Aunt Melinda had warned us about the man everyone on the island called Blue. The man called Blue had a tendency to act a bit crazy. He was unhinged at the place where his soul touches the world. They hinted this to me, though not in specific and deliberate words, but the way my aunt and uncle talked about him, they loved Blue too. You could gauge their love whenever he would drop by their cottage. Their eyes lit up like the first burst from a roman candle on Independence Day. Blue was in communion with the essence of life, he knew what it meant to be alive in the most vital way possible, and this made the man very special.
When I was ten, I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic,” though I’m sure I had heard it used between adults. Of course, I know now what it means. I can now say with some confidence twenty years later that it was ironic that Blue, the man who was most alive of all of us, was laying on the couch in our Hobbit hole with his life flowing out of him and onto the floor.
No, he had not been swimming down at the beach as he was known to do, even at night. That’s not why his jeans looked wet. At first I thought it looked like water, but the funny thing was his jeans were becoming wetter and wetter, and it became clear this water was coming out of Blue.
I tried to wake my brother, but he was in another of his deep, unshakable sleeps, so I sat on a rung of the ladder leading up into the loft. From that perch I watched him.
That water looked red. That seemed funny too.
*
Every summer through the seventies, my family would fly on an airplane or drive in a station wagon to visit the extended kin in the Pacific Northwest. Several uncles and one aunt, all on my father’s side, were passing the time on Vashon Island in Puget Sound. The island in 1979 was a place that still felt more wild than tame. Sure, there were paved roads and cars and utility poles and telephones and every few square miles a TV, though not many. Thinking back, it seemed to be a place that wanted to tear itself from the military-industrial complex, but unable to do so, settled for a wet, salty mote between it and the rest of apple pie America.
Not that there weren’t apple pies on Vashon Island. There were pies, pies grown from organic apples without any added sugar, and there were a lot of apples too - hanging from trees, the trees assembled in massive phalanx formations preparing to attack the pear trees, themselves lined up and prepped for the assault.
Vashon people were hippies for the most part. Earth, air and water lovers to be more specific. The women and girls wore long cotton skirts and dug at the earth with hoes while barefoot. After a day of work in the garden, her man, if he wasn’t off drinking or playing guitar or making money, because even hippies need that, would wash her feet in water pulled from the well and warmed in a kettle on top of a wood-burning stove. Her feet were black from the black, peat-like, soil that, if I remember right, sort of appeared like wet coffee grounds.
Of course, sometimes the roles were reversed. The men worked the gardens in tattered boots and second hand clothes from the Salvation Army store. The women were out smoking, or drinking, playing stringed instruments or gossiping. When the man took off his boots at the door, the woman would ask them about what they had planted, how the rhubarb was coming along, while massaging the knots from his back.
And then sometimes they just got high in the evenings while the sun came down, or they screamed at each other about this thing or that until nearly midnight. They thought that they were healing the earth.
The kids that sprung from the carnal unions on Vashon would run down the beach in summer naked as the day they were born. Actually, I imagined that they had been running ever since they had dropped from the womb of their earth healer mothers, and their mothers were still running after them to this day. They only reason these wild children hadn’t been gathered up was because the beets needed harvesting. I watched these children running along the shore from my place on the top deck of the ferry, a large metal drum that shakes and rattles while rapt in a Sisyphean dance across the water.
*
My uncle and aunt lived in a cottage just above a beach covered in pebbles the color of slate. Just a few hundred feet above them on the hill was what the island people called Bag’s End. Since the concept of private property was somewhat ill-defined on the island, it was unclear whether anyone owned the land outright. It seemed to be hippie-zoned for communal use. Mostly, the islanders built greenhouses and gardens in Bag’s End, but many of these structures were bare skeletons now. The plastic walls were ripped and flapping in the breeze. Now, some of the people were still using theirs to grow vegetables, while others were being used for flower cultivation. About half of these were being used to grow pot, and then there were the ones that looked to be growing wine bottles. The empty green and smoky brown bottles were lined up like rows of tomato plants, and cobwebs had been growing for some time between them.
The reason Bag’s End was called Bag’s End is because the place had a real Hobbit hole fit for habitation. My uncle had built it in 1971 from wood scavenged from a nearby abandoned house. My uncle was a gifted woodworker, having built sail boats with only a saw, hammer and chisels. He was building a large wooden tug boat in a garage off the cottage. These weren’t toys. They were the real thing. The Hobbit hole was real too and had a kitchen with running water, a living area with a couch and a faded Persian rug, and a small loft in which two small earth healers could sleep comfortably. It was even wired for electricity and had a lamp hanging from the ceiling.
Blue was dying in the Hobbit hole during the summer of 1979.
*
“Don’t go near Blue,” my Aunt said. “He’s a little different, kind of crazy if you know what I mean.”
“Crazy” as a word was an abstract concept to me at the time, though at least I had more of an idea what that word meant in concrete terms. I knew more about “crazy” than “ironic.” The coyote that chased the Road Runner was crazy. If I didn’t want Blue to drop a lit bouquet of dynamite on me as I ran along the beach alongside the wild, naked children, I knew I should keep my distance.
“Blue’s a good guy though with a good heart,” my aunt added while we pulled radishes from the garden. This was several hours after my Aunt had first warned me. She had a habit of gathering up threads of conversation hours after they had been cut. It made the air ripe for confused glances and awkward silences. The whole of the island loved Blue. Again you could see the affection everyone had for him in the way they acted, out of kindness giving him fruits and vegetables, laughing at his jokes, sharing with him a few hand-me-down shirts.
One thing I never understood was how Blue earned the name Blue. I don’t think that was his family name. His hair was fiery red and it looked as if he had never had it cut. His beard was equally ruddy, though darker with dirt. He looked like a Viking who had missed several meals.
*
I was watching Blue as he was losing his grip on the gym rope of life. He would look at me from that couch. His chest heaved up and down like rapid tides, and he seemed to be going in and out of consciousness. Sometimes his eyes would roll back up into their sockets. Coughing would bring him back. The blood was starting to pool under him and soak the carpet.
If I left him here to run down to my aunt and uncle’s for help, I would leave this crazy, wounded man with my younger brother who was sleeping, without worry or knowledge. It was a risk I was incapable of accepting. If Blue, in a fit of rage and pain, did anything to harm my brother, my parents would never forgive me.
Still, if I didn’t do anything but watch Blue die, I would naturally feel guilt too. For a minute, I calculated how much time would be left before the sun would come up and tried to figure how much time, assuming a rate of blood loss, I could wait things out until things became clearer in my mind. I considered for another minute that this was all a dream. I pinched myself hard and Blue moaned.
I am unable to explain why I did this next thing. I walked over to Blue and laid my right hand upon him, just about at the place where I guessed the wound was in his body. If I thought hard enough, concentrated as if Blue’s life depended on it, I could find the power to heal the man that the islanders all loved. I had seen something like this special power in a comic book.
Blue moaned again, and his eyes rolled around in their pockets like billiard balls. I felt the warmth of his blood on my hand, and watched as his lips started turning blue. Just then, I heard scratching at the round Hobbit door as if a crazed animal was trying to break in and finish Blue off. There were a pack of wolves rumored to live on the island - horses would be found half devoured on ranches in the island’s center - and my first thought was Blue had met up with one.
My uncle burst into the hole, breaking the door in, the pitiful latch left twisted. I can still remember him, only half-inside his farmer pullovers, pushing me away from Blue and telling me to get back up the ladder into the sleep loft. Soren, my uncle’s German shepherd, sniffed at my fingers and began licking the blood off of them while my uncle rolled Blue onto one shoulder and took him out to a van that was pulling up the dirt road that cut through Bag’s End. This turned out to be the island ambulance, though like no ambulance I had every seen before. Instead of red crosses, it was festooned with images of skeletons in Uncle Sam top hats and dancing teddy bears - things only later I would associate with the Grateful Dead.
My brother slept through it all, blissfully ignorant of the mortal drama.
From my aunt I was to learn that Blue had gotten into a fight at an establishment in Ruston he did not normally frequent. Something transpired between him and the barkeep, perhaps a flash of the danger and craziness came over Blue, frightening the patrons and infuriating the management. He was a long hair in a world still governed by men who took their marching orders from the rhythm that was the mainland life. He was shot in the melee, and took along with him a .38 slug in the upper abdomen back across on the ferry, leaving a pool of blood on the stairs to the upper deck. Somehow he crawled like a wounded animal into the Hobbit hole.
Blue did survive though having lost almost his entire hematic volume. He would never be the same and would never be allowed to wander the earth again. He was admitted to Western State Psychiatric Hospital and died there just about a year later. I believe it was simply impossible for Blue to live several floors up from the earth and in a locked room. The islanders knew something like that would be the death of him.
*
It is my hope that this recollection puts into some context my remarks during the orientation lecture for first year students. When you had asked us if any of us had practiced the “healing arts,” either as nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, psychotherapists, counselors or any role like that, my comments were, I think perhaps it is best to say, given in jest. In no traditional way have I practiced medicine. If I had achieved anything like success during the odd occasion described herein, I may choose not to endure the adventure of which I so eagerly want to partake, that is to receive a degree from your esteemed school to practice medicine.
I understand that after I had provided so casually to the rest of the class this story (though not in such detail), several students have asked that I be removed from the program or be given another option with which to advance my education here, but with minimal contact with other students. I respect their concern. I don’t wish to make anyone uncomfortable. My hope is that I can win their hearts and minds over the next year.
Yours Truly,