By the time Jade turned ten, it was clear that it couldn’t be put off any longer.

Dave’s complaints were basically a general weakness and progressively worsening problems in other areas, including mild pains in his lower abdomen. The first doctor he went to found a very high blood sugar, indicative of type II diabetes, which they thought would account for most of his problems. While diabetes is not a simple disease and can be difficult to manage, we all thought it explained the symptoms Dave had been having.

However, drugs and later insulin only slowed the increase of his symptoms, rather than stop them as we’d hoped. As things progressed, Dave began to have problems with itchy skin and night sweats; although he tried hard to keep weight on, he couldn’t manage it, and slowly began to look sallow. By then, we were having doubts about that particular doctor, and sought a second opinion with a different M.D., who noticed swollen lymph nodes and other problems. He came up with the opinion that Dave was also suffering from Hodgkin’s Disease.

That was the beginning of a four-year battle that involved all too much hospital time, repeated doctor visits, and Dave steadily growing weaker. It was not until we consulted with yet another doctor that things came into focus when the doctor asked if Dave had been in Vietnam. “It seems likely,” the doctor said, “that you’re suffering from the effects of Agent Orange.”

The U.S. military in Vietnam sought to protect American and allied troops by defoliating the dense jungle vegetation hiding enemy positions by using a host of herbicides, the most common of which was called Agent Orange, a combination of 2,4,D and 2,4,5,T that contained dioxin. There was a reason that Phan Loc was barren, dusty bare soil, and it wasn’t that all the ground cover had been bulldozed away when they built the place. It had been repeatedly treated with the defoliant, which was only later discovered to be the cause of a myriad of problems affecting veterans.

The strange thing is that Agent Orange affected different people in different ways, and some were more sensitive to it than others. Dave had actually only been in Vietnam for a couple of months, while I had been there for fifteen, and believe me, I know it was sprayed in my presence; it had a chemical smell, but the odor was not totally unpleasant. But we finally realized that Dave was suffering greatly from the exposure, while I had no apparent symptoms of anything that seemed related to it. Thankfully, while Agent Orange has been indicted as a cause of a variety of birth defects, after careful testing it seemed likely that Jade had escaped them, which was a huge relief for all of us.

Things went downhill from there; it was slow, but it was downhill all the way. Dave’s injuries from the helicopter crash almost thirty years before contributed to the problem. Before too long he was weak to the point where he could only do a limited amount for himself, and I became his nurse as much as anything. I could not have made it through those years without the help of Moose and Shirley along with our housekeeper, Rosa. All of them were helpful in ways too many to try and list. Jade, who at the beginning of the struggle was not yet a teenager, was also a tremendous help in helping keep her father going.

The situation got worse; Dave came down with cancer. No big, scary cancer at first, just melanomas, but we battled them, too – first by minor surgeries, but each time we thought we had licked the current round of cancer it came back somewhere else, and a little bit worse.

Those years are a dizzying blur of trying to deal with Dave’s pain, sickness, and weakness. He was in and out of various hospitals for a couple of years, but the hospital stays never seemed to solve anything and he soon grew worse again.

By that time we had both conceded where things were heading, and that he would never be well again, not that he had ever been truly well after the helicopter crash. He had battled back for decades, and most of it successfully, but now things were starting to gang up on him more quickly than he could deal with.

In his final months Dave’s one big hope was to kick one final item off his bucket list, which was to see the calendar turn to 2000. It was not to be; he died in October of 1999. I almost hate to say it, but his death came as a relief to all of us. He had suffered so much pain, so much deterioration in his last few months that it was painful to all of us, but at least he was released from his suffering.

We had been together for nearly twenty years, and most of them had been placid ones, though enjoyable and fulfilling. We had our adventures together along the way, and had raised a promising daughter in the process. We never had anything that approached an argument since we were both capable of talking things out before they got that far, and I think it is safe to say that we enjoyed most of our time together. Only in the last few years did it become trying, but even then, despite his pain and his weakness, he was always upbeat and cheerful.

As I said, neither Dave nor I were particularly religious, so we thought a traditional funeral was a little bit out of line. Instead, we had a memorial service, not at home, but at the garage that had been his hobby shop since before I knew him. His treasured salt flats Corvette was in the room, although it had been several years since he had driven it, and my hot rod Karmann Ghia was parked next to it.

We had a much bigger crowd show up for his funeral than had been there for our wedding, since we had made many friends in the area over the years after we had been married. Cat and Steve even flew in from North Carolina, where Steve was approaching retirement from teaching; Cat was a few years behind him, having gone back to teaching when the kids were old enough for school.

Dave had wished to be cremated, and we respected that wish. His ashes were scattered in several different places over the next few months; a little of them are on the Bonneville Salt Flats now. Jade and I flew to Taiwan to scatter some of them on top of Jade Mountain, a particular wish of his; some are in the bay in front of Sausalito. I could not bear to give him up entirely, so I retain a small pinch of them in a glass vial.

Dave was the love of my life. My life was never the same after we climbed Jade Mountain together, and in spite of all the tears and all of the pain of his last few years, I don’t regret a minute of the time we spent together. I wish we could have had more of them, but I’m satisfied with what I had.