Old Oregon
News of UO Alumni
Made for Standup | Track-and-Field Master
Finding Eve, Virgin Flies, and the Origin of Clothes | Trials of the Links and Diamonds
UO Alumni Calendar | Duck Tales: Surviving Oregon
Made for Standup
Greg Behrendt makes it in the long-shot world of comedy.
Greg Behrendt ’91, a comedian and writer probably best known for his relationship-heavy standup act and his book, He’s Just Not That Into You, describes his coming unto comedy as “a really long, slow car crash.”
When he arrived at the UO, it was to study business. He joined the rugby team and he joined a frat. And then he got kicked out of the frat. He broke his hand and forsook rugby. And then he kicked business. For theater. “I thought it would be easier!” he confesses.
Watching a classmate deliver a comic monologue captured Behrendt’s imagination. “That seemed fun. Being alone on stage and being funny.” When he graduated, he moved to San Francisco, over the bridge from where he grew up in Marin County. But entry-level positions on stage and TV were in shorter supply than he had hoped. He auditioned repeatedly, but failure to get any roles finally drove him into a life of comedy. In fact, a fellow member of the improv group he had joined told him he was made for stand-up. It was comedienne and actress Margaret Cho, who had yet to make her bones as a standup queen and gay icon, but she already had a keen eye for talent.
Emboldened by Cho’s assessment, Behrendt moved to Los Angeles, a bigger market for comedians, with more clubs, more opportunities. He fought for years through the murky circuit of clubs and other comedy venues. He was getting jobs and laughs, but during those early years, he never quite found the alchemy so many top-level comedians use to transform personal experience into that rarest kind of material, the mercurial stuff an audience can recognize themselves in.
“My comedy career didn’t really start until five years later,” Behrendt said, “when I got sober.” In retrospect, he says it was booze that kept him believing his comedy should sound like that of his friends, the comics he lived and gigged with and who would later be known by the rather vague term “alternative comics.”
These comedians would become some of the most influential of their generation, and Behrendt would be identified as a member of the club. Acid-edged Mort Sahls, wearing band T-shirts instead of cardigans, they birthed a type of personal, story-focused comedy that frequently avoided the clichéd, brick-wall comedy club tropes. These included his roommate David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, and Janeane Garofalo. Their bitingly funny stories described struggles with Christianity and Judaism, pricked social expectations and conventions, and turned their disgust for a rancid political culture into cathartic (and frequently hilarious) orgasms of contempt.
“I wasn’t good enough and I was angry and fat and my standup didn’t amount to anything,” he says about those early days. Only when he got off the booze did he get fearless about letting his nonfreak flag fly.
“I never thought of my comedy as that ‘alternative’ in terms of its content. My friends were talking about their trouble with God and country,” he says. “I just wanted to go to Williams Sonoma, you know? I just want to get my sweater on. As a comedian, you have to be a genuine version of yourself. Otherwise, people know.”
With booze and time behind him (sober for twelve years now), Behrendt’s career started to take off. He scored an HBO special, which he called “Mantastic.” HBO allowed him the choice of directors and he chose a talented comic, writer, and director named Michael Patrick King. A couple of years later, King had become the executive producer of the hit show and cultural touchstone Sex and the City, and that show’s writing room contained five straight women and two gay men. King asked him to become a straight man for the show, but not in the usual sense.
“They needed someone to come in and say, ‘No, a straight guy wouldn’t carry a purse’ and ‘Yes, it’s OK to have a straight guy cry here. I would.’”
Behrendt agreed, with alacrity, to become the show’s consultant.
A bonus outcome of this work was the book he wrote with one of Sex and the City’s writers, Liz Tuccillo. The book, a volume of relationship advice that gave women a peek over the gender fence, was called He’s Just Not That Into You. It wound up first on the bestseller lists and then later in the movie houses. He has since produced several more books in the advice vein, including the latest, written with his wife, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt: It’s Called a Break Up Because It’s Broken.
Although he makes jokes about being just well-known enough to be mistaken for others more famous, he is an established comic. The work ethic he developed early on keeps him as busy as any midway hustler. He performs, films standup specials, produces DVDs and CDs, maintains a website and social media accounts, and even produces a comedy series. He also plays guitar in an instrumental surf-punk band called the Reigning Monarchs. (Aside to music types: think JFA meets Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet.)
“This level of activity has always been pretty average for the guys from my crew because when we started there was no work to be gotten as a standup. You did whatever you could do, whatever needed doing, so you could go out and do standup for free.”
“There’s a difference between being shocking and taking a risk,” he said. “Shocking is easy. Who can’t do it? Comedy is daring to take a risk, outing yourself personally, risking yourself.”
His current routine features a prolonged and baroque story that proves he is capable of practicing what he preaches. The story undresses his vanity in a way few men would ever willingly choose to do. It details his encounter with the actor Jon Krasinski (“Jim Halpert” on the television show The Office) in a hotel gym. Early in their relationship, Behrendt and his wife had played a fantasy dating game. Their “free pass” was the celebrity they were allowed to sleep with. Behrendt’s wife had recently informed him that she was changing hers to Krasinski.
“Oh,” said Behrendt. “Are we still playing?”
Seeing the fifteen-year younger actor on a treadmill inspired Behrendt to keep up. Well, let’s call it what it was: he raced the younger man. He nearly died in his attempt to keep up a pace twice normal and for four times longer, all the while intoning the mantra, “You can’t [have] my wife.” Behrendt then continues the competition in the weight room. The horrendous workout is so damaging to him that he winds up pinned to the bench with a choice: Drop the weights or soil himself. To hell with it, he says, dropping the weight. Take her.
The impression you get talking to Behrendt is that, no matter how many achievements he has now or winds up with in the years to come, he’s always going to be anxious for the next thing. He’s less of a mountain climber and more of a sailor. And as any sailor will tell you, no matter how far you sail, the horizon is always the same distance away.
Nowadays, Behrendt is as likely to be in residence somewhere as touring. He does a gig the last Tuesday of every month at the Los Angeles club Largo at the Coronet.
“It’s playing to the home crowd. When you go out and do an hour in a club [on tour], it’s difficult to write. You owe them a show, you can’t dick around.”
At the Largo, though, that’s what it’s about. Not just because it’s fun.
“I write on stage,” Behrendt said. The initial idea comes up in the course of the day, a bit from a conversation with his wife or something he witnesses. He will jot down the kernel of the idea as it occurs. Then, later in the day, he may tell the story, to see if it retains the necessary radioactive comedy half-life to make it on stage. And there, on stage, he will tell it, retell it, rework it, or discard it.
“I owed myself the opportunity to become a better comedian. If you’re in this for the long haul, you’re driven to replace things, you’re driven to move along.”
—Curt Hopkins ’91
Track-and-Field Master
At seventy, the former UO women’s athletic director is at the top of her game.
In hurdles, timing and balance are vital. First, you need a good start. Anticipate the gun but don’t get jumpy at the starting line. Then you have to steer your body so you hit the hurdle at just the right stride, with the correct leg in position to clear the bar and continue running smoothly. Repeat as needed and cross the finish line just as your energy runs out.
It works for Becky Sisley.
“When I looked at the scoreboard and saw the time, I was just elated,” says Sisley, who followed her own advice at the World Masters Athletics Championship in Lahti, Finland, last August and finished the 200-meter hurdles in 41.08 seconds, an American record for her age group and good for bronze.
The UO professor emerita wasn’t finished.
The heptathlon: 6,050 points and the gold medal. Eighty-meter hurdles: 17.34 seconds (bettering her own American record) and gold. Pole vault: 6 feet 10½ inches and gold; 4 x 400-meter relay: gold. Javelin: silver; 4 x 100-meter relay: silver.
Her age: seventy.
“In Finland,” Sisley says with a laugh, “I did nine events and I was just amazed that I survived.”
Sisley’s accomplishments at the world championships were impressive indeed. But amazing? Hardly.
Consider: Amaze means to surprise greatly or fill with astonishment. Sisley was just doing what she’s been doing the past twenty-two years, and the fact that she set a U.S. record in the 200-meter hurdles, an event that was new to her, comes as no shock at all.
In 1987, Sisley was forty-nine years old and eight years removed from her six-year tenure as the University of Oregon’s first women’s athletic director. There was an article in the local newspaper about a world master’s track championship coming to Hayward Field the next year; Sisley had always wanted to try the javelin and high jump, so she decided to train for the meet, much like a mere mortal decides to take up collecting coins or keeping scrapbooks.
The following spring, she competed against seasoned track-and-field veterans and former Olympians in the javelin, high jump, long jump, and triple jump, finishing fourth in three of the events.
Less than a year of training and she was holding her own against the best. Remarkable.
At nationals two years later, Sisley won five gold medals. Amazing.
In 1994, she heard about a pole vault clinic, and decided to give it a shot. That August, she won gold at nationals. Borderline absurd.
But all the success on the track has come at a price.
“I was a workaholic,” Sisley admits, something that harkens back to her time as women’s athletic director, when she oversaw the main thrust of Title IX compliance, no mean feat. By the time she retired, the stress was so great she was suffering from symptoms her doctor thought were caused by a brain tumor.
This Herculean work ethic benefited her early in her track-and-field career but has posed a problem recently. “It takes a lot of dedication and commitment and time, and it takes an effect on your life,” Sisley says. “I’m not as well-balanced as I’d like to be. That’s what I’m working on now.”
And, like the hurdles, she’s working on timing.
One Thursday late last January, the sun was out in Eugene, and Sisley went to Hayward to run stairs. She was feeling good when something occurred to her. “I thought, ‘Uh oh, can I really do this because I have to run the hurdles tomorrow?’” she recalls. “You have to be careful about doing the same kinds of things over and over, repetition.”
At her age, injury is a real concern. In 2005, she herniated a disc and had to skip nationals because she could barely walk. The only reason she went to worlds was to support her teammates. (But being who she is, she still threw the javelin, albeit while standing still. She finished fourth).
Since then, she’s become wiser when it comes to working out. “Less is best,” she says. “If in doubt, don’t do it.”
And with that need for timing her workouts so she doesn’t overextend one part of her body comes another of her frustrations: logistics. “I struggle with what to do when and where, worrying about the weather.”
If she does find a place to practice the pole vault or hurdles, she still has to set them up, which can be just as exhausting as the training itself. There’s “old folks yoga,” as she calls it, for flexibility. Weight training twice a week. Exercises to strengthen her core.
It takes its toll, and Sisley is trying to balance this with other activities.
Recently, she took up golf and is planning on attending an academy this year. Don’t be surprised if she makes waves on the Ladies Professional Golf Association’s Legends Tour next year.
—Matt Tiffany, MS ’07
Finding Eve, Virgin Flies,
and the Origin of Clothes
Molecular geneticist Mark Stoneking has been one very busy man.
It’s not every UO alumnus who, within a dozen years of graduation, can formulate theories that make the cover of Newsweek and be the focus of an article in Time. By jumping into the deep end of molecular genetics following his master’s and doctoral studies, Mark Stoneking ’77 quickly achieved international recognition and, with it, a share of controversy.
In 1987, while a postdoctoral fellow at UC–Berkeley, Stoneking and two associate researchers (Rebecca Cann and Allan Wilson) published findings in Nature magazine that challenged previous notions of humanity’s origins. The trio’s main assertion was that all human beings alive today share a certain part of their genetic inheritance (called mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA) with one woman who lived between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago in Africa. (mtDNA is a unique and powerful research tool because, unlike DNA, its sequence is passed directly from mother to offspring without modification by the father.)
The media went wild over the implications, and Charles Petit, then a science writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, christened our mutual ancestor “mitochondrial Eve.”
“Allan Wilson preferred ‘our common mother,’ but obviously that wasn’t as catchy as Eve,” Stoneking says. “I have mixed feelings about it—on the one hand, it’s a very powerful image, that of a woman whom we’re all descended from. On the other hand, it easily lent itself to misinterpretation.” Unlike the Bible’s version of Eve—half of the very first human couple—the researchers’ Eve was just one among perhaps 20,000 contemporaries of her species. Their Eve was, in terms of genetics, a lottery winner: while her genes went from generation to generation, the lineages of every other female from that period all eventually died out.
That concept jolted many paleoanthropologists, rocking their belief that the worldwide spread of humanity occurred as early humans interbred with older hominid types such as Homo erectus and possibly even Neanderthals in multiple regions of the Eurasian and African continents. They vociferously objected to Stoneking’s conclusions, and a heated debate over “mitochondrial Eve” rages to this day.
What most disturbed critics was Stoneking’s assertion that this common matrilineal ancestor reproduced our ancient great-grandmothers a mere two hundred thousand years ago. Paleoanthropologists believe the last common ancestor lived more than a million years ago. Even more upsetting to some, other geneticists working from Stoneking’s theories then found evidence that our most recent common patrilineal ancestor, a “Y-chromosome Adam,” probably lived about half as long ago as Eve.
While the results of his research put Stoneking in the middle of energetic scientific dispute, getting to his rather thrilling conclusions “took thousands of hours of fairly tedious work,” he says. Still, the critical ‘aha!’ moment took place one afternoon in Berkeley after a computer had pieced together the vast amount of data the researchers had collected in their worldwide survey of mtDNA types. He spread the twenty or so pages of computer printout on a laboratory table and began scouring the figures. “I asked Wilson to help, and the two of us sat hunched over the printout, counting mutations.” Then they saw it, an obvious and unmistakable split, on one side of which appeared only African mtDNA types. “We sort of grinned at each other—this was the first clear evidence we had from the data that the ancestor was African—and for that space in time, we were the only two people on Earth privy to that knowledge.”
Fanning the flames of contention even higher, in 1997 Stoneking took on the Neanderthals. From his office in the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (where he is currently a University of Leipzig Honorary Professor of Biological Anthropology), Stoneking assisted his department head, Svante Pääbo, in completing an analysis of Neanderthal DNA that was more than 50,000 years old. Their conclusion? It had not contributed in any way to the mtDNA of modern humans. This caused another uproar among paleoanthropologists, who’d been willing to bet the farm that Neanderthals and modern humans had, at least in Europe, crossbred at some point.
Stoneking has a knack for doing science that captures the popular imagination; not long ago, for example, he figured out when primitive people stopped running around naked and started wearing clothes. Using a “molecular clock approach” his team dated the genetic divergence between head lice and body lice, the latter commonly residing in clothing. “That told us when clothing became important, and we concluded it was a surprisingly recent innovation—around 70,000 years ago.” Both Nova, the PBS science series, and a Discovery Channel crew interviewed him this year about these findings.
While Stoneking remembers his undergraduate days in the UO Department of Anthropology fondly, not everything went perfectly. “My first hands-on research experience arose when Ed Novitski, a professor in genetics who was investigating chromosome mechanics in fruit flies, hired me as a student assistant,” Stoneking recalls. “He put me on a project producing a complex chromosomal rearrangement by an elaborate scheme of raising and irradiating lots of male flies, and then crossing them with virgin females with a different chromosome arrangement” in search of a rare mutation. “We had to check thousands of flies to see if we had the ones we wanted.” Stoneking pauses to smile. “I got mixed up and I ended up keeping the wrong flies! When I realized my error, I went with some trepidation to tell Novitski of my mistake.” The professor had a reputation for a short temper, so Stoneking was nervous that his research career was about to end before it ever really got started. Fortunately, his mentor took the news calmly. “I learned two valuable lessons,” he says, “always make sure you know exactly what you’re doing before you start an experiment, and give students a chance to learn from their mistakes.”
Stoneking is currently using molecular genetics to investigate anthropological questions concerning the origin, relationships, history, structure, and migration patterns of human populations. “Depending upon the question, we focus on either contemporary populations or ancient specimens,” he says. “Just now we’re looking at genetic perspectives or variation in the Caucasus, India, and various Pacific migratory groups. We’re ultimately interested in identifying and characterizing signals of selection in recent human evolution.” In typical Stoneking fashion, the hard-core science is shedding new light on questions of general interest—such as why African Pygmies are so short. His research team’s findings suggest it may be “a consequence of alterations in their thyroid hormone metabolism due to adaptation to an iodine-deficient tropical rainforest diet.”
His wide-ranging research has brought him numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, and has taken him to Zambia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. His position at the world-renowned Max Planck Institute has him at the pinnacle of his profession. In terms of individual growth, that’s quite an evolution.
—Joseph Lieberman
Trials of the Links and Diamonds
Exploring golf and baseball from a legal perspective
Imagine you’re playing golf with a friend. He sees you down the fairway looking for your ball, but lines up his next shot anyway, and swings away. He wasn’t aiming at you, but his ball smacks you in the head, causing injury.
Should you sue him? If so, for what? Maybe negligence. He didn’t exercise reasonable and ordinary care for your safety, right? Didn’t even yell, “Fore!” However, golf is a sporting event, and injury is an understood risk of playing the game. Liability may only apply to willful and wanton conduct, and you know he didn’t hurt you on purpose.
But you’re mad (that’s the main thing, right?), so you sue. Do you have a case?
According to John H. (“Jack”) Minan, JD ’72, a University of San Diego law professor and avid golfer, attorneys who play golf wonder about things like this all the time. He just took it a step further. In 2007, Minan wrote The Little Green Book of Golf Law, a compilation of actual cases of golf-related disputes that went beyond the reach of the rule book and had to be settled in the legal system. Think of it as a lay reader’s guide to where the rules of sport give way to the rule of law.
The incident described above is one of them. (The plaintiff—he’s the guy who got plunked in the head—sued for negligence and eventually lost.) There are nineteen cases in all, arranged in chapters headed “Hole One,” “Hole Two,” and so on, to match the number of holes in a round of golf, plus the proverbial “nineteenth hole” at the clubhouse bar. Fittingly, “Hole Nineteen” is about a man who knocks back a few too many beers, forgets he locked his clubs in his car before commencing to drink, then assaults a golf course employee for allegedly stealing his clubs. (He escaped having to pay damages by declaring bankruptcy.)
The resolution of “Hole Twelve” is a bit more uplifting. It details the case of Casey Martin, the Eugene golfer with a physical disability who famously brought suit against the Professional Golfers Association, alleging its ban on using golf carts in tournaments violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Martin, who now coaches the UO men’s golf team, won the case, which Minan cites as a rare example of a golf-related lawsuit reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
Each “hole” in The Little Green Book of Golf Law presents an easy-to-read case summary that occasionally bogs down in legalese, but always provides insight into the machinations of the American justice system. It has sold over 10,000 copies so far, a number Minan describes as “not John Grisham, but respectable.”
Jack Minan’s career path has taken him into just about every legal area but sports law. These include land use, property, water rights, comparative law (comparing the legal systems of different countries), and, most recently, issues related to water and air quality. Beginning in 1999, he served two terms on the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, and he was also on the Board of Governors of the Southern California Wetlands Recovery Project. He joined the USD faculty in 1977, after having taught at the University of Toledo. Before teaching, he spent a year as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Former UO colleagues aren’t surprised by the variety in his career. “Jack was just good at everything all the way around,” remembers Barbara Aldave, who has taught at the UO law school since becoming the first woman on its faculty in 1970. “Jack had a little more imagination [than the] typical nose-to-the-grindstone type of law student.”
“Jack was hard-working and serious, and he enjoyed it,” adds Professor Emeritus Gene Scoles, who was then law school dean. He says Minan was also “the kind of guy who would take responsibility in matters that would put him on the hot seat for a while.”
Minan demonstrated this quality by getting Aldave and classmate Jody Stahancyk, JD ’73, admitted into the previously all-male legal fraternity, Phi Delta Phi. The move got the UO chapter kicked out of the international organization, but Minan lobbied successfully for its reinstatement the following year.
Once out of school, Minan was eager to find legal fields that offered newly developing possibilities. So perhaps his versatility is best explained by his simple statement, “I kind of look forward to different areas.” But a light-hearted, quick-reading book on golf law? Where did the idea for that come from?
“It started simply because I have a shameless love affair with the game of golf,” he insists. So he started collecting legal cases for a book that he originally called The Real Rules of Golf. Then came the rejection slips from twenty-five publishers before he found the one willing to take a chance on him, right? Hardly. Without using an agent, Minan showed his manuscript to Rick Paszkiet, an acquisitions editor for ABA Publishing, the publishing house of the American Bar Association, and “we had a contract in no time.”
If that isn’t enough to infuriate every frustrated unpublished writer, there’s more. Paszkiet says he immediately thought, “Wow, is this a great opportunity for us!” He didn’t wait long to ask Minan to follow up with a book on baseball law.
So Minan teamed up with Kevin Cole, dean of USD’s law school, to write The Little White Book of Baseball Law. Published in 2009, it mimics the golf book’s format by offering eighteen innings (a double-header, as he says in the preface) of legal disputes over such things as ticket scalping, bean-ball pitches, image and mascot trademarks, Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption—everything but the infield fly rule.
Both books rank among ABA Publishing’s top sellers. Their success inspired Paszkiet to launch a whole series of Little Books, featuring other authors with knowledge of different legal areas. The Little Red Book of Wine Law is already out, soon to be followed by books on coffee law (presumably brown) and music law (blue?). In addition, Minan is working on his third book for the series, which he says will deal with sports law and the amateur athlete.
“Jack provided the seed for the series,” says Paszkiet. “He’s an absolutely great guy to work with. He’s an academic, but he also understands the day-to-day demands of the publishing business.”
The Little Book series isn’t likely to supplant air and water quality as Jack Minan’s next legal specialty, but it’s proving to be a fun side gig. “The golf book has been remarkable in that . . . I get a lot of speaking engagements,” he says. A golf tournament sponsor even hosted him as a guest in its corporate box. So far, he says, “it has been a remarkable ride.”
—Dana Magliari, MA ’98
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
June 3
UO Senior Send-off
EMU Amphitheatre
Eugene
July 7
UO President’s Reception
Singapore
July 9
UO President’s Reception
Hong Kong
August 6
Alumni Relay for Life Team
Lane County Chapter
August 21 and 28
Incoming UO Freshmen Send-offs
Portland, Puget Sound,
Southern and Northern California
Go to uoalumni.com/events
for detailed information
Surviving Oregon
My mother is in the kitchen washing dishes, wearing a black apron and hot pink gloves. The White Stripes blare out of a little stereo next to the sink. She turns off the water and the music and looks at me, smiling. “Your father keeps trying to drown the family!”
She is referring to his delightfully terrifying habit of dragging my family out on ambitious outdoor excursions. He’s never tried to drown anyone on purpose. And no one has been seriously injured. Yet.
“Oh, come on, Barbara, just on the rafting trip!” My dad loves bickering with my mother about this particular topic. It gives him an excuse to rehash the family’s adventures.
“Well, you almost killed Katie on the river, and you almost let Warren fly off the cliff into the ocean when we went to the Sea Lion Caves!” My mom looks at me for support. “And you and Alex got caught in that rip tide in Hawaii! And when we went to Thailand and rode those elephants, he made you all lie under their feet! Who knows if they were even trained!” Warren, my little brother, walks into the kitchen.
“I have a fear of heights because of that sea lion trip!” he says. My dad grins, despite the accusations. He commutes to work on an electric bike, so he’s wearing full spandex and a helmet. Most of the other doctors have sports cars. Usually when he dresses like this, my mom tells him that he should change because his “crotch looks obscene,” but today she refrains.
My father was a rock climber before he had children. Now he just takes his kids on adventures. “He’s the good kind of crazy, not the bad kind,” says my mother, who almost drowned for the first time in 1979, before she married my father. He took her on a “date” that consisted of jumping on a mattress and careening down the Truckee River.
“It was a white-water rafting trip and we didn’t have any life vests,” she says. I asked her why she kept seeing him posttrauma. “Well, I guess because he rescued me. He probably has some kind of hero complex.”
I’ve personally almost drowned twice. The first was on the gray and stormy Oregon coast. I was only four or five years old. I waded around in the frigid water of the surf while my parents were supposed to be keeping an eye on me. My dad was talking about skimboarding and surfing, and my mom was taking care of my baby brother. The cold ocean stung every nerve in my chubby little feet and I could feel sand fleas wiggling under my toes. Squatting down to fill up a bucket with foamy tidewater and brown sand, I let my mind wander to dolphins, mermaids, and orca whales. I must have waded pretty far into the ocean as I spaced out to thoughts of dazzling Lisa Frank–inspired sea creatures and The Rainbow Fish, one of my favorite books. I snapped out of it when a huge wave knocked me down and the tide grabbed my ankles and pulled me under. I tried to hold my breath but I was being tossed about and choking on salty water. My eyes burned and I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified, but I kept flailing, hoping that I might be saved.
Strong hands yanked me from the water. My dad carried me to the dunes where my mother wrapped me up tightly in a sandy towel. My favorite shirt had been torn off by the waves. I couldn’t stop coughing and I was totally naked. Even my aqua socks had been ripped from my fragile little body by the angry ocean. I sobbed, but after walking back to the beach house and sitting by the fire I felt a little better. I told my dad that my feet hurt.
“I’m a doctor,” he said, smiling. “I know what pain is, and you’re not in pain.” Somehow this cold, scientific assessment of my condition made me feel better, despite its blatant inaccuracy. Something about being firmly told that I was fine made me comfortable.
Then there was the time when I was in fifth grade. My whole family drove from our Southeast Portland home to the Rogue River, where we planned on rafting for a week with a group of like-minded adventure seekers. Most of them were in their late twenties and thirties and very experienced. One night over camp dinner, my dad decided to tell a story about a Navy Seal who went white-water rafting with his family. Apparently, he spotted a deer in the river, so he put his hunting knife between his teeth and crept into the water. He covertly power stroked to the animal, slit its throat, and swam back to shore with its carcass to feed his family. My dad looked ecstatic.
“Maybe you can do that with your family one day!” he said to one of the guides, who had just dropped out of Navy Seal training himself.
It was a few days into the trip when my dad suggested that I take the kayak out with him.
“Do you think I can do it?” I asked. I felt honored and excited to be chosen out of my siblings but I was nervous about the power of the rapids and my ability to effectively navigate the water with my flimsy arms.
“Of course! Why not, you’ve been kayaking before!” my dad replied. The last time I kayaked was on placid water at Oxbow Park.
As we crashed through the water, I tried my best to propel the vessel downstream and guide it away from the rocks. The rapids surged and my heartbeat quickened with fear and excitement. Just as I started to feel confident, we went over a particularly large rock. I bounced up into the air. As I fell, the churning river swallowed me up. The current swept me under the raft. It trapped me with its yellow circle of inflated tubing and held me beneath its textured rubber floor. Sharp river rocks scraped and pounded my body. I struggled below the water for a long time before my dad got hold of one of my hands.
Even though he saved me, my dad felt a little guilty. He wondered why he chose to take his kids, including my little brother (who was only seven) on a white-water excursion. At least he wasn’t overprotective. I feel lucky that I was thrust into life, instead of sheltered from it. By pushing us out into the wilderness he gave us a taste for adventure, but sometimes he worries it was too dangerous.
“What would I say if something happened?” he recently worried aloud.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Because it was fun.”
He’s right. It was fun.
Kate Degenhardt is in her senior year in the Clark Honors College at the UO and is studying magazine writing at the School of Journalism and Communication. This is a slightly shortened version of the winning essay in the student category of this year’s Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.
Web Extra!
Read both the winning essays and finalist essays here.
