He is of two minds – maybe three or more – about his father. Mark Ludlow, my new first cousin, contends that he can’t be angry about a man he can’t remember, the deadbeat who just disappeared without a word and stayed that way. At the same time, he likes saying (like me) that he is of Norwegian descent (from his dad) and (like me) he wears genes that are more German and English than Norski. But he expresses profound regret that he grew up without knowing anything about the responsibilities, obligations and, yes, the joys of fatherhood.
Mark was a toddler 60 years ago when Frederick (Fritz) Ludlow cleaned out the bank account, took the family car (not paid for) and left his wife, Prissie, to rear Mark and his elder sister, Karen. Fritz was the elder brother of my father, John, when they grew up in Eugene and later in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. My father said Fritz and his younger brother, Ernest (Buzz), bullied him so mercilessly that in later life he would have nothing to do with them. With a family reputation of high intelligence, arrogance and dishonesty, Fritz was drafted into the Army in World War II. (Mark says his dad was dishonorably discharged.) He married a beautiful woman, Prissie, and settled down in her home town, Beatice (be-ATT-riss), Nebraska, where he fathered Karen and Mark, ran up unpaid bills and took off.
Mark and Karen grew up without knowing much of anything about Fritz’s family background. At the same time, my brothers and I never knew that we had two first cousins, Karen and Mark. Things would have stayed that way forever but for a note in the genealogical website Ancestry.com, where Karen had posted a note that asked if anyone could supply information about her father, Frederick Braastad Ludlow.
I saw her note two years later while doing research on my father’s family. I wrote to Karen, who
came to visit us in San Francisco, but not until now did I meet Mark Elliott Ludlow (his middle name, by eerie coincidence, was chosen by my granddaughter, Jenna Ludlow, for my great-granddaughter, Elliot). (At left, Lynn and Mark.)With his wife, Patricia, Mark had moved three years ago from Astoria, Oregon, to Olympia, Washington, where he is an engineer involved in one fascinating enterprise after another. He had just returned from Shanghai, and he travels around the world so regularly that he regards his apartment in Lacey, a suburb of Olympia, without affection. Next: Iceland in the dead of winter.
He arrived with armloads of food for the campers from San Francisco. He didn’t spend much time on personal history (three marriages, two divorces, three grown children) but dived instead into conversation about higher education (he’s skeptical about the qualifications of any professor who hasn’t slept under a bridge, as he has) and the future of newspapers (he reads three or more but asserts, with some anger at the bozo publishers who have allowed the daily press to become dinosaurs, that a new model for the serious news media must somehow emerge from the internet). We talked until 2:30 a.m., cousins trying to make up for what is, in a very literal sense, lost time.
We hope to visit Karen next week at her organic farm in northwest Minnesota with the sense that at last we have healed some of the damage inflicted by a father without conscience. But Mark said something that made me realize that the story isn’t done. He found out that Fritz had died in Santa Rosa (I think he said it was in 1965), and that his father may have remarried and started another family after he abandoned the first one. If so, we have another set of long-lost first cousins to track down. I hope the search will produce more treasures.
Notes from Margo:
We expected rain in the rainforest, and we got it – a little. And we expected rain as we crossed the Cascades, and we got a bit there, too. But the first torrential, continuing downpour hit us as
we went into the reputedly dry section of Washington – the eastern half. The gentle rolling hills around us were contoured with the burnt gold furrow lines of autumn in dry ranchlands. The cloudscape read differently. Showing rain in the distance, clouds played with us all day with off and on showers, and amazing displays in the sky -- dark blobs and sweeping arcs of light gray. Then around nightfall, as we were looking for our campsite, the deluge hit. We got lost in Pasco. Or was it Kennewick or Richland? In the Tri-Cities region, it was hard to tell. We crossed the Columbia River, then the Snake, then the Snake again. Or was it the Columbia? And then suddenly, in the rainy darkness, we were on a floodlit suspension bridge. The intense light played on the hundreds of silver strands of vertical cables, and for a few minutes we drove through a cathedral of light. The soundtrack would have been a crescendo of coronation music. And then we plunged back into the confusing sleet and darkness of a construction detour off Highway 395 in one (who knows which?) of the Tri-Cities.Happy ending: We found our campsite, and fell asleep to the sound of beating rain on the roof of our minivan. The rain blew over during the night, leaving us in the morning with a cold, stiff wind over the prairie. We decided to find coffee at a diner rather than brave the wind with our campstove. We drove through a succession of tiny towns, their two-block brick downtowns still fast asleep on Sunday morning. Then we found the Silver Stallion restaurant in Waitsburg, Washington. We didn’t wait. About eight men – most pushing middle age -- with weather-beaten faces, baseball caps, workworn jeans and plaid flannel shirts, sat at a long table, drinking coffee and talking about wheat farming and guns. It was the classic Western men’s breakfast klatch. I felt like we had slipped back in time, and all we needed was a fire buring in a metal barrel on the porch. And bonus! The waitress was friendly and the coffee, hot cakes and eggs were great.
Since we left the western side of the Olympic Peninsula, with its monoculture tree plantations, we’ve seen a succession of mixed conifer forests: in the Cascades and in the Bitterroot Mountains. A hundred shades of green. I didn’t realize I missed them until we met up again. In these forests, at least a dozen different species of fir, spruce and pine are recognizable, as well as a few deciduous trees. And you have trees of all different ages, different heights, different girths. Layers and layers of greens shimmer there, from bright pale green to shamrock green all the way through deep forest green. It’s a markedly different kind of beauty from the rich, consistent shading that goes on for miles in the forests of Weyerhauser.
Notable:
Magpies, by the score. I’ve never seen more than one or two at a time, so I never needed the collective noun. My iPhone’s bird book tells me I’m seeing a charm of magpies, or a mischief of magpies, or maybe a tittering of magpies.
Mileage: From Astoria to Lacey, Washington, to visit Mark: 125 miles
From Lacey to Pasco, Washington: 261 miles
From Pasco to Missoula, Montana: 332 miles
Total mileage: 2,015
Noon temperature in Missoula: 49 degrees F.
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