18. Druggies and gold diggers
And dealing with change we can't control
Hello friends,
Sometimes we plod along in life feeling like nothing has been happening for years. And then massive change hits us all at once, like the year we graduate from high school and leave home. For me, it was also the year my family fell apart.
18. Gold digging and no escape from the drugs
The events of 1989 and everything leading up to them take up a fast-paced 30 pages of my memoir. Here are the highlights without all the juicy context and dramatic scenes.
Scotty had started an affair with a woman whom he met when he worked maintenance on the condos in Lincoln, NH. He had bought a claim to mine gold in Trinity County, California, and outfitted a van to live in and store his equipment. He was very secretive about the van; he wouldn’t let us in, and by that time, he was not staying with us very often.
The night before he departed for California in late February, my aunt called my mother to tell her that she had overheard a woman in a restaurant talking about going to California with a man named Scotty. We could see the stranger in the van when he pulled up and came in to say goodbye. My mother and I were blindsided, and could barely wish him safe travels.
I was in the midst of a flurry of activities that year: leading the cross-country team as captain to a state championship in the fall, dancing in The Nutcracker just before Christmas, cross-country ski racing, managing the downhill ski team, plus applying to colleges. While I was piling up gold in the form of awards and medals, Scotty had never given up on finding it in the ground. He could not wait until I left the house in a few months when my mother would be free to travel with him; he needed someone else to charm with his pot-fueled harebrained dreams.
My mother and I stayed in the house he built, and he never lived there again. He tried to get her back after the mining expedition failed because the water in the river was too high. His girlfriend left after less than a month, and then his van broke down. There’s more to that graduation picture than his goofy smile; he had just arrived the night before after a six-day hitchhiking journey from California. The reason for the look on my mother’s face takes a full page to describe.
The scholarship to Middlebury College contained everything I had hoped, planned for, and dreamed about for escaping our homegrown life in Benton. But Middlebury offered wild disorientation of a different kind: I found myself rooming with Amanda Peterson, a movie star who was already on a track of self-destructive substance abuse, and was overwhelmed among my upper-class classmates and their private school educations. Boyfriend problems added to the drama: while still in Benton, I had fallen in love with Woodsville High’s former champion cross-country skier, who was attending the University of Wyoming. We kept in close touch, but that fall he started using LSD like pot and was beginning to frazzle.
Thank goodness for my new college friends: a group of men from my dorm and Dan Scheidt pictured above (Hi Dan!). They are all still friends! Their good-natured wackiness grounded me in who I truly was and offered wholesome perspectives on the strangeness of Amanda and the relationship with my drugged-out former champion skier boyfriend, which didn’t last the year.
Just after my 18th birthday on Christmas break, Scotty reminded me that I was old enough to find out the identity of my real father. I hadn’t made varsity cross-country, and with my grades tanking (I got two C’s that semester, a first for me), I was too ashamed to ask my mother to reach out to him. In one year, I had gone from being a star in a small town to living with a bona fide star at college. My sense of inferiority was immense, but that winter I visited Dan’s family home in New York City and started to see different ways of living. I sensed that life would figure itself out, and it did.
What was the transition from your childhood home to the next place like for you? How did you grow that year?
Change is never more than we can handle
In times of overwhelm, I remind myself that everything that happens to me is meant to happen, and the best I can do is forge a path forward and learn from what is in front of me. The dark times come, and the bright ones do too. My young life had already taught me that lesson several times, and it has not stopped teaching me that lesson as I grow through different sorts of difficulties.
Here I am 35 years later listening to birdsong at dusk as a three-quarter moon glows in the sky. The Earth keeps turning, and so do we.
This week, may you gain a new perspective on how you’ve grown through changes you could not control.
Love,
Lee Ann
