Let No One Enter

LET NO ONE ENTER      

A Novel about Fort Bragg in the 1930s

by Glenn A. Reed

© 2018 by Glenn C. Reed

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Any historical events, institutions, businesses, and public offices referred to in this novel, as well as all other names, characters, places, events, and incidents, are either used fictitiously or are entirely products of the author’s imagination.

First paperback edition

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-7324647-0-4

Book design and production by Bookshop Santa Cruz Publishing Services

Santa Cruz, California

www.bookshopsantacruz.com

Cover art, "Redwoods," © 1932 by Fort Bragg Union High School. Previously published in Breath of Ocean 1932. Used by permission.

Chapter titles art, "Cone of Coast Redwood," courtesy of the University of California Press.

"The Coast, Noyo, Pudding Creek Bridge, The Wood Chopper" © 1932 by Fort Bragg Union High School. Previously published in Breath of Ocean 1932. Used by permission.

"The Old Eucalyptus," "Redwood," untitled creek, cypress, and train track scenes © 1933 by Fort Bragg Union High School. Previously published in Breath of Ocean 1933. Used by permission.

Photograph of Glenn A. Reed © 1937 by Fort Bragg Union High School. Previously published in Breath of Ocean 1937. Used by permission.

Prologue

Where are they going? They must be going somewhere. These Fort Braggers, with their physical vitality, live a distinctive life. The Azorean immigrants live alone for months, herding flocks in the hills until they talk sheep language. The Italians, with their seamed, swarthy faces set for the laugh or sneer, seem to hoard their gentleness for nature, not for man. The Finns keep their trim fishing boats in fine order, scraped and cleaned and calked and painted, but they appear to neglect the women they’d married in a moment of passion. Or so it seemed to me. Along with the Pomo, native to this area for three thousand years, these and other immigrants made up the people of Fort Bragg, California.

Suppose I wanted to enter their life. Will the Finn let me into his world? Over his dead body. He will resist all but Finns, and even most of them, because the Finnish colony has its snob levels as clearly defined as the Italians. The Italians resent the white Finn and German northerners with a hatred close to absolute. Only an Italian is worthy of an Italian, so the elders say.

Their young are attracted to the forbidden fruit. What is forbidden must be experienced, and the cultural break is made to the unhappiness of all. The Finn family will lose its prized bloodline. The Italian family will lose its Catholic tradition. The Germans, their orderly lifestyle. Young marrieds will be tossed like shuttlecocks back and forth until they become worn and frayed by the eternal tug of war, and finally they will know what it is to be rootless and cast out even in the town where they were born, in the only life they have ever known.

Everything seems so strange in this world. And the things that you do, without thinking, are not the things to do. Finns simply don’t eat salami sandwiches, and they can’t stand olive oil dishes. Finns don’t show emotion in the manner of the Italians. And Italians are repulsed by even the commonest act or gesture or unintentional utterance that can blow up a storm, which custom dulls but never obliterates. Tolerance is not accepted.

So where are they going—or are they going anywhere? Due to a chance encounter in 1935, I was about to find out.

1 

Leaving the Sanctuary

There it was, five years all bundled, labeled, neatly tied, awaiting final removal: term papers, examinations, mementos were now mostly crammed into a trunk in my car, upended in its rumble seat. Now was the time for one last look around Room 4, Old Union, my residence for the past year. The room was now almost bare. This last memory would be a short look, for I was already behind schedule. It had taken longer than I had expected to put away those five years. They’d kept emerging layer after layer from drawers, seeping out of books and overstuffed folders—an academic gloss, a fragment of verse, papers, papers, wisps of vanished time.

Enough. I had started by arranging, classifying, eliminating—the tidy academic approach. But how do you classify incomprehensible fragments? So in desperation I had stuffed the remnants of that life into boxes, tied them down securely, unwilling to leave them, hoping that time might somehow restore meaning.

Enough. I’d had enough of ideas, speculations, interruptions. The rest could remain in the dust for old Patty to sweep into his trash burner.

I recalled the words of some of my professors as they transitioned along in their lives: Nothing is ever lost, but nothing is ever recaptured. Old, sentimental Howard Judson Hall had said that, sinking back into tears as he ended his last lecture. Nothing is more boring than sin. Sin is a deadly cycle of sameness spliced only by danger of exposure. So had Marge Bailey concluded her lectures of Shakespeare’s villains.

It was a relief to go, but I had never expected those years to whimper away so tamely. A year ago, surrounded by classmates excited by an ending that seemed a beginning, it might have been different. But I had stayed on until all that remained was institutional property—an empty dormitory at the end of a long, unused summer. One little joggle of collegiate time and a generation had been wiped out. You live out your generation in college and then you shove on—with luck and with someplace to shove into. But in 1935 there had been no such place. Jobs had dried up. Opportunity wasn’t knocking that year; in fact hadn’t knocked for several years. I thought it had ceased to exist until it stood before me one day just two weeks ago, fresh from the redwoods of Fort Bragg, and beckoned me north. Where was Fort Bragg?

Board will confirm appointment. School opens Monday. Fifteen minutes to make decision, and then he would need to leave. Needing a teacher, he shifted his specifications to fit the object presented. Needing a job, I shifted my demands to fit the object presented. Interested? OK, done.

By this simple logic of fate, Fort Bragg had become my future, a small dot at the end of the line, governed by a tall mathematician with a lumberjack’s stride and a strange friendly remoteness.

With my Stanford employment completed and car finally packed, I stop-ped to take one last look around the empty Room 4 on the second floor of the Union. Bare, except for the bed, dresser, and two chairs, and the eternal dormitory water pipes. I had snapped the lock on the door and dropped down to The Cellar for a last cup of coffee. It was just 8 a.m. Should be able to make it to Fort Bragg by noon or one o’clock. That would give me an hour or two to spare before I was due there.

Only the overstuffed chair—now a scarecrow of springs and slats and strings, but once our pride of hospitality—remained. I had donated it to the big-game bonfire last year, but the committee of freshmen hustlers, after vainly struggling to shove it through the window, ceremoniously thanked me and departed, unwilling to wrestle it down five flights of stairs. Now another generation would inherit the problem of getting rid of it. The rest was impermeable institutional equipment: two scarred tables, two de-slatted wooden chairs, two iron cots lumped with striped mattresses, a washbasin, a windowed alcove overlooking Fraternity Row and Hoover Hill.

Two large windows opposite the doors overlooked the bullpens five stories below, littered with fragments of celebrative bottles. Life had deserted the place, but some feelings remained: returning late after long hours in the library, seeing tier after tier of square, unblinking eyes of Encina, ducking into The Cellar filled with smoke and steam and peanuts and coffee and rustling wrappers and voices, gulping down a cup of black brew.

Now it was time for my final trip down these stairs. A simple matter of timing: launch forward, driving hard, start with left, pivot on right, hold on to bannister for stability. Up, round, up, round, stairs groaning, feet thumping, echoing, thundering in the stairwell. Finally I swung into the last pivot and hit the slab, just missing Patty as he backed behind the stairwell for safety.

One o’ these days, ya damned fool, one o’ these days y’ll come down and never get up again, temptin’ fate that way.

Guess this is the time. My last trip. Everything’s out that I can get out. Here’s the key to 514. It’s all yours now.

OK, Ranfree. They all leave sooner or later. Glad you’re finally pulling out.

Patrick—the red-haired, bushy-browed, wild-eyed Irishman. The Honors Graduate janitor who had spent years working his way through law school then stubbornly refused to finish. Patrick, the great Nietzschean nonconformist who refused to leave the scene of his failure. Or was it failure? Catholic orphan who hated Catholicism. Brilliant scholar who detested intellectualism. Factualism finally overpowered. He turned music-lover, poet-mystic rebel janitor. I work to live, not live to work, he would shout to all who tried to goad him back into the economic system. Mind is the mortality of man that must be subdued by the heart. Never let it interfere with life! Work, like materialism, is either the slave or the master. He would refuse to be loyal to a system that chews the guts out of man.

He was full of them, Patrick. Nostrils quivering, he would inhale like a storm, sniffing the air for some new heresy, but his feet were caught in the meshes of conformity, or so I thought then. I used to listen to him just for the kicks, baiting him with clichés to achieve extravagant denunciations. But after all that happened over the years, I was not so sure. Was I starting to become a convert?

He stood beside my car while I dumped my lamp and typewriter and shoebox onto the front seat, then turned to him: We’ve had some good evenings, Patty—good music, good talk. I’ll miss that. The remark was a mistake. Patty, the sentimental Irishman, hated sentiment.

No regrets, no restrictions! Just be glad you escaped! Patty never talked, he shouted, pontificated, gestured, dramatized, whether his audience was one or many. This Harvard of the West is a sepulcher of sterile intellectualism. Make no mistake about it—you stay too long around a place like this and all your blood feelings dry up. You forget how to think with your bowels. D. H. Lawrence saw that and got out of the university before it destroyed him. Feel, man, feel. Never be ashamed of your feelings. Universities have forgotten that the mind and the blood and the bowels are all linked together. Think of your bowels. Feel with your mind. Remember that, Ranfree, remember that.

I should, I assured him. You’ve said it often enough. But I don’t know. It’s not so easy to transform ideas into action. Anyway, I’ll remember, and so long, Patty. I’ll look you up when I get back this way.

Patty was halfway through the door when he turned and shook his arm at me, pumping it up and down, Remember! Chin jutting out, eyes blazing wide and fierce, he offered a final admonition: Remember that futures can only be built out of discarded pasts. Man is ever lonely but never alone. So long as he believes in himself he has the companionship of the immortals.

Knowing Patty to be against emotional farewells, I just switched on the engine. Good old Patty. Yes, he would still be there. Every year ushered in a new generation and moved out the old one. I pulled out onto the tarry pavement, heading for my future.

Settling into the driver’s seat, I tooled slowly around the engineering building, passed the corner of the geology building, the philosophy corridor, passed Sequoia Hall, the old chemistry building, then the long, straight line of palms leading to El Camino Real. I passed the beer gardens, passed Stone’s Cellar, and the memories lingered and accumulated and then faded.

2 

The Interview

That last week at Stanford had indeed been a hectic one. It was on a Tuesday, in the last week in August 1935, that I had interviewed with two administrators from Williams and found out that they wanted—aside from an all-around expert coach, a biologist, a historian, an English teacher—the most important of qualifications: a good church member. In college I had built up my conception of teaching as a life mixed with study, creative work, and freedom—economic as well as intellectual freedom.

I left the interview rather discouraged. It was not the first of its kind that I had endured: softheaded men content and smug in their established principalships, allowing precedent to dictate their choice of teacher. If the last teacher was fat and bland and Presbyterian, a thin Methodist wouldn’t have a chance, even if he was as brilliant as Socrates. Brilliancy, it appeared, was a decided handicap in the teaching game.

So I’d returned to my usual occupation of waiting on customers from behind a library loan desk at Stanford University. I had just returned to the job of reshelving books when Patty appeared and told me I was wanted at the front desk.

There was only one person at the desk, a rather old, loosely assembled man whose clothes immediately told me he certainly could not have been a product of Stanford or of San Francisco or vicinity. I addressed him, and he introduced himself as Mr. Ainsworth. Rather hesitatingly, he told me he had been looking over the records of teaching candidates at the employment office. He happened to notice my record stating that I had been doing library work for some time.

Would you consider a teaching job in Fort Bragg? he asked. Before I could reply, he went on, Of course, I rather expected to get a woman teacher. We have always had a teacher to take care of our library, and of course you would have to take charge of the library as well as the English department. They are rather expecting me to bring back a woman, but I don’t believe they would have any great objection to having a man in the position.

I mumbled a reply and asked where Fort Bragg was. It turns out it was a small lumbering town on the coast about 160 miles north of San Francisco. Evidently it wasn’t on the regular highway, because I hadn’t gone through it on my trips north. I asked what would be the nature of the work. It seemed I would have to agree to teach night school as well as day school. Of course there would be a little extra salary for the night school, but all of that could be discussed later. After a brief pause I said I would indeed be interested. I said I was very anxious to get started in the teaching profession.

I can’t let you know for sure, but I think I can say you have a pretty good chance. I still have to interview several women in Palo Alto before I go back, but you should hear from me in a day or so if there is anything to hope for from this interview.

He started to walk away and then came back to ask me what was the best procedure to go about getting a few books out of the library. It seemed his sister in Oakland wanted a few books that could not be obtained from the California library system. I told him about the inter-library loan system; I didn’t want to take a chance with taking the books out in my own name, because sometimes that procedure leads to disaster.

The next day I received a telegram from the superintendent at Fort Bragg, Kerry Baker, stating that I was being offered a job teaching English and night school there at a salary of $1,750 per year. I was to wire my acceptance immediately and be present at the teachers’ meeting August 31 at two o’clock in the afternoon.

August 31. Why, that was the coming Saturday! I would have to give up my trip to Pasadena, long looked forward to, and going to the Hollywood Bowl with my friend Ruth. Besides, there was the possibility of a job at the San Rafael Military Academy, which would be so much closer to San Francisco. That job didn’t pay as well as the one I had just been offered, but then again, it was close to Stanford. The proximity to Stanford and its library collections would make it easier to successfully finish my thesis.

Wire acceptance immediately.

I delayed a whole day, and then I wired my acceptance. After all, if it was going to be a venture, I might as well make a clean break. Some people must live up there, otherwise they wouldn’t have a school. And if they could stand it, I guess I could, at least for nine months out of the year.

I told my supervisor, Mr. Owens, that same day that I had accepted a teaching position, so I would be leaving the library. There was no trouble from that angle. There were always others only too glad to step into my full-time library job. Besides, I had three weeks of vacation coming that Owens had already planned on my taking starting the first week of September.

I really felt no qualms about leaving. College atmosphere was beginning to seem a trifle artificial and stilted to me. I had been there too long to continue to hold in my mind any of the usual glamour that attends an alma mater. I still contend there never is a more unusual cross-section of society than one gets at a college. All the freaks, except utter imbeciles and idiots, could be found there. I actually felt a release, a freedom from the fetters of my library job. Along with hashing and coaching tennis, working so many hours had kept me tied down through my college years. Not only was my class work over, now my employment here was finished too.

I looked back over the summer. Actually I had accomplished very little, aside from the passing of the master’s exam in English lit. I had made a small beginning on my thesis on Henry James, but it was no more than an introduction to the subject. And that was about all there’d been to my summer. I’d even dodged all dramatic activity, including the radio play.

My final day at the library was Friday, August 30, and I worked until late afternoon to get in the proper number of hours. I would have to start north early in the morning if I hoped to arrive in Fort Bragg in time for the teachers’ meeting.

When I returned to Room 4 after work, I learned that my buddy O’Neill had left for some Friday night fun in San Francisco, leaving behind him a road map on which was outlined my route to Fort Bragg. Under it was a meager little note stating that he couldn’t face a farewell so was just leaving like this. I had planned to take him to the city that night, going up for a final celebration before I went into hibernation for at least three or four months.

Just as I finished packing, my friend Charles Denny came in, and we decided that the occasion indeed called for a little activity in the city. That turned out to be quite an evening. It began with an Italian dinner floated in wine and coffee royal. From there we went to a show—a burlesque to be specific—and then on for a little slumming. When we finally got back to the campus, it was around three in the morning.

3 

The Journey

I had traced the map’s black line out of San Francisco until it became a palsied scratch along the coast that staggered into Cape Mendocino and never came out. I’d guessed it would take about five hours, even allowing for lunch and some narrow roads.

Already behind me were the sandstone arches and red tiled roofs of the campus, surrounded by parched brown, luxuriant groves of eucalyptus and oak, swaths of polo fields, multiple swimming pools and tennis courts, acres of Sunken Diamond, a man-created volcano called a stadium—a playground for giants, for the propagation and training of the intellectual elite on a farm intended for the breeding and training of horses. That was Patty’s way of putting it, anyway. And he would add that the studs far outnumbered the geniuses.

It was after 9 a.m. when I turned off Palm Drive onto El Camino and settled down to the familiar drive to San Francisco. Highway of celebrations—Palace big-game nights, Hal Grayson at the Mark, Anson Weeks at the Frantic, Pinky Tomlin, Mills blind-daters at the Yacht Club, North Beach stags prowling Columbus and Kearny and Grand for the warm-up, and McAllister for the finale. But today San Francisco was just an obstruction on my way to an unknown future called Fort Bragg, a place I hadn’t even heard of two weeks ago—and now still just a printed name on a map at the end of a hairline that ended in a fly spot on a promontory bulging into the Pacific.

All year I had waited for something to turn up, and then suddenly, casually, there it was: an ordinary workday at the library; a summons to the front desk; a large man standing there, fumbling his wire-rimmed glasses in one hand and a sheaf of papers in another.

Ainsworth, principal of high school. Last-minute resignation, one day to find replacement. Available? Interested? Salary $1,500 with something extra for library and night class. Would I consider?

I considered: present income $50 a month with luck. Prospects? Nil. What could I lose? Nothing. Another year at Stanford? Disastrous. Even the last year had been near disaster, muddling through MA exams, act of duty, something to show. But another year? Unthinkable.

I had considered. Ainsworth was shaking hands. Board would confirm appointment. Faculty meeting Saturday, August 31. School starts the following Monday. Fifteen minutes from a shake of the hand to the shake of the hand. By this simple logic, Fort Bragg became my future. Soon it was confirmed by telegram: SCHOOL BOARD APPOINTS YOU SENIOR ENGLISH TEACHER LIBRARIAN STOP SALARY 1725 STOP MEET SATURDAY, SEPT. 9, 2 P.M. AINSWORTH.

Hence I found myself at Sausalito Ferry now, joining the lines of waiting cars. The ferry blasted a warning, reversed propellers, vibrated in at an angle, striking pilings on one side and then the other before settling into a groaning groove. Cars rushed out, the deck buckling with each release. Then the tide reversed, and the cars started pouring down the wooden ramp, sinking with a quash of the deck into the hold. By the time I reached the deck, we were already out into the Bay. Alcatraz, Golden Gate. Past. Future. Choppy. The tide sucked strongly, forcing the ferry to half-face the current to stay on course. Angel Island. Deserted. San Francisco rapidly disappeared into the onrushing fog. Coffee and donuts were gone. I was separated completely from any known shore, passing all landmarks known or unknown, old gone, new not yet discovered. Then a long, mournful wail of the ferry whistle. Black shadows loomed ahead, then a sudden stillness. The ferry leapt into life with groans and creaks and shudders as the propellers thrashed through the waters in reverse. Then came a jarring, followed by scrapings, the rattling of chains, the ignitions of many cars. Off the buckling deck, onto the clattering streets of Sausalito, the cars inched forward. I made my way through the winding streets, heading back to the highway. The fog was thinning over Mount Tamalpais. Blue skies and the golden-brown hills of autumn were visible once again.

It was close to eleven before I reached the open highway. Now I drove freely through open country loping over hills—San Rafael, Cotati, Petaluma, Santa Rosa. Two hours and less than eighty miles covered. Skip lunch and push right through. No margin now. Houses thinned out, the road thinned out, the trees and hills closed in. Healdsburg, Geyserville, Cloverdale. Even the names shifted from saints to nature. Out of the Christian into the pagan.

Outside of Cloverdale, a sign pointed left to Fort Bragg, while straight ahead was the main highway to Ukiah. I hesitated, remembering two other crossings on the map. Might as well stay on the main road as long as possible. At Ukiah I stopped for gas. Fort Bragg? Twenty miles and turn at the sign, I was assured. But the Willits road? Logging. Very bad this time of year. The Ukiah road? Yeah, well if ya want to try it, ya turn right on the first paved road out of town.

Not encouraging. But twenty miles in, I turned off on a narrow paved road. For several miles, it followed a creek bed, pleasant, leisurely. My next turn was upon me before I had a chance to brake. I swung the car sharply to the right, to cross a bridge. The wheels clattered over the loose boards of the bridge, after which I was down in a dry creek bed, fighting to control wheels that were jerking crazily over rocks. I looked around. There was no other road. This was the way, rocky, rutted. Ahead, parallel tracks came out of the rock pile, up the side of the hill, hardly more than wagon wheel tracks. Nothing else. If I turned back, I would never get there in time. This might be a washed-out gully, for all I knew. But anyway I was committed, and the road was on the map.

I continued on, slower now, resigning myself to a pace that might lead to survival. Farmhouses had disappeared with the pavement. The road became increasingly steep and unfriendly: rocks, scrub brush, dust. I shifted into low gear. The car labored and rocked along. Always below was the beautiful valley, but the road pointed up, climbing steadily into the rocky hillsides. Obviously man had given up this road to the elements long ago. As the road became more primitive, I found myself feeling my way along with the car, leaning up the hills, holding back against the sharp ruts, now laboring with the motor, now wincing with the tires. Probably Daniel Boone was the last trespasser before the land was returned to the Indians and the elements. Suppose the road was blocked or the car stopped. Nobody would ever find me. Impossible to turn. No recent car tracks. An abandoned road that was going to make me pay for its neglect. I only wanted to pass through, not die there.

Onward the car jerked and tumbled through the ruts of many rains. The turns sharpened. Brush scraped at the car. In the rumble seat, my trunk thumped back and forth. Up a sharp rise, the engine growled unevenly as the wheels jolted and slipped over angry rocks. Go, go, go. I steered sharply to the right as the road doubled back, up, up, and around once more. Just watch the road, keep to the inside. Hug the rocks.

The road disappeared under the fender. Tighter. Tighter. There. The car settled back. I glanced at the dashboard. Temperature up to red. Can’t stop here. Must