Suzanne Gates
I have two answers for this, but one mystery is no longer a mystery. It's a tragedy.
First answer: The family that lived in my childhood home before my parents bought the house had a son who had served in World War II and had a tremendously difficult time adjusting to home life when he returned from war. Now we would term his illness "PTSD," but at the time (and when I was growing up) the term was "shellshocked." This man retreated into his bedroom, and came out rarely. On one such occasion, he went to his bank, withdrew everything he had in savings, and buried it in a Kerr jar in the crawl space underneath the house.
Eventually the family moved out. I don't know what happened to the man; all this happened way before I was born. My parents, a young married couple, bought the house with a caveat from the prior owners: They asked to come back and dig for the money their son had buried. They did return several times, but didn't find the jar. After they gave up, my parents began digging. By the time I was born, the "buried treasure" was family lore and my friends and I would crawl underneath the house and use trowels to dig for treasure. We never found anything.
I've thought about a book that would move between the son's story, the terrors he must have lived through that made his return home intolerable, and the story of a contemporary woman who desperately needed the money, although she wouldn't know how much money the jar contained. Mostly, though, I think now about the son and what moved him to feel his only recourse was to hide what money he had in a canning jar. I wonder what became of him, and hope that his pain lessened with years. And somewhere, underneath that house in Portland, Oregon, the jar waits.
The other mystery in my life was no mystery at all, but it had a profound effect on my choices and on my writing. In the mid-1980s, a serial killer emerged in the Portland area. The Pacific Northwest is ground zero for serial killers, and I remember my worry in the 1970s that my sister was a target for Ted Bundy. She was beautiful, with long brown hair, parted in the middle. But by the 1980s, Ted Bundy was jailed in Florida and my sister was safe. Not so for the women whose bodies were found in Molalla, an area just outside of Portland. One of the bodies belonged to Maureen Hodges, a grade school friend of my best friend, Kelly.
There's no mystery here, as I said. The murders were horrendous, the killer was caught, and I refuse to write his name. It's Maureen Hodges who is important to me, the young woman who one night stepped into the wrong car. My best friend and I read everything we could about the case, about Maureen. Our question, and maybe this is the mystery, was "What separated her from us?" We all grew up in the same shoddy neighborhood (for context, figure skater Tonya Harding lived down the street. That should tell you all you need to know). We went to the same schools, the same seedy parks. But Maureen became a prostitute and worked downtown Portland for a fix, and Kelly and I became college students. Protracted college students, but still.
The difference was heroin. At some point in her life, maybe late grade school or high school, Maureen made a decision that led her into the Molalla forest, and her detached feet into the freezer of a psychopath. I took drugs in grade school. In my neighborhood, most kids did. But heroin--that was something else entirely. As Kelly remembers, Maureen was smart, funny, a terrific friend. Our question, again: What separates us? Maybe it's simply luck.
First answer: The family that lived in my childhood home before my parents bought the house had a son who had served in World War II and had a tremendously difficult time adjusting to home life when he returned from war. Now we would term his illness "PTSD," but at the time (and when I was growing up) the term was "shellshocked." This man retreated into his bedroom, and came out rarely. On one such occasion, he went to his bank, withdrew everything he had in savings, and buried it in a Kerr jar in the crawl space underneath the house.
Eventually the family moved out. I don't know what happened to the man; all this happened way before I was born. My parents, a young married couple, bought the house with a caveat from the prior owners: They asked to come back and dig for the money their son had buried. They did return several times, but didn't find the jar. After they gave up, my parents began digging. By the time I was born, the "buried treasure" was family lore and my friends and I would crawl underneath the house and use trowels to dig for treasure. We never found anything.
I've thought about a book that would move between the son's story, the terrors he must have lived through that made his return home intolerable, and the story of a contemporary woman who desperately needed the money, although she wouldn't know how much money the jar contained. Mostly, though, I think now about the son and what moved him to feel his only recourse was to hide what money he had in a canning jar. I wonder what became of him, and hope that his pain lessened with years. And somewhere, underneath that house in Portland, Oregon, the jar waits.
The other mystery in my life was no mystery at all, but it had a profound effect on my choices and on my writing. In the mid-1980s, a serial killer emerged in the Portland area. The Pacific Northwest is ground zero for serial killers, and I remember my worry in the 1970s that my sister was a target for Ted Bundy. She was beautiful, with long brown hair, parted in the middle. But by the 1980s, Ted Bundy was jailed in Florida and my sister was safe. Not so for the women whose bodies were found in Molalla, an area just outside of Portland. One of the bodies belonged to Maureen Hodges, a grade school friend of my best friend, Kelly.
There's no mystery here, as I said. The murders were horrendous, the killer was caught, and I refuse to write his name. It's Maureen Hodges who is important to me, the young woman who one night stepped into the wrong car. My best friend and I read everything we could about the case, about Maureen. Our question, and maybe this is the mystery, was "What separated her from us?" We all grew up in the same shoddy neighborhood (for context, figure skater Tonya Harding lived down the street. That should tell you all you need to know). We went to the same schools, the same seedy parks. But Maureen became a prostitute and worked downtown Portland for a fix, and Kelly and I became college students. Protracted college students, but still.
The difference was heroin. At some point in her life, maybe late grade school or high school, Maureen made a decision that led her into the Molalla forest, and her detached feet into the freezer of a psychopath. I took drugs in grade school. In my neighborhood, most kids did. But heroin--that was something else entirely. As Kelly remembers, Maureen was smart, funny, a terrific friend. Our question, again: What separates us? Maybe it's simply luck.
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