The Angel Island Fire

On October the 12^th, 2008, after the last ferry left, I finished my shift. It was around 5:30 or 6:00 in the evening.  It had been a long day, Sunday of a three day weekend and Fleet Week, more than the usual visitors coming over to the island to see the air show from the island's south side. End of shift, I went home to my house on Ayala Cove and settled in for the night. At 8 o'clock I got a call out. The dispatcher said an employee was reporting a bonfire in Campsite 1.

I got back into my uniform, put on my POPE gear, the acronym we use in Parks to describe our gun and all the other stuff on our belt. We always wore the full gear for a call out. At Mt. Diablo I had been called out one night on something sounding innocuous that ended with an arrest after a camper high on drugs had threatened us with a knife. After that I never thought twice about wearing my POPE gear. It was easier to have it on than it was to go back and get it.

The weather was warm. Humidity was low. There was a light but steady breeze blowing out of the northeast. Mount Tam and the larger parks were on fire alert. At Angel Island, wood fires were never allowed though campers could use charcoal. From my house in Ayala Cove I drove to the northeast side of the island where Campsites 1, 2 and 3 were clustered about 200 feet above the shoreline on a spur off the fire road .

I drove my truck to the turnoff above the campsites. I didn't see any fire. I got out and walked back to the campsites and started with the young adults in Campsite 3. They seemed relaxed and surprised to see me. Campsite 2 and 1 were four fathers and a large group of young girls, about 10 years old. There were small bikes, mostly pink parked all around the campsites. As I did in 3, I checked the to see if there was a campfire or wood burning anywhere and I didn’t see anything to be concerned about.

Everything seemed to be as it should be. The girls were running around, shouting, having a good time. I talked to the men and told them I was checking for fires and they assured me they didn’t have a campfire. I told them it was a serious problem and people needed to be careful. They said they understood my concern. I walked back to my truck and headed for Campsites 7, 8 and 9. Some employees can be pretty unreliable reporters, new employees with no experience and people who just overreact. Like any reporters they get their facts jumbled up. I called in to dispatch that I was leaving Campsite 1 and heading for 7,8,9. I got a phone call on my cellphone. It was Gerald O’Reilly our maintenance chief. He was the reporting employee.  Gerald is a reliable source and he had been driving on the fire road and had personally seen a large fire at Campsite 1.

I was halfway to the other campsites. I turned around and drove back and left my truck at the junction of the fire road and the campsite road. I walked down into the campsite. The girls were still running around and I walked up to the barbecue stand and there were coals in it but also chips of wood that had been gathered from the site after I left the first time. I gave the men a stiff lecture and told them, no fire was allowed, no wood at all should be put on the charcoal and that if there was another report of a fire that they would be ticketed. I warned them it was a heavy fine. One of the girls asked what a ticket was and I gently explained it to her. I had not been gentle with the men.

I walked back up to my truck and as I got close to it, I saw a column of white smoke rising up beside the reservoir nearby. My heart jumped with a shot of adrenalin and I hurried to my truck and called in a fire and requested assistance from dispatch. I knew Tiburon Fire would be moving immediately and they would be there soon. That alone made me feel better.

I drove quickly toward the smoke swallowing the panic I felt and began planning what I needed to do. I got up to the smoke where there was an old retaining wall below the reservoir. The fire was on a patch of grass behind the wall sloping up the hill. It was a small grass just starting right at the wall. I got a shovel out of my truck and got up beside it, I knew enough not to put myself in front of the fire but to go to the side and try to work around it. I shoveled dirt on the fire and it kept broadening and advancing. Gerald arrived in his pickup truck with a small water tank and pumper in it. It took a minute or two to get the pumper going and we attacked the fire with the small water hose from the truck. Still the fire kept creeping up the hill and expanding and we weren’t getting control of it. Mike Holste arrived with the island's fire truck, a pumper, and we got that going, but by the time we began pouring water on the fire, it had jumped to a pile of dead branches and then into a dead tree and from there the fire took off up the hill.

The Angel Island crew were amazing that day. They had proved themselves before in medical emergencies and crises. Now with a fire they showed up and immediately started doing what was needed. As each one arrived and pitched in, I felt less and less alone. We were working together. Park people everywhere are good, but the Angel Island people are the best.

The whole time we were fighting it, the fire kept growing just out of reach. It seemed if we had been just a little better, a little faster or just had more water or more people we might have been able to stop it. At each stage it was just a little more than we could handle. When I first got there it was only two yards square and then it was the whole draw and working up the hill. Casey Lee our chief interpreter arrived on the scene and she began evacuating the campers. Kelli Holste was in her truck evacuating campers. Tiburon Fire came across on their fire boat and arrived in one of the vans we kept in the cove. Ed Lynch, the Tiburon Fire Battalion Chief, greeted me with a smile and began moving his crew along side the fire. Ed and his crew were in charge. I don't think I've ever been so relieved. The fire was theirs now.

Time seemed to compact itself. The first concern was campers and the Park employees evacuated them and made sure we had everybody. They loaded people into their trucks and vans and searched the island thoroughly. Rangers from the mainland arrived and more firefighters. We helped the new firefighters figure out the lay of the island. We evacuated the visitors to Camp Reynolds and the Quartermaster Building which was on the southwest side of the island, all the way across from where the fire started.

By the time Dan Villanueva, a Ranger from China Camp, arrived the only vehicle left in the cove was one of the small electrics we used. Dan used it until it ran out of juice in an area that was later overrun by the fire. All night Dan worried that he was responsible for a puddle of plastic on the hillside. It wasn't the worst thing that could have happend he felt bad about it. In the morning, we learned one of the firefighters had moved it. Even the electric cart had been saved.

The fire quickly reached the top of the island and began coming down the southwest side. We decided to evacuate the visitors completely off the island and the employees and their families to Ayala Cove on the northwest side of the island. I went to Camp Reynolds where the campers were gathered. Some were calm but some were frantic. We assured them they were safe and I had to tell one woman she was not going back to her campsite to get something she needed. By that time the fire was already heading down the south side of the island through Campsites 4, 5, and 6. Later we saw that the firefighters had set a backfire behind Officer Row protecting the employee houses on the east side of the island.

Before we loaded all of the campers in our various vehicles I pulled aside the four men who had been in Campsite 1. They wanted to explain, to talk, and I told them I really didn’t have time, I just wanted names, addresses and phone numbers. We would talk about it later. They were pretty chastened.

Maggie McDonogh, captain and owner of the Angel Island Ferry, met us at the docks. She had come when she saw there was a fire. She evacuated the campers and began bringing firefighters across the strait to the island. Her boat held about 300 people and she brought us firefighters as they arrived in Tiburon. By early morning we had 375 firefighters, all the local companies and CalFire crews.

Dave Matthews the superintendent arrived on the island. I was assigned to the docks to help the firefighters and equipment coming in.

Rich Ables a maintenance worker was operating the Ayala, a crew boat. Allyn Shaffer, our boat operator, and his son Nick were operating the LCM, landing craft mechanical, a boat of about 80 feet, able to carry a large truck and land it on a ramp.  Western Marine showed up with another LCM and began transporting fire trucks to the island. The Coast Guard showed up with their Life Boat and asked if they could help. By that time everything was covered and there wasn't much for them to do. They left and came back with pallets of bottled water and cartons of Cliff Bars which turned out to be a wonderful contribution. After that they patrolled the strait with a cutter ready to assist us if we needed it.

It was a hectic night. 375 firefighters fought the fire. 15 Fire Trucks were brought on the island. The docks were a busy place all night long. I helped unload the ferry and LCMs and oriented the firefighters to the island. I could see smoke coming over the top of the hill but I couldn't see the fire from the cove. I had a second radio with the firefighters band on it and I heard the constant stream of reports and commands back and forth between the firefighters.

I heard them staging to fight the fire on the southwest corner of the island and all along the south side. The fire came over the hill and they held it at the fire road. At one point I went up to my house and the night and the trees changed the perspective and the fire looked like it was in my backyard when in fact it was better than three quarters of the way up the island. The residents of the island from the east side who were staying at my house didn't like the look of it, but with an effort they managed to stay calm.

Before dawn four helicopters staged themselves in the air above Tiburon and Belvedere across from the island. At 5:30 am it was determined there was enough light for them to begin their runs and they came over the island and dropped loads of water, a couple from belly tanks and a couple from large buckets suspended by cables. They made another run and another run, pulling water up from the lakes nearby on the mainland. Within the hour the fire was under control. The hotspots which had been held at the Fire Road by the firefighters were doused.

After that all the tension was gone. Cal Fire arranges for food for firefighters and the caterers arrived in the morning. Breakfast signaled the end of the fight. After that it was cleanup. Everyone’s mood shifted. It became a friendly and relaxed gathering of first responders, stories to be told, work to be done. No buildings had been lost, no firefighters injured. There was no one else on the island, just us. A wonderful air of satisfaction settled over the island, lots of work to do, but the worst part was over.

At three o’clock in the afternoon I left the docks and was off duty. Suzette met me on the main land and we had a late lunch at Il Fornaio in Corte Madera. It was a strange feeling after the preceding 18 hours to be sitting in a nice restaurant and enjoying a nice meal. It was wonderful like stepping through a curtain.

Later that afternoon I came back to work and showed the County Fire Marshall around the island to the scene of the campsite and where the fire started. At the campsite we saw beer cans littering the ground and in the trash. There were wine bottles in the trash as well.  It had been quite a party before the fire broke out. We heard from other campers and some of the girls that the girls had been putting sticks into the charcoals and burning wood debris and running around the area waving their burning sticks like sparklers.

It had been a bad combination of unsupervised children, an illegal fire, and red flag fire weather.

The next day two investigators from Cal Fire arrived. George and George, they said there was good George and bad George but they wouldn’t say which one was which. They were incredibly professional, combing the spot for evidence inch by inch where the fire started. They were both Fire Captains trained as investigative police officers. They were in civilian clothes but they wore pistols, magazines and handcuffs on their belts, serious looking men.

Our own district biologists and the County Forester visited the island. Quickly the conclusion was the fire had not been bad for the island. No buildings were lost. The valuable historical sites were unharmed, Camp Reynolds had been saved. The chaparral in California is fire compatible and the environmental effect of the fire was to clear invasive weeds and revitalize the cycle of the local plants which are able to withstand fire and regenerate themselves. As one naturalist said, it couldn’t have been better if it had been a controlled burn.

Our superintendent was always one to assume control of the situation and he began a struggle with Cal Fire over who was in charge of the investigation. There was never a question that it was Cal Fire but the effect was they stopped talking to us and as is normal in these cases, we never learned about the results and the whole incident just faded into the past.

They quickly determined the cause of the fire was human, that it was negligent not criminal. Before they stopped talking to us I asked what happens in these cases. They said the responsible parties pay the cost of the fire. The initial estimate put the cost of the fire at over a million dollars. I said, if it were me, I just didn’t have the money, what do they do then? They said the judge determines what the responsible parties can afford and they make payments for the rest of their lives. That sounded fair.

I was never able to learn what happened after the first few weeks but it was a solid case against the campers and I’m guessing that the State of California reached a settlement with them before it went to court and they are paying for their negligence. They didn’t seem to be bad people, they just did something very dumb and it seemed fair they should be held accountable for it.

At the fire scene in the beginning there was a little girl who was very distraught and had to be calmed down. Of course, no one admitted what had happened. I was sure her parents were going to fight legally any responsibility but I hope they stepped outside of the legal issues and get the little girl the help she needs to understand she wasn't responsible. The guilt she might feel seemed to me to be the worst potential damage of the fire.

The fire was exciting but like all the other events in Parks, within a surprisingly short period of time everything returned to normal. Visitors came, the island renewed itself, and the Park went on.


The photograph is from:
http://www.chriswage.com/2009/08/07/angel-island-on-fire/

The Angels' Island

On Angel Island people asked me how I got such a great assignment.  Well it wasn’t hard, between the isolation of living on Angel Island itself, totally unattractive to anyone with a family, and the Superintendent's reputation for being a micromanager, there weren’t many takers.  A few Rangers were interested but as soon as they looked into it, they backed off.

I went to Angel Island November 17, 2007, 10 days after the Cosco Busan oil spill.  The island was still coping with the spill when I arrived.  The cleanup on the island’s shore went on for months afterwards.   I had my own personal crisis, having recently separated from Susan.  At Angel Island no one knew her or anything about my marriage and how it ended.  As far as anyone knew Suzette was my girlfriend and she started coming over to the island and was an immediate hit with the island residents, they all seemed to like her. 

The island itself was another beautiful place, 800 acres, about one square mile, sitting in the middle of San Francisco Bay with a view of the City, the East Bay, the San Rafael Bridge and Richmond, and a mile from Tiburon across a very rough piece of water.   

I told people that coming to Angel Island I had had a religious conversion of the Park variety, from the Devil’s Mountain to the Angels’ Island. 

The island was a favorite camping spot of the local Miwok people for over 5,000 years, then part of a Mexican land grant where they ran cattle, and then an Army Camp from 1862 until 1962.  After 1862 it was a Federal island and in addition to the Army post they used it for a quarantine station and an immigration station with detention barracks.  The Chinese, mostly young men, were detained for interrogation about their documents and their detentions ranged from weeks to years. 

Most of the human history was on the edge of the island surrounded at an elevation of about 150 feet by the Perimeter Road. 

Richard Dana in his book Two Years Before the Mast, wrote about Angel Island in the 1830s.  He called it Wood Island.  The Whalers who stopped in the Bay took on wood at Angel Island for rendering whale blubber.  By the time the Army occupied the island in 1862 photographs show it nearly completely bare of trees.  The Army planted Eucalyptus trees around their structures supposedly to prevent malaria and left the rest of the island alone.  Over the 150 years the Army stopped grazing and wood cutting the interior of the island restored itself with a dense covering of live oak and California chaparral.  Above Perimeter Road, we tried to keep the island as natural as possible.  The biologists battled invasive species removing Eucalyptus and Monterey pine. 

The views from Angel Island are the best in the Bay Area.  We could see the City as if we could reach out and touch it, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the East Bay and the North Bay.  From the top of the island I could look over the Berkeley Hills and see Mount Diablo. 

Angel Island was a much quieter park than Mount Diablo.  The only way to get to the island was by ferry or private boat.  We had spaces for 30 boats to moor overnight in Ayala Cove and 10 campsites.  Alcohol was fine on the island.  The café sold beer and wine.  People brought their own, but the costs of getting to the island kept most of the rowdy 20 somethings away.  Public drunkenness was an occasional problem but easily handled. 

There were fewer accidents on the island, but as the only Ranger I responded to all of them.  Even when Eric Knapp joined me in 2009 we still responded together, so the only accidents I missed were when I was off the island.  We only had one serious police incident the whole time I was on the island, a drunk who called in a bomb threat and then said he was armed and was going to kill himself.  Eric and I went searching for him.  We found him in the bushes on the east side of the island and arrested him.  We never found any weapons.

Law enforcement was very low key, most of it was enforcing fees and boating regs for the private boaters who came to the island.

The housing at Angel Island was amazing.  I was given a choice of houses, the Pharmacist’s house in Ayala Cove or the newer Coast Guard house at Point Blunt.  Point Blunt has an incredible view, but it’s windy and often foggy.  .  I chose the Pharmacist’s house, an 1890 two story Victorian house with a wraparound porch.  It was up the hillside from the beach at Ayala Cove.  The house was cold and drafty but beautiful.  Ayala Cove is where all the ferries came in, the Park offices are there, a café, a picnic area and a small beach.

The house is up from the picnic area and 100 yards up the road from the Park Headquarters.  Even though it was within sight of most of the activity of the Park, it was still quiet and out of the way. 

There is no bridge to Angel Island.  The only way to get there is by boat or swimming.  I had first gone to Angel Island in a kayak from Sausalito and for a number of years that was the only way I got there.  It’s a strenuous kayak trip against strong and rough currents and constant headwinds it seems.  Before I had decided to work there I had only come ashore at Ayala Cove and Camp Reynolds, both on the western side.  I kayaked around the island a number of times, but I’d never really got up on the island to explore.  I’d seen the east side from the Larkspur Ferry and all the houses and buildings at East Garrison seemed mysterious and forgotten. 

So just prior to taking the job at Angel Island I went to the island by way of the Tiburon Ferry.  Once I moved on to the island the regular means of getting on and off were the Angel Island Ferry and the Park’s 50 foot crew boat which ran a regular schedule of 8:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.   The Ferry ran for the tourists hourly on weekends and during the visitor season three or four times a day during the week.  During the winter the ferry ceased operation on weekdays except for charters. 

Living on Angel Island was wonderful but it was also like being exiled.  Even though it was only a mile from Tiburon and within sight of most of the Bay Area, it seemed very far away.  I enjoy unusual and remarkable things and living on an island was a remarkable experience.   Knowing the boat schedule was very important as it was the only way of getting off the island and back on.  If I needed milk, I drove or walked down to the docks on Angel Island, got there in extra time and waited for the ferry.  There was nothing more frustrating that to get to the dock just in time to wave good-bye to the departing boat.  If I were operating either of the Park boats myself there was preparation time.  It took 10 minutes to get across the strait and then the tying up, disembarking and a four block walk to the parking lot where we kept our vehicles for use on the mainland.  Until the last year on the island I could use the Park’s boat for trips, but these had to be scheduled and announced well ahead of time so everyone had an opportunity.  There were no spur of the moment runs to the mainland.

So that quart of milk took about an hour and a half to two hours if I planned it just right. 

I could have gotten my own boat, but maintaining a boat is a lot more trouble than a car.  People joke it’s like having a second wife.  And there are no public docks available in Tiburon.  Tying up required borrowing space, permission and avoiding spaces when they were needed.  The whole thing made it nearly impossible.  To rent a space was hundreds of dollars and the only thing available was all the way over in Paradise, about five miles away.  Dave had a whole course and qualification system for the crew boat and only a few of us qualified to operate that boat and a 16 foot inflatable with a large outboard motor on it.  Even that ended with a new superintendent in 2011. 

I lived on Angel Island for four years.  At first it was a novelty and I enjoyed it, but as time wore on the inconvenience of it began to weigh heavier and heavier.  The worst part was scheduling a return from the mainland.  After Suzette moved on the island and we had Paloma, if we were to go shopping or just to visit the mainland we would have to schedule it in such a way that we could return to Tiburon in time for the boat.  

There was a lot of waiting around because we had to get there early enough to make sure we didn’t miss the boat.  The islanders were well known at the town library and the café on the corner near the docks. 

I remember one time we went to LA by car.  We drove back overnight so Paloma would sleep through most of the trip and scheduled our return to catch the morning crew boat to the island.  It’s hard to be precise about time with a 400 mile trip and we gave ourselves plenty of time to make the ferry.  We arrived in Marin before 5:30 a.m.  The boat schedule for the island was 8:30.  We went to the 24 hour Safeway in Corte Madera.  We shopped for things we needed and bought some morning snacks and then returned to to the car to wait for the ferry. 

We still had 2 hours before the boat left Tiburon for the island.  Of course, there we were, Paloma, Suzette and me, our luggage and the debris of the trip in the car.  The security guard for the shopping center, drove around us every 10 minutes for the two hours we waited.  We looked like a homeless family living in the car.   That was the worst time but we often felt like a homeless family looking for a temporary camp until it was time to catch the ferry. 

On a busy summer weekend there could be 5,000 visitors to the island or more.  Most of those would arrive by ferry and leave by ferry the same day.  So the earliest visitors arrived at 10:30 a.m. and the latest left at 5:30 p.m.  There was space for 30 boats to be moored and there might be a 100 people in the moorings but they stayed on their boats overnight.  We had 9 campsites distributed around the island and maybe 50 people used those.  During the winter on a weekday or rainy weekend we might have 10 visitors, a couple of moorings and no campers.  Except for busy weekends which were only half the year the only residents on the island were the Park employees and our families, about 25 people. 

After sunset and before mid-morning it was very rare to see anyone on the island.  There were 80 or 90 deer on the island, hundreds of raccoons, harbor seals in two different locations and a host of owls, hawks, and seabirds.  There were no rattlesnakes, no coyotes and no bobcats or mountain lions.  It was an idyllic place.      

The Superintendent at Angel Island was Dave Matthews.  Before I went to Angel Island I met Dave and decided at worst he had to be better than my supervisor on Mount Diablo.  He seemed like a good guy.  I worked with Dave for three years and at times it got a little crazy.  He was a micro manager.  He was always changing things, couldn’t leave anything alone and something I didn’t expect he was always battling with the forces of evil, park vendors, partners, maintenance people from the mainland and management.  There were things Dave could have done or more often not done that would have made working there easier but basically Dave was a good guy, honest and a reliable friend.    

When I first got to Angel Island Dave and I were the only Rangers.  I was replacing Hector Heredia.  Hector was an odd character, a real wannabe cop, he had been heavy on enforcement on an island where there was a rare need for it.  Dave had to fish him out of trouble with the visitors a number of times.  After I’d been there awhile I began to realize Dave’s MO included surrounding himself with dysfunctional people who needed his help to stay afloat.  His most loyal follower was Jean Orchard, a Park Aide.  Jean had a serious alcohol problem and a year after I got there had to be fired for testing positive for cocaine.  Dave tried to get her a job on the mainland.  His reasoning was that drug testing was an island requirement because of crewing the boats.  It didn’t apply to working as a park aide on the mainland.  The Tamalpais Sector people thought that hiring a coke addict made no sense at all and didn’t accept Dave’s recommendation. 

It was a blow to my ego to realize why Dave so readily recruited me to be a Ranger on Angel Island.  As a 61 year old Ranger over the hill and wounded by Bill from Mount Diablo,  I was another one of Dave’s cripples needing his protection.  

I felt like Dave made a mistake in my case, but that’s probably not true.  I flourished under Dave’s protection.  He excused my failings and appreciated I didn’t do anything without checking with him first.  As a veteran of the military and 9 years in a Japanese environment, I was a well practiced follower and I think Dave appreciated that.   

Dave was a good guy.  I liked him.  He put people and family first, but he couldn’t resist manipulating all of us.  Dave, like me was that frustrating mix of sterling qualities and raging faults.  Dave battled everybody, the district, our vendors, the ferry boats, the Coast Guard, anyone outside of his circle and caused us problems with nearly everyone.  The Coast Guard generally avoided the island and treated us like lepers. 

When we had the fire he insisted that he should take overall responsibility for the investigation since it was his jurisdiction.  Cal Fire, of course, didn’t see it that way at all.  The Cal Fire investigators were very competent and knew what they were doing.  Dave interfered so badly with the Cal Fire investigators that after a month or so they wouldn’t talk to us.  That was also part of Dave’s MO, to get in a power struggle with people we should have cooperated with.    

I  really enjoyed Angel Island and I hated it at the same time.  I hated that the visitors mostly wanted a character like Mickey Mouse at the docks who would wave at them and stand in pictures with their family.  I did that and enjoyed it, but a lot of the time I was the only one at the docks, during the week and in the winter and being a dock aide, smiling and waving wasn’t always that much fun.  It was a day tourist venue and the tourists could be demanding and shallow. 

I also disliked the arrogance of the boat owners, both the ones on the dock who avoided paying fees whenever they could and the ones in the moorings a few of whom displayed an arrogance of property and disrespect for the Park.  On the other hand some of the boat owners were extraordinarily nice and I got to know and appreciate the regulars.  It was one of the pleasures of being a Ranger.    

I liked our vendors.  I got to be good friends with the people at the café.  Maggie, the ferry boat operator is a special friend.  Living in a village was interesting.  I used to say if something happened on the island, it only took 15 minutes for the people on the other side of the island to know about it, unless it was a secret, then it took a half hour.  Being the Ranger for the local Park was also very interesting.  I knew the businesses in Tiburon and the local bank manager.  From doing medicals together I knew the firefighters.  Walking down the street in town whether I was in uniform or not I was well known character and exchanged greetings with people along the street.  That was different than my usual experience of being anonymous nearly everywhere.  

In my second year we got another Ranger, Eric.  Eric was a character.  He had a droll sense of humor.  He had been a Ranger for over 25 years and was pretty well burned out.  He didn’t much like the visitors and he quickly got off on the wrong foot with Dave and kept making it worse. 

Eric was called the ghost because he was hard to find.  But when I needed Eric he was always there.  There were a few times when we went out on gunfire or other questionable calls, where we didn’t know what we were going to and I always felt safe with Eric at my side.  He was experienced, competent and courageous.  Other things about Eric didn’t count much in comparison to trusting him with my life, which I did without hesitation. 

He and Paloma had a special relationship.  To her he was Uncle Eric and anybody who is friends with Paloma is OK.  Paloma also got the benefit of being in a village where everyone knew her and loved her. 

Suzette

I first met Suzette at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  I was in the new class of counselors hired on July 1^st, 2001.  Suzette was in the class before me and had started working there six months earlier.  Early on I had a client who as I talked to him told me what he had told the previous counselor to do.  As I listened to this guy, I realized he was only manipulating the system to cheat his creditors and I was supposed to roll over and help him.  He was what in banking we called a flake.  I reverted to being the bank vice president I had been two years earlier and told the SOB we weren’t there to help him cheat his creditors.   

I went looking for the previous counselor to tell her I had taken care of this guy for her.  I expected to find a young recent college grad who could be easily pushed around.  Instead I found Suzette.  She was wearing a long gray sleeveless slinky dress that was businesslike and sexy.  She was gorgeous and had a smile that lit up the room.  She had not taken the client seriously and the problem had been she didn’t follow his directions either. 

She had a laugh to match her smile.  She was a most attractive young woman.  Of course, I found her attractive, I would have had to be blind and deaf not to have been attracted.  She had a beautiful laugh.  She was young, in her mid or late twenties, though I thought she was younger.  She was a recent graduate of Cal, the University of California in Berkeley.  She was an English major and probably the smartest of all the counselors.  She was a favorite of Susan the supervisor and did special projects for her.  Her name was Suzette Anderson, she appeared to be a dark skinned African American.  She wore her hair pulled back to a French braid, looking very Spanish, that and something she said, I asked her if she was a Latina.  And she was, Panamanian, born in New York, with immigrant parents, she grew up in Inglewood.  Like many Central Americans she is fiercely patriotic about being Panamanian. 

This was the period at the end of my obsession to learn Spanish, an obsession that got me to fluency and I immediately spoke Spanish which she understood but responded in English.  It turned out she could barely get a word of Spanish out.  She reminded me of my cousin’s children who would only respond to their mother’s Tagalog in English.  For years I used her as an example of someone who at five decides to only use English.  My own granddaughters stopped speaking Spanish in kindergarten.  I think it was their reaction to the way the Spanish speaking immigrants were treated in their classroom.  If they didn’t have to speak Spanish they didn’t want to.  Suzette to my surprise could barely get gracias out of her mouth.  She choked on it the way the most anglicized gringa would speak. 

She had been an English major at Cal and immediately began plying me with books.  She particularly liked Toni Morrison and at her urging I read “Song of Solomon.”  In our chats I quickly realized her appreciation of literature and literary criticism was way beyond my understanding.  She had learned something at Cal that had passed me by or honestly I probably didn’t have the aptitude for at UCLA. 

From my point of view it was a wonderful office flirtation.  She was a beautiful young woman and we were friends.  I tried to go to lunch with her whenever we were free together and it wasn’t often enough, but every week once or twice.  She was a bit of tease.  I wasn’t sure how she felt but it was fun for me.  She had a six year old son and lived with his father, but they weren’t married.  She didn’t talk about John and I didn’t talk about Susan.  If I had thought about it I would have realized the flirtation was mutual, but the age difference between us was huge.  Suzette was younger than two of my sons.  I just enjoyed the friendship with a beautiful and exciting young woman.  Anything more would have been too complicated and it never occurred to me. 

When I left CCC to go to Juvenile Hall, Suzette invited me to dinner with her and her friend Jody.  There was an electric charge between us, but if we hugged, it was stiffly.  I went back to have lunch with Suzette a few times after I went to Juvy, and it was always fun.  We didn’t really stay in touch but she was a friend and I wasn’t really surprised when two years later I got an email from her and she suggested lunch. 

By this time I was living in Oakland and Susan was living in LA.  Suzette and I had a wonderful lunch.  We ate somewhere in my neighborhood on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland and then we went for a walk, all the way around Lake Merritt, a good three miles.  We sat in a café and drank coffee and talked and talked and talked.  She was going to graduate school for an MFA and was very excited about that.  I was unabashedly attracted to her and would have loved to have touched her.  We sat close but there seemed to be an invisible curtain just barely keeping us apart. 

At that time Susan and I got together for a week in LA each month, which was OK, but I had long since given up on the marriage between Susan and me and would have welcomed an affair.  Suzette didn’t talk about John and my natural Puritanism and reticence and we were just good friends.  She was as a friend described it later, an inappropriate female friend, but not a relationship that I felt would ever get beyond flirtation.  I didn’t really know how Suzette felt and I didn’t ask.  I was enjoying her company. 

We got together a few more times and then I went to the Ranger Academy in Pacific Grove, a good distance from the Bay Area.  After the Academy, I invited her to my graduation.  She didn’t come but invited me to a celebratory lunch in the City at the Slanted Door, a highly rated San Francisco restaurant. 

We saw each other after that and then I received an email, our only form of distance communication, that invited me to lunch.  Susan was supposed to be in Oakland that week and I emailed Suzette that Susan being in Oakland made scheduling lunch difficult.  I knew the mere mention of Susan violated our unspoken rule of not talking about partners and it acknowledged in a subtle way that our lunches were not the totally innocent meetings of friends that we pretended they were. 

I got no response from Suzette.  As the time passed I realized she had been scared off.   I was surprised to think, maybe there was more to this than I had admitted and I found that very exciting.  Maybe I would hear from her again.  But I didn’t for nearly two years.

Then in March, 2007 I got an email from Suzette wishing me a happy St. Patrick’s Day and maybe we could get together for lunch.  By this time Susan had moved back up to the Bay Area and was living with me in Park housing at Mt. Diablo.  It was not a comfortable situation and I welcomed a chance to see Suzette again. 

Only this time I was going to say something directly about it.  I sent her an email and told her how much I enjoyed hearing from her and I would love to go to lunch, but I was married and this was a little complicated.  We needed to talk about what we were doing. 

In response I got an erotic love poem that took my breath away.  Suzette is a very talented poet and this was a very good poem.  I had no idea Suzette felt toward me as the poem showed.  I really had thought, the flirtation was just her style and we really were just friends. 

I was eager to see her and we arranged to get together shortly after Easter.  This time we touched.  I held her arm and enjoyed the closeness of her next to me.  She was shy, but the air between us was charged and it was wonderful. 

About that time I picked up Helen Fisher’s book, “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.”  Suzette and I were in love, all the chemistry and emotion that Fisher talks about.  It was a wonderful roller coaster ride.  I was old enough and experienced enough to know what was happening and our infatuation with each other was like a storm we couldn’t resist, a storm that would inevitably pass.  I was going to enjoy it while it was there.        

I tried to see Suzette every time I could.  We emailed each other and I would go to work and sit down at the computer first thing to see what she had sent.  It was a delicious obsession.  I knew if it came out, I was risking my marriage but by this time, I really didn’t much care. 

Susan knew something was going on.  One time at a restaurant I arrived very late, something I never do.  She teased me about a girlfriend and I stumbled through a denial, but it was true I had been with Suzette and lost track of the time. 

After that Susan went on vacation to the Caribbean.  I had already said I did not want to go and work gave me the excuse.  I saw Suzette on the weekends and we spent more time together.  Suzette was still living with John, but that obviously wasn’t a good relationship either.  John and Suzette had a son born in 1995.  Suzette didn’t tell me much, but early on the relationship was on again off again and then John moved up to the Bay Area when Susan went to Cal and she wanted a father for her son. 

With Susan in the Caribbean we had a date and went to the Legion of Honor.  I think it was closed but we spent the day in the City and on the Muni I reached for her hand and for the first time we solidly held hands, not linked arms, not nearly close this time, but tightly held hands.  It seemed naively adolescent but Suzette and I were very reticent with each other and it made the romance all that more exciting. 

In all of this I really knew it was the infatuation that was running us and we wouldn’t know what we really had until the infatuation had run its course.  Being married and trying to indulge an infatuation wasn’t going to work and I realized I needed to end it with Susan.  I was really grateful that this infatuation gave me the energy to end something I had really wanted to end years before. 

By the 2004 I couldn’t stand living with Susan.  Our living in separate cities postponed the inevitable, but when Susan said she was moving back up to the Bay Area I thought I should tell her we were finished.  But I took the easy way out and decided to give it another try.   She moved up in December and by spring I had had it with Susan. 

I was having a hard time at the Park.  My supervisor was a twit.  I was the lowest man on the totem pole, a probby, on probation.  Living in State housing and in the Park is never a simple thing and Susan was making it very difficult for me with her demands on our “landlord,” and her dissatisfaction with everything in the Park and her own situation.  Her vacation to the Caribbean was a welcome respite but when she got back I had to do something about it.  I was grateful that Suzette had come back and I felt lucky that it gave me the energy to finally end it with Susan.    

When Susan got back on July 1^st, the next day I invited her to go for a walk with me.  “We had to talk.”  I struggled through telling her I wanted to separate.  I didn’t want to be with her.

She interrupted me and asked, “Is there another woman?”

I said, “No.”  I wasn’t separating from Susan because of Suzette.  I just wanted out. 

She said, “You’re lying,” and told me she had been reading my emails.  It didn’t go well after that but the result was right.  We were done. 

Susan and I continued in the house for a short time together.  We tried to avoid each other and didn’t talk again.  In September she moved out and I was free.

 In August I went up to Oregon to see my son and his family there.  When I got back Suzette and I went for a picnic at Paradise Park.  I leaned over to kiss her, for the first time.  I anticipated a light chaste kiss but it was returned passionately and our relationship took another step along.

In October Suzette finally informed John and that started a round of insanity for her.  I think it was shortly after that John turned up when I was meeting Suzette at a BART station.  I was surprised he was a little man and jumping up and down and yelling biblical insults at me, adulterer and all of that.  I thought considering that he had never married Suzette in 12 years or more he didn’t really have that much of a claim on her. 

John began drinking and was pretty distraught.  I learned he was a graduate student at Cal State East Bay, still a graduate student, even though I guess he was in his late 40s or even 50s and he worked as a community aide for the UC police, walking coeds to their cars after night classes.  I didn’t take him very seriously. 

I stayed close to Suzette throughout the craziness.  John had gotten himself totally worked up, he was drinking and one time he grabbed Suzette and ended up biting her on the lip, enough to bring the cops for a domestic violence call and earn a temporary restraining order.  So John was gone in November.  He continued to be as troublesome as he could be, but it was over.  He convinced the court he was the better parent for Arom, now 12, and he got custody of him. 

Suzette and I settled into making out as if we were virgins back in Catholic high school.  Yes, Suzette had put in her time at St. Mary’s Academy before she finished at Rialto High School. 

I went to Angel Island in mid-December which made the break with Susan more complete.  By that time we had started divorce proceedings, Susan was very businesslike and in charge.  We did a mediated divorce and had no problems until Susan decided I had cheated her on taxes.  She decided I owed her $150,000.  I explained how community property laws actually worked and what claims we might both have.  She didn’t pursue it.  I think in the end if I was cheating on her, even financially, it gave her closure and justification.  I certainly had enough blame and she was rightly angry and I was relieved. 

I was glad to be at Angel Island.  The people there had never met Susan and as far as they were concerned Suzette was simply my girlfriend.  Our scandalous beginning was irrelevant. 

Suzette began coming over to the island but she always needed to get off sooner than I would have liked.  She’d come only if she could leave at 9 at night or 3 in the morning or way too early and cutting her visits short.  After awhile it seemed like we were still having an affair, but it wasn’t John we were cheating on, it was Arom.  After the initial protests Arom was living with Suzette most of the time.  She told me she had not told him about us

We dated for a year, but it wasn’t a very satisfying relationship.  Even after John left it didn’t seem Suzette was free.  Sometimes I could reach her.  Sometimes I couldn’t.  Suzette is an extraordinarily private person and it was hard to tell what was going on with her.  Sometimes she was available and sometimes she wasn’t.  Sometimes she would come to the island and we would enjoy each other’s company and sometimes she couldn’t wait to get off the island. 

By January of 2009 I had decided that Suzette and I weren’t going anywhere.  I gave up on trying to establish a relationship with Suzette and waited for her to withdraw, only the next time I wouldn’t try to bring her back.  The infatuation was over.  We went on like that until March.

Then one day Suzette called me and asked me if I was sitting down.  I laughed and sat down and waited to hear what she was going to tell me.  She told me she was pregnant.  We had been using birth control but apparently it wasn’t effective.  When we got together a few days later Suzette had decided that she wanted this baby.  So with great trepidation I celebrated this coming event with her.  We would have the child.  She would move on to the island and we would get married. 

Then in April we learned that Suzette had tested positive for Trisomy 21 markers.  She had an ultrasound.  Fetuses with Down Syndrome often clench their fist.  The fetus didn’t have clenched fists.  We learned we had a girl.  They withdrew amniotic fluid and we waited for the test results which take about three weeks.  It was a very hard three weeks on both of us.  Suzette was mostly withdrawn.  I had concluded if our child did have Down’s Syndrome that I would want the fetus aborted. 

With great relief we learned that Paloma, by that time we knew her name, had no chromosomal problems.  It was like the second acceptance of this event.  Times had been difficult

Both times, learning about the pregnancy in March and then the test in May were like a roller coaster ride where this was this excruciating slow climb up a hill and then the decision to go ahead and the plunge down.  The first time the climb was a few days until we got together and I found out Suzette wanted to keep the baby and the second hill, much longer and higher, was four weeks and then we plunged down into the speed and inevitability of Paloma’s coming. 

That was in May and it was time for Suzette to move to the island.  She put it off, reasonably enough, until Arom graduated from Sierra Prospect 8^th grade.  She also put off telling Arom that they were moving and that she was pregnant.  She told Arom about me and her pregnancy as they were packing to move on the 4th of July.  Arom was 14 years old and furious.  I had never met him and Suzette didn’t tell him anything about me.  He was in a total snit, not talking, not helping, he was angry, rightly so I think.  It couldn’t have been handled much worse.

In return Arom did his best not to graduate from the 8^th grade but Suzette and his teachers pushed him through. 

Suzette got her father and brother to help her move.  The truck arrived at the docks in the late evening and it was a pile of furniture and boxes that had been thrown into the back of U-Haul truck willy nilly.  It took another few days to finish moving and I went over to help Suzette.  The apartment was a wreck.  We trashed what was left, packed a few boxes and I had Suzette hire a couple of casual workers to help her clean the apartment. 

We planned to get married in August.  Suzette got very crazy, as pregnant women sometimes are.  Disorganized she began concentrating on details of a very elaborate wedding.  For a wedding cake she went to a bakery in San Carlos, 40 miles away; the invitations she was hand making.  At this time Suzette had some idea I should be a father figure to Arom.  He was barely talking to me and rightly so I thought. 

In August Suzette and I went to get the marriage license and as was common by then Suzette wasn’t talking to me.  She like Arom radiated hostility and anger.  That was my excuse to pull the plug.  Getting married seemed a crazy idea.  The wedding was being put together with no communication or proper planning.  Suzette was focused on hand making invitations, and she was by this time very pregnant.  So I said, no, we would postpone the wedding.  She was angry that afternoon and then never said anything about it afterwards.  I knew it was a resentment that wouldn’t go away but it didn't make sense to me at that time to go ahead and marry someone who couldn't even talk to me when we were going to get the license.    

Suzette and I occasionally found a way to be friendly and comfortable together, but it wasn’t common.  We went to pregnancy classes at Kaiser Medical Center in San Rafael and most of those we passed ourselves off as the loving couple we should have been.  In social situations Suzette would relax and we did well, so sometimes that goodwill would last past the evening.  Paloma was born in October, more or less on schedule.  

Thankfully the day Paloma was born we were wonderfully together. 

On October 11^th about five or six a.m. Suzette woke me up and told me she was having regular labor contractions.  We were living on Angel Island.  Rich Ables, the maintenance worker on Angel Island, was a good guy with a very good heart who really liked Suzette and me and wanted to do anything he could to help us.  Instead of waiting for the 8:00 run to the mainland, which would have been easy enough, I called Rich knowing he would be very proud of being part of our day of birth for our new daughter.  So at 7 a.m. Rich took us to the mainland on the Ayala, the Park’s crew boat.

Everything was easy, there was no hurry or panic, we just wanted to be on the mainland as the situation developed.  When we got to Tiburon we walked the four blocks to the car and I asked Suzette if she wanted to go to breakfast and she did. 

We went to Denny’s.  Suzette ordered pancake rounds with syrup and butter, pancakes, orange juice, bacon, extra bacon, a vanilla milkshake and I think maybe eggs.  They kept bringing things and by the time she was finishing the table was full of empty plates.  The waitress there still reminds us of that day.  It was very funny and Suzette was having a good time. 

After Denny’s she wanted to go to ACE Hardware in El Cerrito for a board or something she needed; so we went there.  The salesman who helped us had been a medic in the Army.  He asked when the baby was due.  We told him the baby was on her way now.  That made him nervous.  Don’t worry you won’t have to do it, we told him.  From there we went to Target and Suzette shopped.  I don’t remember that we bought anything,

At Target she just wandered around looking at things.  We were moving pretty slowly.  Mid-afternoon we went to a Starbucks in Emeryville.  We sat there and talked and entertained each other through the afternoon.  Finally we decided we should think about going to the hospital.  The pains had never been terrible, but by this time Suzette would regularly stop and hold herself during a contraction.  They continued to be regular and they were getting stronger though not urgent.

I said I probably needed a burrito before we settled into the hospital and we went across the street to La Cucina Puebla, a place we liked.  Suzette decided to eat and we had a full meal, taking our time again. 

By this time, the pains were coming more regularly and at shorter intervals and we headed for Kaiser Oakland.  There is no maternity ward at Kaiser Marin so we had made all the arrangements to go to Kaiser Oakland.  Oakland Kaiser is a big medical complex at Piedmont Avenue and Broadway.  By the time we were walking from the parking lot to the hospital the pains had become intense and we would have to stop and wait until they passed.    

We went to the pre-birth triage and the nurse was very nice and the intern was a wonderful young man.  They agreed that it was going to be sometime that day but not soon.  They said if we lived on the mainland they would have sent us home but since we lived on an island we were admitted then.  We moved slowly, stopping when Suzette was having pains and were relocated to the obstetrics area and made comfortable in a delivery room. 

Even remembering it over three years later our experience at Kaiser was incredibly warm and human.  Everyone was wonderful.  They took care of us like we were family and very very special people.  They made us comfortable, they watched, they did what they needed.  From beginning to end, the triage nurse to the girl who helped us to our car two days later, people were just wonderful.  Thanks to whatever hormones, dopamine and whatever other things go on at a birth we were in a heightened state and we stayed that way, feeling close and deeply in love for the whole time we were there and loved by everyone around us. 

After 11:00 p.m. the labor contractions strengthened and started to become unbearable.  Suzette was in great pain and not her stoic self at all.  At one point, she started saying “No mas!  No mas!  No mas!”  The nurses all looked at me, they had no idea that Suzette was latina and pushed to her limit she reverted to her childhood language.  Coincidentally as she switched to Spanish the baby crowned and a few minutes after midnight Paloma was born.  Unfortunately the baby had picked up the drugs used to dampen Suzette’s pain and the first half hour a neo-natal intensive care unit, six very intense and efficient people concentrated on her to get her breathing and keep her breathing.  After a half hour they succeeded, cleared up and left the room, leaving the baby with us and the regular obstetrics staff. 

After the delivery we had a wonderful room to our selves on the 12th floor.  It was just us and the baby and we spent our time admiring her.  Outside it was storming, pounding rain and beautiful thick gray clouds.  The first storm of the season it was greeted by everyone in the Park and throughout California wild lands as the end of the fire season.  Paloma’s arrival brought a sigh of relief from all of us, the bad dry days of summer were over.  The rains had arrived.  We had a long relaxing day in the hospital.  The next morning I rushed around to do the paperwork, pay $800, the portion not covered by insurance and we left that afternoon and took a boat back to Angel Island through the storm with our new baby. 

Paloma was transforming.  She was and is such a beautiful child, remarkably so from the very beginning.  Suzette and my genes from disparate places in the world produced an incredibly beautiful girl child. 

We both took time off and adjusted to the baby as she took over our lives.  Suzette went to work in March and during the winter I had a schedule where I only worked weekends.    

I had a lot of fear around being a father at 62 but over time the more I get to know Paloma as a person, the more fortunate I feel.  However she came into the world, whatever the timing, I am just a very fortunate person to have her.  The heart attack I had less than a year later made me feel very vulnerable but after six stints and three years later, I am alive and well and doing well today. 

As much as possible I don’t dwell on the future, I stay in the present and enjoy my beautiful daughter. 

Suzette and my relationship was difficult in the first year.  Arom didn’t help the situation.  The following September he left to join his father in Florida.  We got a new superintendent in the Park at that time who began to put the Rangers in their place and it became harder and harder to live on the island.  The superintendent changed the rules for using the boats to leave the island and Suzette could no longer get to work from the island.  In April, 2011, we moved to Oakland and living on the mainland was one less stress on us and our relationship. 

I retired in November of 2011 and I began enjoying that.  One day I went to Kaiser and they asked me if my spouse had insurance and I started giving the clerk all the information on Suzette and her job.  As I got to a part I didn’t know I said, I would have to call her, and then as I was dialing the phone I realized, she wasn’t my spouse; we weren’t married. 

I went home with the intention of telling the story to Suzette and asking her to marry me.  In our nearly three years together we had become a couple.  For some petty reason when Suzette came home that night, she was all upset and directed some of it at me and as she had been doing since we began living together, she withdrew and wasn’t talking to me.  I was struck by the irony of that, one more opportunity to get married missed because Suzette decided to be angry.  This time I waited a month and told her the story and asked her to marry me. 

We got married on April 3rd before a county commissioner and then a wedding with all of our friends at the Unitarian Church on Saturday April 8th.  Again the wedding was a difficult event but for me I did what needed to be done, a hall, a minister, a caterer and emails to my friends to come to the wedding and Suzette concentrated on the things that were important to her.  It worked.  We had a nice wedding.  Lots of people were there.  Suzette went to work Monday and we began living our life as a married couple instead of just a couple. 

In July, 2012, Arom returned from Florida to live with us.  Initially he was more cooperative but that wore thin.  Arom still makes life as difficult for himself as he can, but I’m less a part of it. 

Suzette and I live together better than we have before.  Two days after Arom moved in we moved, as previously planned, to a house in El Cerrito.  It suits my working class self image.  It’s a nice house, not luxurious, on a nice block in an acceptable neighborhood.  It’s very comfortable without being showy at all. 

My days are filled with writing.  Suzette still goes to work incredibly early and comes home late.  Lately she hasn’t had so many things going on that keep her away from the house.  For awhile it seemed she didn’t want to spend any time with me, but now we’re quite close.  That too will change.  Arom will join the Army this summer or be shipped back to Florida. 

And I enjoy Paloma.  We do ballet, that is Suzette and I take Paloma and watch her begin to dance in her pink tutu and tights and sometimes leg warmers.  We go bicycling, her in a green seat on front of my bike or lately on her own bike, a 12 inch pink princess bicycle with training wheels.  We go to the Farm, a small show farm in Tilden Park and to the snow.    

This winter we went up Highway 108 to the Sierras.  We had seen snow for the first time last winter in Arizona.  This time as soon as Paloma saw snow by the side of the road, patches under the trees and on the shady spots, from the back seat she shouted, “Stop the car!  Stop the car!  I want to play!”  We drove on a short distance and stopped in a parking lot with more snow where she could play and then went on to our hotel and the next morning had a wonderful time just being in the snow. 

We sing, we read stories, we dance and I am delighted to have a daughter.  I am also delighted to have a beautiful wife who lately most of the time is very warm and affectionate.  She is an incredibly interesting person who is sincere and seems to try very hard.  We are I think getting better together.  And while it’s not quite the normal middle class life that I’ve aspired to, it’s close enough and it has Paloma and Suzette in it and that’s an incredible good fortune.