We heard about my colleague’s work—how his oil paintings evoked “discrete units of entablature and, at the same time, stained glass.” We heard about the “mandala motif in many of these paintings and the recurrent theme of the Uroborus as seen in Mexican calendar stones.” Ginnie mentioned some pamphlets on a table, urged all of us to enjoy the Chenin Blanc provided by a vintner from the Yakima Valley, and then, with spread hands, turned us loose once more “to look deeply into these glorious works of art.” Afterward, I told Jamie who’d just spoken—that Virginia Worthington, as she called herself, reclaiming her locally respected maiden name, was John William’s mother. Jamie said, “She looks like a matador in that two-million-dollar jacket.” And she did look like a matador. That was the right image. Ginnie looked flamboyant, if economical, making small talk. Once, in that packed gallery, I drew close enough to see her tiny earrings, and to hear her say, as I passed voyeuristically, to a man and two women, “The Arias Peace Plan for Central America would certainly be a boon for the arts.” Surprisingly, I felt no urge to tell Ginnie what had happened to her son. She left me, I suppose the word is, numb.
The second time I saw Ginnie was in 2002—four years after I’d bought Chronic Obsessions for $5 at Shorey’s. She was now an octogenarian and had endowed, at the University of Washington, the Virginia Worthington Poetry Series, designed to bring three poets a year to Kane Hall for readings and lectures. On the night I went, with my colleague the classicist, to hear Joseph Powell read, Ginnie was introduced by the dean of arts and sciences as “a true friend to the university and a lover of the arts whose generosity, grace, and philanthropic vision now bring to our campus the gift of fine poetry.” He preemptively took Ginnie’s hand and touched the padded shoulder of her suit; then Ginnie went to the podium, bent the microphone toward her brightly painted lips, pulled her jacket smartly down, and rubbed her palms together while we applauded. Reaching back to touch her hair, as she had fifteen years earlier, in her art gallery, she thanked us for “that kind and heartfelt greeting” and acknowledged the dean’s “words of praise.” My classicist friend leaned toward me and said, “It’s a Worthington Worthington, as in money,” and later, “Quintessential harridan.” Ginnie had become regal in her advanced years and carried herself like a dowager, leading with her chin, and addressed her audience with icy beneficence. She looked, I thought, like a film star at dusk—like someone loath to move out of the spotlight. “I am gratified to share fine poetry with you,” and “The stellar constellation of poets this inaugural season bodes well for the future of the Virginia Worthington Series,” and “I have insisted on reasonable ticket prices in perpetuity,” and “At lunch today with Joseph Powell, I let him know just how entirely pleased I am that he has joined us for this debut.” When Powell came forward, wearing a droopy mustache and cowboy boots, she called our attention to him with the open hands of a magician who has just produced something implausible.
Of course I thought, seeing her this way—so aged but indomitable and so self-reverential—of Chronic Obsessions. I didn’t see the benefactor with deep pockets and a love of poetry the dean of arts and sciences had proposed; instead, I saw a woman who’d poeticized badly. I saw Robert Leventhal. I saw someone who felt that torture is Eros. I’ve more than once, for a variety of reasons, had to impress on my students that “you can’t tell by looking.” I’m there in my sweater vest, cleaning my glasses in front of the blackboard, sweaty with my passion for Basho or Shakespeare, chalk on my fingers and squinting at the clock, and I know they don’t know, for example, who Neil Countryman is. Dickinson hardly published, I might say, by way of an example. Most of her neighbors had no inkling she wrote poems. Robert Frost was notoriously enigmatic with biographers. The amiable New Englander, the laureate and sage, was also his secretary’s sadistically charged lover. How wonderful that the hoary and sinewy Virginia Worthington had endowed this promising poetry series. She seemed so remarkably clearheaded, even wise, and entirely in command of her moment at the podium. She seemed so worthy of our praise.
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED.
One day this spring, I read, in the Seattle Times, an article called HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK. This sort of thing gets reported sometimes—a hiker or climber will go missing for years, and then a femur is found, or a skull and some plastic, and two or three paragraphs will appear in the local section with the words “unidentified” and “investigation” and a description like “twelve miles west of Quilcene” or “seven hundred feet below the summit of Mount Constance.” The article this spring, though, was more thorough. It used the term “federal law enforcement officers” and the phrase “in a remote area of the park near the Hoh River.” I showed this to Jamie, and she said, “I think you might be busted, Neil,” and, “Don’t worry—I’ll visit.” In other words, she didn’t believe, after twenty-two years, that this article had anything to do with us, and neither did I.
The next morning, though, there was a longer article in the Post-Intelligencer, with a byline and the heading PARK REMAINS PROMPT QUESTIONS. It included “evidence of long-term habitation,” “potential foul play,” “National Park Service criminal investigators,” and “Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,” and it reported that the human remains in question were discovered by “park personnel engaged in field research on the South Fork of the Hoh.”
I went to school, but it wasn’t my best day of teaching. And just as I feared, they were waiting for me, outside Room 104, at two-thirty, when the bell rang. There were two of them, a man and a woman, both younger than me by at least ten years, and they didn’t appear threatening, grim, or intimidating. I confessed, “I know why you’re here,” and then, sitting on the table at the front of my classroom, I gave them all the detail they wanted. When that was done, I said, “Can I ask you one question? How did you find me?”
“Your name was in his books,” they said in tandem.
The Seattle Times assigned an investigative reporter whose style—and I mean this as a compliment—might best be described as “gripping narrative.” It was rich raw material: the son of so much local wealth, a Lakeside grad, missing for twenty-nine years, turns up in a cave as a mummy who’s been rolled and bound in a cedar mat. One Times article begins like true-crime noir, with the discoverers of John William’s cave, two cougar researchers tracking “a radio-collared juvenile female in the lush darkness of the rain forest,” stumbling on a scene so strange—the dug spa and the cave in the wall—“it was as if they were characters in an episode of The Twilight Zone.” A forensics doctor comes off like a horror-movie bit player while explaining mummification, adding, “The chemicals in cedar, specifically plicatic acid, are a potent preservative,” and “It’s possible to do an extensive autopsy on mummified remains,” and “Conditions like these even enable us to get fingerprints after more than two decades.” A wilderness-survival expert is quoted: “His gumption was only exceeded by his foolishness.” Lakeside weighs in: John William is described by former teachers as “a conspicuous academic presence,” “one of my top three classical philosophy students of all time,” and—Althea Mastroianni—“brilliant but eccentric and disturbed.” A Lakeside classmate: “He wrote a lot of angry letters to the Tatler. People basically stayed away from him.” His Scoutmaster: “He was a wonderful Scout and in so many ways a good example to the younger boys.” The owner of the general store on the Hoh River Road: “I told him not to come in if he wasn’t going to wear shoes.” A former air-force survival instructor who now runs a wilderness school in Oregon: “This guy had to have been highly motivated to stay in the woods that long.”
In Part Two of the Seattle Times investigative series, we read that Rand Barry filed a missing-persons report with the Clallam County sheriff in late April of 1977, after finding his son’s “slatternly, dilapidated trailer on the main fork of the Hoh River abandoned.” Rand also contacted the Washington State Patrol and, later, the National Crime Information Center and the Friends and Families of Miss
ing Persons and Violent Crime Victims. The Bledsoe Agency—Rand’s private investigator—gets a brief mention (but not Vance Reese). The Times reporter, sleuthlike, follows the trail to California, where the Highway Patrol impounded John William’s Impala near the San Ysidro border crossing in early April of ’77. “The missing boy’s father,” Part Two tells us, “brought his son’s disappearance to the attention of Senator Henry M. Jackson, whose office contacted the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, but nothing came of this high-profile effort.” Et cetera.
Part Three—this is where I show up, wearing that mustache in my annual picture, and depicted—it seems to me—as Mr. Chips crossed with John Muir. I’m of “North Seattle, blue-collar, lunch pail origin” and “a well-liked high school teacher with twenty-six years of classroom experience under his belt.” I’m the father of two and live in a modest home not far from where I grew up. Jamie is “a real estate appraiser and a volunteer youth advocate with Boys and Girls Club of Seattle.” According to the Times, I’m contemplative and answer questions slowly. I ride my bicycle to work and rarely use my car, a ’92 Honda Civic. My friend the classicist says about me, “Neil is dedicated. He never misses a day of work.” One of my former hiking partners from the Mountaineers says I’m “persistent on the trail and knowledgeable in the woods.” My sister: “Neil’s a generous soul and has always been determined.” My mother’s untimely death is mentioned, as is the fact that my father passed away in ’98. There’s plenty from me about the packloads I carried, and the backtracking in snow, and the elk jerky, and so on, but probably the best quote the Times reporter got from me, while we sat by the South Fork of the Hoh together, was “I let him down.”
Part Three, though, is mostly about John William’s “Early Years.” There’s a quote from an elementary-school teacher (“Precocious, but I suppose you would say socially inept without posing a classroom behavior problem”), and a carefully written description of Laurelhurst (“architecturally notable postwar ranch houses interspersed with striving Tudors behind foliage”). We’re given some color—that in the sixties the Barry family attended dinners and barbecues at the Seattle Yacht Club; that John William played Pop Warner football and Little League baseball; that his mother, for a brief period, chaired a neighborhood gourmet club; that the family enjoyed summer sailing trips to the San Juan Islands and Desolation Sound; that John William liked canoeing in the Union Bay Marsh, built a telescope from a kit, and joined the American Association of Variable Star Observers at age fourteen. His parents separated and “eventually divorced.” His mother “became prominent in the Taos art scene.” His father’s Boeing career “was highlighted by the test launch, at Cape Canaveral, of BOMARC, a combination pilotless airplane and missile whose development he was largely responsible for.”
Before Part Four could be published, I got a call from an attorney, saying—to my message machine—that he’d read about John William in the paper, and asking me to call him “with due speed regarding important news.” He said his name was Mark Sides. He was terse, I thought, and in his terseness evasive, especially in his reference to John William as “your intimate friend, and I’d guess the term is, uh, uh, my posthumous client.”
I Googled Mark Sides. He was a partner at a Seattle firm called Berman Piper with “extensive experience in civil litigation, land use, and environmental law” and had been named in ’98 by Washington Law & Politics magazine, a “Super Lawyer.” There was a photograph of a slim, nearly drawn man about sixty, wearing a blue blazer and graying at the temples; he was a member of the American Water Resources Association, the Downtown Seattle Association, the Planning Association of Washington, and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties. His undergraduate degree, from Berkeley in ’68, was in the political economy of natural resources. He’d gone to law school at Stanford and had graduated in ’71, Order of the Coif. Sides had clerked for a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in San Francisco and had lectured, in ’03, at the University of Washington on the Model Toxics Control Act. He was on the board of directors for the Vashon–Maury Island Land Trust and provided pro-bono legal services to Powerful Choices, “a nonprofit organization serving women’s empowerment and self-defense needs and supporting witness protection for Bosnian rape camp survivors.” I followed a link to the Puget Sound Business Journal and read an article from its November 3–9, 2004, issue on Sides’s successful handling of a lawsuit brought to determine who should pay for the clean-up of contaminated property. I also read his tips for choosing an attorney, written in a dry but striving style, employing the phrase “unvarnished counsel” and warning potential clients that “the law is a thicket demanding careful negotiation.” In sum, his Web page served its advertising purpose: Sides seemed credible and inspired confidence, and his Berkeley degree in something radical-sounding was sufficiently mitigated by his subsequent narrative and by the particulars of his impressive CV.
But how boyishly sixty he was in person, on the seventy-first floor of the Columbia Center—Seattle’s tallest building—in his corner office with its panorama north and east and its immediate view of the rooftop communications array and of the zigguratlike concrete terraces in the upper reaches of the Seattle Municipal Building. It might have been a problem, in the professional sense, to look as young as Sides, or to look so reedlike and easily pushed over; on first impression, he struck me the way I’m struck by photos of adolescent congressional interns who, posing beside senators, peer into the camera looking eagerly pliant and, in proximity to political power, happy to have no point of view. Would this work at the bench, or in the Berman Piper conference room we’d passed on the trek to his office, with its voluminous rosewood table? This vague calling forth of George Stephanopoulos with a shorter haircut? The color of his belt matched his cordovan loafers, and, without a jacket or tie, dressed in chinos and a white pinpoint oxford with carefully rolled sleeves, Sides looked like one of the older models in an L.L. Bean catalogue. There was a framed photo on his office wall of Sides and another man, both in flimsy nylon shorts and sweat-soaked bibs and chips, crossing the finish line at the Seattle Marathon, Sides with his thin arms raised in painful exhilaration in the end zone at Memorial Stadium. There was another, more moody and contemplative black-and-white of Sides trail-running, with the light glinting in the well-defined, if slim, quadriceps muscle of his leading leg as he passed under alder trees in what looked like early evening. Noting my eye turned toward this portrait of a runner—of a solitary man captured in a brooding, poetic training moment—Sides said, “That was taken on the Middle Fork Snoqualmie by my wife, eleven years ago next month.”
Generally speaking, Sides’s office was in disarray, with document boxes and a pair of shoe rubbers under his desk, wine gift-bags stuffed into a corner, and, in the slant of morning light through his southeasterly window, food crumbs and dust on the small pedestal table holding down the center of the room. This was no show office. Instead, it had the feel of an air-traffic-control tower, with its banks of uninterrupted floor-to-ceiling windows, treated with antireflective glare, about a thousand feet off the ground. Sides was frank and said that sometimes, gazing out, he wanted to be mayor of Seattle. He couldn’t see the Rainier Valley, the Industrial District, or the port, but otherwise he was poised like Zeus above the city, and from his desk took in not only Puget Sound but the rooftops of lesser towers, four lakes, two mountain ranges, and the eastward suburbs installed in their low green hills. We were literally twice as high as the Space Needle, that erstwhile symbol of Seattle’s quaint ambitions, which from here looked like one of the extraterrestrial tripods in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds—in other words, from the vantage of the Columbia Center, the Space Needle resembled a B-movie prop.
Sides’s guest chairs, in vinyl, weren’t ergonomically correct, as I found when he invited me to sit in one. From this lower perspective, my view was of the sky and of Sides swiveling in his lounger. “Okay,” he said. “So why are you here?”
I said, “Right.?
??
Sides chuckled, crossed his arms, and stuffed his fingers in his armpits. He even leaned to his left a little and affected a look of rank skepticism. “You’re Neil Countryman,” he observed.
“True.”
“What’s your birthdate?”
I told him. Then Sides produced, from a desk drawer, a small tape recorder, at which I nodded. “This is new,” he said. “I’m not good at it yet. I lost the old one in Atlanta last month. I’m lazy about longhand and tend to dictate.” Another chuckle as, looking stumped, he fiddled with his recorder. “Yep, it’s true—I tend to dictate,” he said. “You can verify that with my wife.”
“I think you have the wrong guy,” I told him. “I’m a teacher.”
“You’re a teacher,” he said, “but not a teacher in trouble. In fact,” he added, “it’s the opposite of that—you better hold on to your chair.” And he held on, demonstratively, to his own chair.
This was toward the end of my twenty-sixth year of teaching, thirty-four years after I’d met John William, and twenty-two years since he’d died in his campfire. This was on an April morning during spring break, so cloudless and promising that I’d pedaled my bicycle downtown and locked it to a rack in front of the Columbia Center before coming up to see Sides. My plan, at that point, was to pedal home in stages, visiting used-book stores along the way and stopping somewhere for a sandwich. I also planned to go to Trader Joe’s and Rite-Aid. In other words, my day had a shape I looked forward to. But now here was Sides in his Naugahyde saddle with his fingers linked behind his head, seated under his six tall windows and at the intersection of his two wall-desks with their law books, brown accordion folders, and three-ring binders. Here was Sides before a sky of cobalt blue, vastly spread, saying, “Did you ever think you’d be rich, Neil?”