Happenstance

By Lester Fisher

A bastard boomer negotiates the maze of postwar America. Wrenched from his working single mother, and brought to Camp Pondosa by his grandfather who was Woods Manager for McCloud Rv. Lumber Co. After his WAC mother became X-ray tech at the McCloud hospital, and acquired a husband, the new family moved to R. A. Long’s “planned city” of Longview, Washington. A shocking change for a country-bumpkin kid. He attended Catholic School in this pretentious mill town with its socially stratified culture of mill workers, overlords and timber barons. Catholic indoctrination led to the Franciscan Seminary. He survived into his 6th year at the college of San Luis Rey, CA, when love won out. This young man left the pursuit of the priestly vocation to pursue the woman he had dated since his fifteenth year.
First collegiate in his family, he and his girl entered the daunting halls of ivy at University of Washington. Engaged to his high school sweetheart, graduation approached in the turbulent years of 1969. A youth’s options were few during the Vietnam War. Having taken his Naval Officer Candidate School exam, he also applied for Peace Corps. The NOCS did not reply, but the Peace Corps invited him to Kenya. Parting with his xenophobic fiancé, he served in the idyllic Hills of Taita where began a romantic involvement with a Taita woman … and her 3 children. Their happy two years together ended when he was exiled from Taita by his military induction notice. By happenstance, Richard Nixon had changed the course of his life.
One young man’s account chronicles the most turbulent growth in United States history. These were expansions in technology, global influence, wealth, power, popular unrest, and human rights. These changed America from a isolationist, racist enclave, to the present confusing, liberating, imperialistic and ideologically-divided envy of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781665535984

Lester Fisher

Born Lester Fisher on Feb. 1 1947, he later took the surname of his step-father, James G. Klungness. His education, after Catholic school and seminary, included a Bachelorette in Botany from the Univ. of Washington. After 2 years of Peace Corps as Youth Extension Officer in Taita, Kenya, he began a career with Weyerhaeuser Co., serving in the Wood Morphology and the Genetics Research Divisions. After 5 years, he returned to finish his Master’s degree in International Agricultural Development from Univ. of Cal. Davis. His thesis on honeybee digestion was published in three scientific papers. After 6 years of service in the Dept. of Pomology, he worked for the University of Hawaii for 10 yrs., performing research on fruit fly parasitoids. He then transferred to the US Dept. of Agriculture to pursue research on fruit fly suppression and management for 8 years. He retired back to the Univ. of Hawaii to assist on a program to protect the honey bee industry in Hawaii from invasive species such as the vorroa mite and small hive beetle. Health issues forced him into full retirement in 2010. He had authored or co-authored 21 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and many presentations to scientific and public meetings. He developed microscopic techniques, and invented the augmentorium for disposal of infested fruit and augmentation of parasitoids. The author is married to his high school sweetheart and has a son and a daughter, a step-son, one grandchild, and two step-grandchildren. “I decided to write the book because I am amazed how many twists and turns my very ordinary life has taken during what must be considered an extraordinary period in human history. This was a life which profoundly impacted or begat the lives of three wives, six African children, an Afro-American son, and a white American daughter. I will always wonder what other influences I have had during a 40 year career in public service.”

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© 2021 Lester Fisher. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/03/2021

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3600-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3599-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-3598-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917387

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Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®). Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Website

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Happenstance?

Chapter 2 The Family in Oregon

Chapter 3 The Logging Camps

Chapter 4 My Mother’s Life

Chapter 5 McCloud

Chapter 6 The Move to Longview

Chapter 7 The Catholics

Chapter 8 The Franciscan

Chapter 9 On the Horns of a Dilemma

Chapter 10 The Great Storm

Chapter 11 Hail to the Chief!

Chapter 12 The Entertainers

Chapter 13 The Summer of our Discontent

Chapter 14 The Mission Bells

Chapter 15 The Mission

Chapter 16 Ab patina decumbo in flamma (Out of the frying pan into the fire)

Chapter 17 The Halls of Ivy

Chapter 18 The Solo Troubadour

Chapter 19 Kuungana Kufanya Kusaidia Kenya (Work together to help Kenya)

Chapter 20 Nyuki (The honeybee)

Chapter 21 Dikundane di diwose (Blessings for everyone)

Chapter 22 Ukungu ya Mlima (Mountain Mist)

Chapter 23 Hadithi ya Wazee (History of the Elders)

Chapter 24 Kwaheri Kenya (Goodbye Kenya)

Endnotes

PREFACE

I AM WRITING THESE BOOKS as a kind of hard drive dump of my life. I am trying to be as honest as I can, but like any hard drive, there are corrupted areas of the memory. In fact, the writing of this memoir is precautionary or, perhaps, prophylactic. Who knows when the hard drive will crash or start developing irreparable glitches. I figure I have learned at least a few useful things in my life. However, my physical condition is such that I probably won’t have the opportunity to put some of those invaluable skills to work. Pilot said quod scripsi scripsi; I say quod facio facio. Meaning I have probably done about as much as I will be able to do. At the risk of being too pedantic, I will resort to the old saying; If you can’t do, teach; but if you can’t teach, write! Well, I have done, and I have taught, so now I write.

Returning to the computer theme, I am so impressed with the technological world we live in that I have liberally borrowed from it. Of course, I am not enamored of everything about the computer age, but it is an unmistakable boon to those wishing to write a book. I must confess that I have relied very heavily on Wikipedia.com. My first reason is that I am egalitarian; I think everyone should benefit from the internet like everyone benefited from the invention of the book. Guttenberg himself tried to control it, just like the monks had tried to control access to the hand written manuscripts before him.

My second reason for resorting to Wikipedia is because it is the perfect format. If I wanted to bring up a subject with which I think my readers are not familiar, why should I have to introduce the whole concept when Wikipedia does it so concisely? Every entry starts with a brief explanation, almost a definition, of the topic. If you need to go into greater detail, Wikipedia will usually have the current information. Maybe it is not absolutely verified like Encyclopedia Britannica; but have you ever read a 50 year old copy of these scholarly tomes? You will usually find a few outrageous fallacies within their hallowed pages. That is the nature of human knowledge, imperfect. At least with Wikipedia, you have people checking and correcting the information all the time. Besides, for the personal memoir of one insignificant individual, the world will not end if there is a mistake. Life is full of mistakes, and the ivory towered universities which are so disdainful of the Wikipedia, are themselves not above reproach.

At the risk of belaboring the point, this is a personal peeve of mine. I had an employer who jumped all over me for citing Wikipedia on a table of Pollinators of Agricultural Crops. Fine, but so far, that scientist has only been willing to provide a very small table of the pollination requirements of a very few crops that are grown in my State of Hawaii. Nor have I found comprehensive volume that covers such pollinator relationships in detail for a large range of agricultural crops. On the other hand, the knowledgeable people who wrote the table of crop pollinators for Wikipedia have gone to as many sources as they could find to build the table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated_by_bees

Of course all the information in the table is not verified to the absolute detail of experimentation. What Wikipedia does is take whatever information is known and what is not certain, is referenced to the source. What else this pollinator table does is save the average grower, who wants to know about his/her crop, the trouble of trying to track down the available information. If he/she wants to delve further into it, ma·zel tov! But if he/she just wants to know if the crop can produce without honeybees, at least Wikipedia has may have the answer Enough said on that topic.

This book does not follow a strictly chronological order. There is an element of free association. More accurately, there is the evolution of the thought process that led to this memoir. In the beginning I introduce you to the circumstance of the offspring of three generations of my seed and as many as four generations of the seed of my wives (of whom there were three). Then I go back to the generations before me and proceed forward in time through my life, with occasional excursions into the present. Some of the past is documented; some of it is purely from memory, as imperfect as that may be. I am at once trying to demonstrate how random it all was and yet, how predictable some of the outcomes of my actions and the actions of others have been. I won’t say the sins of the father are visited on the sons, but I will say that parental input can profoundly affect output, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

I also hope the reader will not object to the many footnotes regarding so many things that have occurred during my lifetime, and a few that occurred long before I was born. You can gloss over them if you just want a quick read, and in the e-book version these footnotes will largely be embedded as links to the URL where they originated. Nevertheless, I think there are fascinating tidbits of information that I either knew before I wrote, or discovered in the process of writing, Mea Culpa! For example, I knew almost nothing about my step-father’s experience in WWII. Using the information on his certificate of life membership in the Sixteenth Armored Division Association, I was able to find a trove of interesting and humorous information about the 64th Armored Infantry Battalion during their stay in Czechoslovakia.

I am a scientist of sorts, and find the natural world fascinating. You will find a lot of references to biological issues that I consider important. If it doesn’t fascinate you, you need not read the footnotes to understand the text.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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FIRST I WANT TO THANK my dear wife, Gretchen, who has been so patient and supportive through this whole process. It was she who preserved much of the information about our lives together, and she is most talented in the area of grammar and proper English. I also want to thank my son, James Kevin, and daughter. Colleen Malia, for not saying: Are you crazy, Dad? They have been supportive, even though they have both declined to read the memoir before it was completely finished. They have waited a long while. I also would like to acknowledge my dear Step-mother, Elizabeth Klungness (7/25/1924 - 9/21/2015), who kindly agreed to edit this book. She had been an editor and writer for many of her 91 years, and was still willing to help a neophyte.

CHAPTER 1

Happenstance?

His shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon.¹ English Standard Version (2001) Hosea 14:8

MY LIFE IS COMING TO a point where I must do some soul-searching. I need to determine what useful thing(s) I can do with my remaining time on earth. As in the movie Alfie, the questions of life are, "In the end, is Alfie happy, and above all, what’s it all about, then?"² These are two very difficult questions. Am I happy? And what is it all about? Is there a plan? Is there a reason? Is there meaning? Or is it all just Happenstance? Unbeknownst to me, just before I wrote this, a paper was published on the theory of happenstance.³ It pretty much reflects my life. Is that happenstance or what?

Now it is two days after Christmas 2008. I am with Gretchen, my first love and now, finally, my third wife. I have spent most of our free time watching television except when we went to dinner with friends. On Friday, after work, we went to a movie with the same couple. The movie was Marley and Me, which puts some perspective on life. Even though it was a dog’s life, it pointed out the importance of commitment on the part of the dog to the family… and I suppose the reverse. Our lives have been like that also. It’s all about family, but we are here in Hawaii, and the family is all thousands of miles away, on what we islanders nostalgically call the mainland. Gretchen’s daughter-in-law, Brandy, just gave birth to the newest member of the family, Rylen Cooper, 8 lbs. 4 oz., 21 inches. He was born in Portland, Oregon, on one of the coldest, snowiest winters, in over forty years. The family brought Rylen home on Christmas Eve. All’s well, except for the fact that the new parents don’t have jobs, and we just had to give them money to cover two months’ mortgage payments so that, hopefully, they will not lose their townhouse.

Gretchen and I have both been fortunate to have stay employed, and so has Brandy’s father. He and her mother have been there for the whole delivery. While it is bitter sweet for Gretchen to have missed the birth of both grandchildren, we feel very fortunate in this time and place, since so many people are losing their jobs in America as a whole. Times are uncertain in 2008… we are perilously close to a recession the magnitude of the Great Depression of 1929. We can only hope that the incoming administration of Barack H. Obama will save us from international collapse. I actually had to retire from the federal government where I worked for 8 years (with an additional two years of service in the Peace Corps). And Gretchen was cut back to three days per week at the law firm that employs her. Fortunately, my boss at the USDA went to bat for me and managed to get me re-hired at the University of Hawaii, working on the Varroa mite eradication project in Hilo. This is on the Big Island of Hawaii where we live. Gretchen was also able to get two days’ work with another lawyer, named Sandy. She was a member of the law office for which Gretchen has worked since she married me and moved to Hawaii. Sandy left the firm to take a job as a judge several years ago, and had since retired and gone back into private practice.⁴ Sandy was not able to employ Gretchen full-time but the extra hours help us make ends meet, and give Gretchen some diversity in her job, which had become quite routine. My return to working with honeybees has also been a new challenge for me, especially given my age (sixty) and arthritic condition. They say bee stings are good for arthritis… Lord, I hope that is true!

These are the mundane facts, but the circumstances, the strange chain of events that led us to where we are now, are begging me to contemplate. They are all part of what, at times, seems a random sequence of happenstance. Yet how different our lives, and the lives of many others, would be if they had not happened. There would not have been a Rylen Cooper (at least not this Rylen Cooper), since his father, Cameron Peer, would not exist. Just as my son, James, born of an African mother of the Taita tribe of Kenya, would not be here in America to witness the inauguration of the first African American President of the United States. Barack Obama himself was the son of a Kenyan father and a Caucasian mother from our State of Hawaii. Nor would there be James’s daughter, Taita, named for her grandmother’s tribe, and Gretchen’s granddaughter, Kayla (five), to be the two firstborn of that next generation. Nor would my now seventeen-year-old daughter be born to my second wife, Mary, who married me at graduate school. When I returned to UC Davis to pursue a master’s degree, it led to the breakup of my marriage to James’ mother, Charity. Later my daughter’s mother left me to marry one of her employees, whom, by the way, I believed to have been my friend. Nor would their son, Daniel, have been born a developmentally disabled child. Six children, all born of this strange sequence of events that started when Gretchen and I were in high school.

I was in a Franciscan minor seminary, and she was the student body historian of the local high school in our hometown. How then did I, the potential future priest, meet Gretchen, eventually my last wife of three? Our fathers worked at the post office together, and her father asked my stepfather if he wanted to bring our family to a musical comedy, for which Gretchen’s father was buying tickets. It was a simple request that would lead to such a long sequence of events and consequences.

Actually I should set the record straight since the reader will have long since been lost in the confusion if I do not explain. I met Gretchen when I was fifteen. Going to musical plays became a regular summertime activity of the Klungness and the Huffhines families. To be frank my lanky six foot two inch self was somewhat smitten with the perky, five-foot two, fifteen-year-old blond, when first she flitted down the stairs of the house her father had built. Nor was my mother unaware of the spark. In those high school years, she was more than willing to present this potential incendiary in my path to test the mettle of my vocation. She went so far as to bring Gretchen to Visiting Days at the seminary during the school year. This happened whenever we were planning an outing to some play or concert. I think she enjoyed Gretchen’s company and liked mothering her, since she had to give away her only daughters for adoption. But I am sure she was not unaware of the obvious chemistry between her surrogate daughter and her also-illegitimate son. In our junior and senior years during summer vacation, Gretchen and I often went on dates together; all innocently, of course. The rationalization was that it is better to test the waters to be surer of one’s intentions when embarking on such a permanent decision as the priesthood. By the time I had entered college, my mother had given up the concept of grandchildren and resigned herself to the fact that I was on the road to the Franciscan priesthood. To this day, I hope that my decision to leave the seminary and become engaged to Gretchen was not affected by the very strong influence of my mother…. if so, the influence obviously had the reverse effect of my mother’s intentions. Of course, there was plenty of communication going on between Gretchen and me before the fateful decision was made. The late Fr. Benedict, the Dean of Students at San Luis Rey seminary, could have attested to our communication because he was reading and commenting. This included spelling corrections and advice, in my letters to and from Gretchen. Like a teacher grading papers he would fit his precise script in the margins in bold red. She likes to remember that Fr. Ben once wrote, You didn’t answer her question. She deserves an honest answer.

I have to beg some tolerance from you, the reader, at this point. As you may have noticed, my thoughts are rather free flowing as I gather the threads of history from my mind. In this first chapter, you may find the linkages confusing, and the connections thin. Try to understand that dredging up a life from 60 years of synapses is not always an orderly stream of consciousness. I can promise one thing, I will try to make it entertaining.

Well, Gretchen got her answer in the winter of 1967. She had already enrolled in the University of Washington, but she was home on Christmas vacation when I came home from San Luis Rey for the last time. Unbeknownst to Gretchen, I had previously broached the subject with her father by asking if I could marry her,

There was already tension in my parents’ little cottage on the Toutle River. But the sparks flew when I stayed out until 2 AM with Gretchen in my parents’ only car. It was before cell phones, and my parents were worried sick. My dilemma was that Gretchen was bawling because she didn’t want to go back to the University of Washington without me. Needless to say, she did. Equally obvious was the reaction of my parents…. perhaps a bit severe, but very effective.

The next day, my parents took me and my baggage to a boarding house in the mill district of the logging town built by R. A. Long (Longview). I am sure the boarding house was one of the first structures built in the 1920’s, and some of its residents were probably some of the first workers hired at Long Bell mill. One could not call it a flop house, but then it was not an upscale retirement residence either. The price was certainly manageable, even though I had neither job nor transportation. After one week, I moved to a boarding house more in the center of town, about half way in between Lower Columbia College, where I enrolled, and Pietro’s Pizza Parlor, where I had managed to land a job. Those were long cold walks in the wet winter of ‘67, but definitely character building and enhancing to the long lean look that I had acquired from the Spartan meals at the minor seminary. My only paid meal of the day was a $1.00 breakfast at the Longview Café. I took my dinner at Pietro’s Pizza Parlor, where Jack Troupe would let each of the crew make his own medium pizza for their lunch break. Needless to say, these pizzas would more properly be called montagna. My toppings were often three cheeses, peperoni, sausage, salami, Canadian bacon, olives, sliced bell pepper and tomato, topped with pineapple. Definitely all the food groups! I think I ate all of one meal at the boarding house; I believe it was stuffed bell peppers. Because of my classes and work schedule, I could never make the meal hours at the boarding house again.

Eventually, the owner agreed to charge me only for the room. It was a little room, but it was clean and it was near the bathroom with shower down the hall. The second story window looked out on the bare branches of an apple tree, and my writing table looked out on the gray streets of the gray town of Longview with lingering odor of the several pulp mills that fired the engines of commerce in that berg. It was a nostalgic, painful, yet hopeful time for me. I had no diversions, so I resorted to writing things like:

Shoo-splash round rubber wheels roll

While reminiscing I squat sit

Upon this chair within my niche

And wondering, wish and watch below

Wet wandering rubber wheels go.

I do dearly! dread I say it,

Heard by her who might waylay it.

Yet ‘tis true, nor can be altered;

Hope, I do, it bloomed and altar-ed!

My fondest memory of that winter was when I was writing a letter to Gretchen one day. I realized that flower buds on the apple tree were beginning to break open. It was probably my most profound realization of the promise of spring in my lifetime. I might have actually penned a poem, but I have no idea whether it still exists. The memory, however, has never left me. I ran across something I had written in my freshman year at the major Seminary, which may reflect the feelings I felt at seeing the buds bursting:

There’s something in the new growth,

That’s greater that the full growth.

The hope in sunlit new growth

Is seven times profound.

Nature saw them kind and gentle

Her do I see might unsettled.

To them t’was beauty fair and bright.

To me ‘n’august and powerful sight.

Later I wrote something in a similar vein:

Seasons

When silver dew upon the green grass glitters

When hoary frost the spires of sunlight splinters

When wet mist massed on weeping oak trees trickle

When warm wind’s breath through rocky rapids ripples.

It really did represent a turning point for me. I had done reasonably well in my coursework at Lower Columbia College. I think by that time I had advanced to a job at the Weyerhaeuser plywood plant making a whopping $3 per hour. I had previously made a few cents more in my summer jobs at the pulp mill. I was scheming to get back to that mill for the summer, particularly because they offered overtime. The dehumanizing monotony of being a drier sheet-feeder definitely did not hold the glamour and adventure of being a Lime Kiln Helper. One might be called from one’s regular rounds of cleaning stacks and mud spills, to help open a stack washer which had just been shut down. Or even more glorious, double-time pay for mining the lime rings out of the kiln that had been shut down for Independence Day weekend. Although the dust was hot, dry and caustic, it was far superior to hosing out a liquor tank where every drop of alkaline water dripping from your nor’wester could burn your skin.

I wrote a description of my pulp mill experience for a freshman English class at San Luis Rey Seminary. May I take the liberty to include it, since Fr. Benedict seemed to appreciate it enough to read it aloud in class?

Sounds of Summer

The contents of this composition may strike you as somewhat sensual, and indeed they are, because the theme, the topic, and the concern of this paper are the realm of sensible noise. As a sort of reaction against the attempt of this school to abolish all forms of clatter, I would like to lose myself, and you, in a short contemplation of the whole wonderfully various world of sound, especially the one which I will re-enter this summer.

[The composition included descriptions of the sound of the bus, and the woods, but I leave these out and proceed to the sounds of the mill]

The Mill

The digesters’ whoosh shatters the hum and grind and clatter and clunk of the pulp log chipper with a rushing stream of steam. A hissing shroud of steam softens the factory’s loud pounding roar. But it’s still deafening thunder throbs with the rush of red blood, as I pass on my way to work.

At the door of the kiln room, the sputter of small valves give way to the sonorous symphony of intoning electrical drones set to the beat of laboriously slow rolling ovens of cylindrical brick.

From the rear comes the monotonous scrape of the slaker-trough rake; there where the gyro-pumps rhythm-less whir runs in on the strident clang of the grinding trunnions that work their way up, then hammer fall, bang!

Farther still, at the five hundred foot length of the kiln, the hollow roar of a draft-tunnel blower rattles its bolts on a rapid unbalanced vibration.

And at the extreme, screams of steam, sprayed on the white-hot walls of the liquor-solution furnace, reinforces this acoustical combat.

San Luis Rey Seminary 1966

Still these jobs paid the bills…. Gretchen was coming home for the summer… The campus was in bloom… hope for the future was in the very sun-warmed air. I was so inspired that spring that I wrote a poem to Gretchen,

To one so fair her will-wisp hair

Can greet gold sun without regret;

Nor blush, but billow bubbling joy

And belle bright blue-eyed beauty blessed.

Light heart that’s heaven’s helpless coal

Whose warmly tender radiant glow

Un-nights the God-light. Gretchen grow!

How Gret the wonders where God blows

Te, tinder-fire of all-in-compass kindled love.

If I had to give a musical background to this picture of my youth, I think it would have to be Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances.

The wistful, hopeful reveries of youth often have to give way to the realities of life. The debate of the summer was whether I would follow my original plan of going to Washington State College to pursue agriculture, or meld into Gretchen’s plan and attend the University of Washington. With me pursuing… oh, I don’t know, maybe microbiology. Dr. Helms had made the subject seem quite palatable, albeit not within the genetic inclination of my Irish sodbuster heritage. Needless to say, Gretchen won! Fall quarter would find me lost in Padelford Hall trying to apply for my classes.

May I digress slightly to describe my emotional state at this juncture? Padelford was a very modern building; a confusing labyrinth that I am sure was designed to weed out the inferior mice that could not negotiate the maze. Needless to say, I ended up in the ladies’ restroom. There were so many letters and numbers on the door that only three letters registered in my mind, men. I only realized I had entered forbidden territory when a woman entered the rest room only to quickly dart out the door again upon seeing me there. This then explained why there were no urinals. Briefly I had thought that perhaps the educated male intelligencia were required to urinate while sitting down (which does, in fact, make microbiological sense since science has discovered how messy the process of vertical urination is). Amazing to myself, I did actually manage to register at the University of Washington. And no, science has not yet convinced the male population to pee sitting down. Even though, as I had learned in later years, Gretchen’s mother had convinced her husband to sit when relieving himself in the family bathroom. Considering that most wives cannot convince their husbands to put the toilet lid down, this power that Jana had over her husband, Bob, may have explained why they were married for 48 years. And they would have made 50 plus if he had not succumbed to Parkinson’s disease. Which is another ironic twist of fate, because there was no one man who had more joie de vivre than Robert Huffhines.

My discussion with my advisor was equally daunting. Some child genius in the newly exploding field of genetic engineering, he was sure that I needed to quickly get up to speed. So he enrolled me in classes of genetics, bacteriology, organic chemistry and algebra. One of the Teaching Assistants in Bacteriology Lab was herself only 17; the next generation of whiz kids in that department. With labs, I had a total of 24 classroom hours. This was a lot for liberal-arts major, whose chemistry background at the major seminary consisted largely of a study of the cosmology of Teilhard de Chardin. Needless to say, in addition to maintaining a job and a girlfriend, I got a 1.8 GPA that quarter. Interestingly, Gretchen did exceptionally well that quarter. Better than she had in previous quarters, when she was alone in the daunting world of higher education. Subsequently I changed departments to Botany, a gentile old school, and made sure to soften my science-class load each quarter with a philosophy class.

That summer I had also purchased, with all my overtime pay, my first car. Four hundred hard-earned dollars for a 1960 aqua blue Chevrolet Corvair. I was so proud of it, and it rode like a dream. There was a reason for that… the independent suspension, before they learned about torsion bars, allowed the wheels to splay in and out with every bump… thus efficiently wearing the tire into a round donut in record time. I quickly learned the price of mobility… in tires, ball joints, shocks, clutches and eventually a complete engine overhaul. The mechanic assured me, when he had finished the overhaul, that there were a number of pieces of metal and a small pyramid of nuts and bolts that were absolutely unnecessary to the performance of this aeronautic engineering marvel. Strangely enough, I did not have any major problems with the Corvair after that. If I had the good sense to have put it into storage when I left for the Peace Corps, I might have owned a valuable piece of automotive history. Instead I signed the Corvair over to a Christian half way house in Ballard. As it turned out, I received a subpoena from the Chicago Court while I was in Kenya, because the Corvair had been used in a crime. The Judge let me off the hook with my lame explanation of being half way around the world in Peace Corps at the time of the crime. I don’t know if the registration of the car was ever changed. Maybe my blue baby died in the crime? I’ll never know.

But I fear that I have digressed again. The Peace Corps gig requires considerable explanation, especially since it was such a seminal event to my relationship with Gretchen.

Rather than pursue the details of ancient history at this early juncture, let’s return to the contemplation of the curious and unfathomable fact of where we find ourselves today. On New Year’s Day 2009, my daughter (then 17) called to say that she had a marginally enjoyable time with her Facebook friend from Wisconsin. He had driven all the way to Maryland in rather inclement weather to bring in the New Year with her. Of course, when I had called New Year’s Eve, only to find that her stepfather did not know where she was, and that her mother was still visiting her own mother in San Francisco, my 20th century brain (raised on Father Knows Best⁵) went wild! I maintained my sardonic calm while discussing with my alter ego and former friend (Colleen’s stepfather). My forced composure was because my alarm at the way Colleen has been raised in Maryland has caused considerable consternation in previous worrisome incidents. In spite of my restrained demeanor, it must have started some wheels turning, because my daughter admitted, in her recent phone call that she was probably in serious trouble with her custodial parents. I tried lamely to explain that any parent would be concerned! A web-cam pal can have a lot of connotations in the 21st century. The Badger had taken a hotel room in Maryland (but, in fact, they ended up staying with Colleen’s parents) of course, I did not know that at the time. This is coming from a 17 year old talking about a 20 year old that she only knew from a year-long conversation by web-cam. O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t! (The Tempest by William Shakespeare).

Interestingly, my impression was that Colleen was not as pleased with this Badger as she had hoped, and that she perhaps had learned lessons from her previous youthful romances. Perhaps the Tao of Steve⁶ had sunk in after my repeated reference to the importance of maintaining objectivity (translation: playing hard to get). Of course, I speculated that the Badger may not have been as satisfied with his marathon trip to the heart beat of the country, particularly since they didn’t even find a decent fireworks display… and by implication, it was not party on in Maryland. Of course, I am interpreting this all from Colleen’s telephone tone of voice, and I will be the first to admit that I am not the most astute father in history. I may be deluding myself. Perhaps there will be the tearful phone call next week… you know, the woe is me, will I ever find love? conversation. At least there has not been the Do you know what your daughter has done now? phone call from my Ex. I think the latter has given up threatening to try to send Colleen to live with me if she doesn’t straighten up and fly right. Not that I would be displeased to have Colleen come back to Hawaii to go to College. But Mary, her mother, has made Colleen what she is, and one thing she has become is determined to stay with her friends and her life in Maryland.

Maybe young people really are more mature at a younger age these days. Maybe they have to grow up sooner, because they certainly can’t rely on their parents to teach them good sense. Lord knows, we have screwed up our lives enough, and the kids are generally the collateral damage. Yet, here they are, trying to struggle through life, just as we did. Somehow, if we look hard enough, we can see a pattern, a hope, a determination, a will to survive. Albeit so, that survival instinct seems more tenuous in today’s youth than we remember from our youth. We had our worries and our problems, but the prospects of life were not nearly as formidable as what young people face today. Maybe if we went back two or three generations to war time or depression, those young people may have had as much to be concerned about as our kids do. But they did not have the speed and the pressure and the technology that have made living so much more tenuous. I sometimes like to watch the old movies, because they let us peer into the trappings of a more innocent age. Of course, there have always been the Mr. Potter’s of It’s a Wonderful Life, but there was also the community and the connections that sustained the working class in spite of the difficult times. You knew your neighbors, and your boss might have been nice enough to keep you on the payroll in spite of the difficult times. My mother remembered that the logging company kept her father and the other employees on the payroll even when the demand for lumber was depressed. Then you managed the hard times by reducing the work hours, not firing all the unessential staff. Of course, many did lose their jobs, but I don’t think it was as cold hearted as it is today. Or was it? There are a few bright lights, like FEDEX, whose management had, by this date of writing, determined to cut back hours, not employees. But in light of the financial crisis of 2008, and seeing that is largely the fault of greed in high places, it is not hard to understand that the young people wish they could just step out of this world and form a different world that moves to a different drum… a slower, more thought provoking, more civil beat…. that of a heart and not a machine.

Still, as a father, I have to pray that another unexpected addition to the generations of my seed is not conceived. It may happen, in due time, but hopefully with a good foundation and love. My daughter is beautiful (which reminds me I failed to take advantage of the New Year’s Day sale of her lovely graduation pictures), but she does not realize just how much she makes me proud. She is also talented, and I fully expect that she will come around to realizing that her ability to create in pencil, ink and paint could make her future. She had received an inordinate amount of encouragement towards education, to which her reaction has been contrary. Still, I cannot let myself think that she will not figure it out and find her niche in this highly competitive, but talent-loving society.

Likewise, my son James, who has lived a much more challenging life than Colleen, is also finding his love of knowledge and books. He realizes that he is underutilized in his un-chosen profession, even though he is very skilled at what he does. He fights fire for the forest service, which he came to as a consequence of happenstance. The school of hard knocks, so to speak, and 10 years of fire fighting has only recently earned him a permanent seasonal position on the Olympic National Forest. But his supervisors have used his talent, his ability to work with and lead diverse and sometime devious personalities. And he is a good teacher. Master Sawyer at age 33, he wields the power of good training like he wields a 32 inch bar, always spiced with anecdotes from a life of unsought adventures. I would go into more details about my rather impressive son, but I reserve for him the right to tell his own story. And I think someday he will. He certainly has no trouble maintaining my attention when we have the rare opportunity to share a starlight evening and a beer. I think he has a similar bard-like effect on a lot of people he has encountered in his exploits.

I received another phone call this New Year’s Eve. It lasted for 2 hours! We were waiting to go to the homecoming party of Mae Kaler, a Native American friend, who had been the daycare giver for my daughter, and, in my opinion, the person who had the most positive influence on my daughter’s development. How different my daughter’s life would have been if her mother had not taken her to Maryland. If, instead, she had let Colleen grow up in Mae land with a circle of friends and a community culture that has produced a generation of balanced, happy, hopeful young people with none of the angst of most of this urban generation. Those preschoolers are now respectively a veterinary professor at Cornell, a dolphin protector, an architect, a Natural Foods store manager, a US marine/cowboy (paniolo style), and more good things to come. And at the center of that loving community was, and still is Mae. I haven’t even mentioned the many exchange students that she introduced to life in Hawaii. If I think about my limited sphere of influence on the lives of generations, by comparison, she is a tidal wave of the Great Spirit.

Still, this pre-party phone call was from the oldest son of my first wife. Edward was the son of Charity Mshoi and a father whom Ed never knew. He was not yet a teenager, living with his grandmother, when Charity came to work for me at the County Council Hotel and Dance Hall in Taita Hills. I had not been in Taita long when one of the women, who worked at the hotel, told me that she had a friend that wanted to take English lessons. She had 5 children and had no job except to help her mother farm their small plot of land. That land was the legacy of the Kiwinda family. Reverend Jeremiah Kiwinda was the famous link in this family, because he was the first African to be ordained to the Anglican priesthood, and had gone on to become the bishop of his people. Edward was regaling me, in this phone call, with stories of the family. One story was that Desmond Tutu, as well as many important Africans from all over the world had come to the funeral of his 104 year old grandmother. That was all because of the century of connections between the Kiwinda family and the development of Taita and Kenya, as a whole. Because the Taita people had influence throughout Kenya, being early converts to Christianity, they had proven themselves to be an agreeable and hard-working people who moved into important positions of government and education during and after independence from Britain.

What Edward was trying to tell me was this. The daring step that his mother had taken to fall in love with me, and later follow me to America and marry me, had itself had a profound impact on Taita. I was thinking only of the impact on the 5 children and one grandchild that I had somehow managed to bring to Washington State. He was talking about all the people in Taita who followed suit. Cousins, acquaintances and sometimes strangers who knew that uneducated Charity had gone to America; if she could make it, perhaps others could succeed outside Taita as well. Ed was calling from the home of a cousin who had followed their lead, came to Washington, found employment and was even able to buy a house. He was telling me of Africans who had gone to Europe and Russia, and elsewhere. This was rather a surprise to me. I have worried a lot about the 5 children and James’ nephew, Teddy (more like James’ brother than his nephew). This is because after Charity and I broke up, I really wasn’t sure what was happening with the kids. As it turns out, Ed has done quite well in business, and the next oldest brother earned an accountant degree and is working at Sylvania Co. Ed’s nephew, Teddy, had worked for years with Ross, Inc. but has recently enrolled in that US Army and is posted to Bahrain. His niece has worked as a missionary teacher in Kenya, but her mother, who was a trained nurse when she came to America, has left that profession, and married and gave birth to several more children. Charity’s youngest daughter and her three children have struggled with the hardships of Hilltop life, as did my own son, James. Fortunately James has come out of the Afro-American enclave of Tacoma. In fact, only one of Charity’s sons has not had financial success. But that son started with a physical disadvantage. When I met Charity he could not walk. Between his oldest sister’s and my efforts, we managed to get Sam to a hospital and to a point where he could walk. Nevertheless he has remained partially disabled. Fortunately, he is apparently a fairly content individual now. He lives with his mother, and, according to Ed, has become like the philosopher of the family. I also think the other sons are also happy that he is there to help Charity (who has never remarried). The brothers all contribute what they can to supporting Charity and Sam. After all, this is the African way, and although life in America has strained the bonds of family, for the most part they have not broken completely. Charity, of course, remains the main glue that holds them with that mystical power of Mau (‘mother’ in the language of the Wadawida). That is one thing that can only be understood by living with the people of Africa.

So I come away, from the conversation with Ed, believing that perhaps it has all been for the good… or, at least, more good than bad. Speaking to my daughter again the day after New Year’s, also confirms my sometimes tenuous belief that, somehow, things may work out for the better. She and her friend from Wisconsin were enjoying their trips through the museums of DC, and she sounded happier than she has for some time. I also called her mother, who confirmed that the Badger seems like a nice guy, although she also suspects that the friendship is just that. Not a thing to be feared, but an indication that there is a certain measure of maturity in my daughter who marches to the beat of her own proverbial drummer.

My son James also called, and made me feel very comfortable about the New Year. He had spent it with his daughter in the chalet of his firefighter-brother and his professor wife. James made it sound as though they all enjoyed themselves, even though my son faces financial difficulties and does not really have a home in which to lie his head or entertain his daughter. I guess the whole group went back to visit my granddaughter’s grandmother, which in itself is a positive sign after the unsettled breakup between James and Tammy. Yes, perhaps things will work out… perhaps we have a future in this world. After all, we all have our health, we are all sensible people and we can weather the storms that are certain to come our way.

I see that I have covered a lot of territory and a lot of years in these few pages. There is much filling-in to be done. So, I am taking that advice that I have given my children for so many years, write it down. Surprisingly, Gretchen’s mother and my grandfather were journalists. No, not the type that work for newspapers. They were journalists in the old fashioned sense of those who kept a journal all of their lives. I only have a fragment of my grandfather’s journal, although my aunt and cousins still have his logs that date back to before the First World War. Gretchen’s mother’s journals go back to, at least, her teen years and Gretchen does have those. Ironically, both journals are the most un-emotive and manner-of-factual record of their two lives. Jana’s entry upon the day of Gretchen’s birth was Gretchen was born. She weighed 6 lb. 8 oz. My grandfather’s journal always contained the weather and other mundane details, although he would record visits of and to people and places. The most emotive thing that I could find in the volumes of his journal (that I possess) is about me. I visited him just before departing for the Peace Corps. I was hitch hiking with two Christian acquaintances of mine … we were headed to California, where I was planning to visit my mother for the last time before I went to Africa. Gretchen and I had ended our engagement, and I was getting very involved with the Pentecostal movement. My grandfather was not a religious man, but he was not an agnostic or an atheist. He was not inclined to attach himself to any religion although he generally respected the belief of others. However, in this instance, he wrote, I think Mike is on the wrong track. He would never have said anything to me, of course, but given all the things that have happened since, perhaps he should have.

But such disclosiveness was not the way of either my grandfather or Gretchen’s mother, Jana. In fact, if they might have had time to know each other, they probably would have liked each other. They were sort of kindred souls. Both were thoughtful, relatively quiet, slow to judge, but usually right-on with their judgments. Perhaps Gretchen and I would do well to go back to their rather dry journals, since they are both deceased…. we might find out some things we had missed in our youth.. Gretchen says her parents were both opposed to her first marriage (not to me), but had concluded it was better not to interfere, lest Gretchen might later blame them. Albeit, her father did go around before the wedding singing a most telling song from the musical I Do! I Do! The chorus was, my daughter is marrying an idiot! How can she stoop so low?

My Grandfather liked Gretchen, and it was probably his advice that brought me out of the seminary, although I am sure he would not have wanted to be responsible. As he said, I don’t give advice. When I asked him what he thought about my growing affection for Gretchen in my senior year of high school, he said If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. I find myself delivering such tried-and-true proverbial jewels of wisdom to my children all the time. Although, at that time, I thought it was pretty cryptic non-advice. I am sure his approval of Gretchen is also why he wrote that in his journal. I was off course (Gretchen and I had separated by then). He did not come to my first wedding to Charity, probably because his second wife, Eva, was in advancing stages of Alzheimer’s disease. However, he and his last wife, Josephine (we called her Josie), did come to my second marriage to Mary. He gave no indication of displeasure with Mary, but he nearly died on the spot. The Unitarian Church we had rented was built with a one story meeting hall and a sanctuary with a high ceiling that was shaped like the inside of Noah’s ark. The ceremony was delayed and the temperature was rising rapidly in the 100+ degree heat of the Central Valley. The sanctuary was cool, but the windows would not open in the meeting hall. So everyone was sweltering, and Pat, Mary’s father, himself an alcoholic of many years, had busted open the many cases of Champagne. He was pouring glasses liberally. My grandfather had only tasted his first wine that spring, on the Princess Marguerite cruise to Victoria, Canada, where Josephine and he were celebrating their honeymoon. Being a jovial and loveable pair, the captain had insisted that they dine with him at every supper, and, of course, to refuse the wine would have been impolite. But this wedding to Mary was no cruise, and there was no water to drink, as the wedding caterers had not arrived. So my grandfather, in his late 80’s, in a full suit, was trying to quench his thirst with Champagne, with near lethal consequences. But being of sturdy lumberjack stock, he managed to make it through the day.

My mother, on the other hand, was not so quiet, having had a few too many bubblies at the behest of Mary’s father. She was rather obnoxious; if not to Mary, certainly to her parents, and particularly to my swarthy Best Man from Bangalore. When Jairus tried to deliver the toast, she kept interrupting him. Still, how can you expect to tell a young… well not so young… couple that they should call the whole thing off, when you really don’t approve of this secular wedding to your once-to-be-priest son? Of course, Fr. Carl, the priest for whom my mother was the rectory housekeeper, and who had baptized both my mother and me, had the good sense to stay home that day!

Nevertheless, had it not been for my second marriage, there would not be a Colleen Malia, born on the Island of Kauai in December of 1991. And now she is a few months away from graduating from High School, and all ready to enroll in college. Although her mother moved her away from me when she was only five, I am probably more attached to her than to any of my children by birth and marriage. My son and I are becoming closer as he has matured, but our relationship had to heal the wound of a six year old child, who believed that he was abandoned by his father. Whereas, in the case of Colleen, I don’t think she has ever thought that I had abandoned her. Perhaps as she becomes an adult, she will realize that I have been less than a pillar of support, but I think she knows that I love her. James, I believe, has forgiven me for not being there. Actually, I think James has some appreciation for the effort my second wife, Mary, and I made to bring him to Davis and expose him to the world of educated white folk. He particularly appreciated the advice and interest of Mary’s professor father, Pat Purcell. Colleen, on the other hand, always knew that she was wanted for summers in Hawaii, and it has only been in her late teens that she has found the concept of summers in Hawaii as an obstacle to her life and friendships in Maryland.

So that is a passing overview of my life. I think I have mentioned most of the critically important people in my life. Admittedly, from the reader’s perspective, at this point, it is like looking at the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that was just poured out on the table. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, happenstance describes my life. I suppose you could say that about anyone’s life. Even a life as directed as our newly elected President Obama. Had his father not returned to Kenya, had his mother not moved to Indonesia, had he not applied to Harvard, had he not interned at the law firm where Michelle Vaughn Robinson worked, would he have become the President of the United States?

For example, I met a man in Kenya who was catching honeybee swarms in Taita Hills. He was a retired agriculture extension agent from Colorado who had been invited by the Near East Foundation to work on a grant in Mombasa. He turned down the first invitation he received, because his wife Mary said, You just retired! Then why would you want to run off to a foreign country to work? However, when the Foundation invited him again one year later, he told his wife, Mary, we have been married for 40 years, but I am going to Kenya. You are welcome to come. And she did, and found useful work at the Coast Province. He built two rice irrigation schemes on the Tana River. He also decided that they didn’t have enough honeybees to pollinate the fruit trees at the Mtwapa Coastal Research Station. That is why he was catching swarms in Taita Hills. If I had never met him at the public market in Wundanyi, I probably would have never become interested in honeybees. As it happened, I began to help the white haired powerhouse of a man, Floyde Moon, and that led to the development of a course for beekeepers in Taita. It is also what led to my attending Univ. of California at Davis, which had been recommended highly by Dr. Gordon Townsend, Chairman of the Bee Biology Department at the Univ. of Guelf, Canada. Because of my work with Mr. Moon, I volunteered to help Dr. M. V. Smith collect pollen samples for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Dr. Townsend headed the CIDA project and had sent Dr. Smith to Kenya to start a beekeeping development project.

I would probably have continued to help the project, but I received a draft notice from the military and had to leave Kenya. On my journey, returning from Kenya, I visited Dr. Townsend at Guelf, thinking that I might be re-enlisting to work for the Peace Corps at the Mtwapa Research station. When I failed my military induction physical, and tried to reenlist in the Peace Corps, I was not allowed to return to PC Kenya because the Nixon administration chopped the Peace Corps budget. So I did pursue apiculture studies at UC Davis, after I worked five months for a bee breeder in California. Eventually I obtained a master’s degree in International Agricultural Development. My later employment took me into other areas of science, although I never got closer to overseas than Hawaii. Unfortunately, I did nothing with honeybees for the next 36 years. Now, at age 61, I am again working on a government project trying to stop the spread of varroa mites in the honeybee population of the Island of Hawaii. The strategy was to kill all the colonies of honeybees within a 5 mile radius of the spot where mites were first detected. Equally unfortunate, the first thing that I did on the project was to recommend that they stop using a micro-encapsulated pesticide to try to bait and kill the honeybee colonies infested with Varroa mite. As it turned out, my master’s thesis topic was the digestion of pollen in the intestine of honeybees. This was consequential, because bees have an organ in their stomach called the proventriculus. It is basically a valve that moves in and out of the honey crop (the bee’s stomach) and its function is to move pollen from the crop into the lower intestine of the bee. Microencapsulated pesticides are about the same size as small pollen grains, Therefore, instead of being regurgitated at the hive and passed around the colony, the pesticide was being concentrated in the bowels of the foraging bees. Of course, the foragers eventually died, but the poison did not have much impact on the colony itself. My apiculture training finally came into play thirty-five years later... killing bees. Was it pure happenstance? Unfortunately, I also discovered the mite infestation in four hives, outside the eradication zone radius of 5 miles. That may be the straw that broke the camel’s back. The State Department of Agriculture decided to stop the eradication program. The opportunity to be the first people in the United States to stop the spread of Varroa mite disappeared in a puff of my smoker.

This is the story of my life… one serendipitous or unpropitious twist after another; to what end I will probably never know until I lie on my deathbed… if even then?

CHAPTER 2

The Family in Oregon

Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness and truth; who keeps loving kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations. English Standard Version (2001) Exodus 34:6-7

ONE CANNOT REALLY UNDERSTAND THE intricacy of any human being without knowing something about how that person was born and raised. Sometimes that requires knowing more about the family history of the person. Therefore I start this narrative as far back as I can remember. There are large holes in my knowledge because there were not that many members of the family that were willing to speak freely, even if I had had the time or the interest to ask. Like my grandfather’s journal, his side of the family

Reviews for Happenstance

[Lester M. Klungness · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reviews


TITLE INFORMATION
HAPPENSTANCE
Lester Fisher
AuthorHouse (684 pp.)
$42.99 hardcover, $28.99 paperback, $2.99 e-book
ISBN: 978-1-66553-599-1
September 7, 2021

BOOK REVIEW by KIRKUS Book Reviews

In this debut memoir, a man recounts his loves and experiences as a young seminarian and later a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa.

Fisher, who goes by Mike Klungness (his middle name and stepfather’s surname) in his book, opens with a “passing overview” of his life. Readers discover that the 60-something has children and that his third (and current) wife is his first love, whom he met when they were teens. Then the author focuses on Klungness’ intricate journey. He was born in 1947 to a single mother who moved to Washington state after she married. Roman Catholic school led to his enrollment in St. Francis Seminary. Though he was quickly smitten with neighbor Gretchen Huffhines, his studies to be a priest meant they would stay merely friends. Klungness eventually left the seminary, hoping to walk down the aisle with Huffhines. But as the Vietnam War raged, he felt he had few options beyond applying to the Peace Corps. He went to his Kenya assignment alone and immersed himself in an entirely new culture, all while racial unrest unsettled his home country. He also fell for Charity Mshoi, a mother of three young children who became his common-law wife. Once his tour ended, he planned to bring his new family to the States. Despite the work’s 672-page length and Fisher’s overview that takes readers into the 21st century, the memoir ends in the early ’70s. A sequel will follow. The author includes memorable details in this first installment, from Africa’s vast landscape and local foods to the treatment for the atrophied leg of Mshoi’s son. There’s a lively focus on many of the people in Klungness’ life, such as his mother, and though this autobiography occasionally hops around decades, it’s never confusing. Fisher enriches his book with snippets of other sources, like newspaper articles, as well as Klungness’ written correspondence with Huffhines and her mom Jana’s delightfully pithy journal entries. The author moreover adds copious photographs. Only some of them are Fisher’s own pictures—and those are the most rewarding.

An absorbing personal account of life’s unpredictable turns.