The End of the Dream (13 page)

Steve was tremendously grateful to Scott and accepted his help. A skeptic might suggest that Scott knew how much that would mean to Steve, and that it would create a symbolic debt. In the late summer of 1991, after some acrimonious legal wrangling, Steve was granted temporary custody of Cara and he brought her to Chicago. Steve had paid for Cara’s ballet lessons seeing in her the grace that he had once seen in his sister Dana. He vowed that she would continue to have the best lessons available. Although he could scarcely afford it, he enrolled her in a private school. But she wasn’t happy there and he transferred her to a neighborhood school program for gifted children.

Steve had lost two studiosone in Italy and one in Virginiaand he had lost the two women he loved. But now he had his daughter with him.

He asked for nothing more. He was not to have that. When Maureen and Steve went to court the judge saw an attractive young mother living in suburbiaopposed to an artist father living in a warehouse located in an industrial section of Chicago. On the surface, which would provide the more stable home for a ten-year-old girl? The judge granted custody of Cara to her mother. Steve Meyers was inconsolable. He knew that Cara would grow away from him. He had done everything he could to protect her and to keep her with him. And now she was gone from his life. In his legal fight to gain custody of Cara, Steve had spent everything he had, even the huge pillar of white marble had to be sold.

When he had paid his lawyer and court costs, he had nothing left. He had no choice but to file for bankruptcy in the last months of 1991.

That meant his warehouse/studio/home would be lost, too. Once more, Steve Meyers had no place to work, no place to live. And now, it seemed that he had no one to love, although he would love Cara to his dying breath. In the spring of 1992, Steve Meyers received a phone call that seemed to bring with it the answer to his immediate problems.

It was Scott Scurlock.

Scott knew that things weren’t going well in Chicago, and he had an offer. He suggested that Steve move to Olympia. Scott had work for him to do, the gray house needed to be completely upgraded.

The tree house project needed work, too. Scott said that there would be a place for Steve to live, rent free, on Scott’s own acreage. “How am I going to get my stuff all the way out to Washington? “ Steve asked.
 
“I’ll get a rental truck and come get you. Bubba will help.” It seemed like Steve’s be stand only option. Scott drove a van to Chicago and helped Steve move a load out of the warehouse. They drove back to Olympia, and then Steve returned to Chicago for the rest of his belongings. Kevin had agreed to drive back to Olympia with him. Steve was so broke that Kevin used his own Sears card to pay for the Ryder truck. At the end of August 1992, Steve Meyers looked around the warehouse for the last time. And then he got behind the wheel of the van full of his belongings and headed for Olympia, more than two thousand miles away. Kevin and Steve took turns driving, and the one who wasn’t behind the wheel slept in an eighteen-inch-wide strip at the back of the truck on a folded mat. When they got to Seven Cedars, Steve tore the Achilles tendon in his heel as he was unloading the truck, and had to be taken to the Black Lake Medical Clinic. It was an excruciatingly painful injury, and he would have to be on crutches for at least a month. Kevin returned to his acreage in Great Falls, Virginia, somewhat gratefully, although he felt a strong sense of unease about Steve living on Scott’s land. He knew how persuasive Scott could be and that Steve’s being down on his luck made him vulnerable. He hoped that Scott still remembered how frightened he was when Captain Pat was killed a murder that had never been solved.

If Steve just helped Scott redo the gray house and shore up the barn, this could be a good time for him to regain his bearings. Scott lived in the treehouse, there was no question of Steve making it up the ladder with his injury, and so he lived in the gray house. When he was more mobile, he would start putting marble counters into the kitchen and the bathroom. Later, he would finish the barn.

Something deep inside Steve Meyers had died when his daughter was taken away from him. He had been a man of humor, a man with a ready smile and an expansive imagination. Now, he was bitter and defeated. He had tried to make it by playing by the rules of society. He had failed.

Now he was as open to suggestion as a man could be.

PART TWO

Mark Here the hand and here the Heart, Some melancholy bloom Must start, This flowered dream both Sweet and tart. Since you must stay And I must part .. . Adieu, M Mark Biggins Scott had several close friends in and around Olympia. Probably Mark Biggins was the closest.

Mark had been in and out of Scott’s life for seventeen years. And like Steve Meyers, Mark had endured some rough times. But he and Scott were as opposite as men could be, Scott was lightning and impulse Mark was sentiment and dogged loyalty. One was a warrior, the other a philosopher. Mark was an old friend from Scott’s years at Evergreen College. He was a big, gentle man, a guitarist and poet, a wanderer whose prodigious physical strength belied his tender heart. Mark Biggins and Scott Scurlock had met in 1981 when they were introduced by one of Scott’s housemates. Though Scott had gone to college mostly to please his father, Mark had wanted to become a teacher and, ultimately, a writer. He had majored in English literature. Whether Mark knew everything about Scott Scurlock in those early days is unknown.

Perhaps Scott kept him in the dark as he had Kevin Meyers. Although Scott had become very open about his drug making in the late eighties, he had been quite secretive when he was in college.

Later much later, Mark did know. Mark Biggins was born in Mankato, Minnesota, one of seven children, and the oldest son of a devout Irish Catholic family. He grew up in St. Cloud with his four sisters and two brothers. His father worked for the government and his mother taught in Catholic school. The Biggins family was exceptionally close, and they preserved the memories of the growing up years of Mark and his siblings in countless albums of photographs, children playing in the Minnesota snowdrifts, swimming, celebrating birthdays, observing First Communion, opening Christmas presents.

They were as American and middle class as any family who ever lived.

There is a poignancy in those early pictures of Mark, who was a cherubic toddler smiling up at the camera. The Biggins children were impressed with the need to develop a strong work ethic. They had to, that was the only way they were going to get through college and survive in the world. Intelligent as they all were, it was up to them to pay for the advanced education that a teacher’s and government clerk’s salaries couldn’t cover. Mark was a popular, cheerful boy with a keen sense of humor. He was a gentle kid. He brought home injured animals and tried to nurse them back to health, and he sobbed when he lost them. He grew up quickly and stood a head taller than his father.

Mark Biggins went to Tech High School in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He was an altar boy in his church the Church of Corpus Christi and he won several achievement awards from the St. Cloud Chapter of Kiwanis, International.
 
In high school, he played football, baseball, basketball, and wrestled.
 
Talented musically, he had roles in a number of school plays and one of the leads in Tech High’s production of Guys and Dolls. When Mark and his brothers turned sixteen, their father took them hunting. His brothers enjoyed the sport, but Mark could never bring himself to shoot a living creature. When he graduated from Tech with honors in 1972, Mark had no real sense of what he wanted to do in life. He enrolled in Duluth Area Vocational Technical Institute where he studied broadcasting. The next year, he switched to St. Cloud University where he took pre-med courses.
 
Quite probably, Mark wasn’t that interested in becoming a doctor or a radio announcer, he longed for something more. Even then, he had a strong social conscience, and he wrote poems and essays about the less fortunate in society.

His heart bled for the poor, for children without love, for policemen who were in danger. He seemed far more aware of the pain that is inherent in many lives than most nineteen-year-olds. In 1974, Mark’s closest friend’s father perished when he fell under a train. Mark’s friend was so grief stricken that he committed suicide, and this was quickly followed by a sister’s suicide.

Mark himself was so distressed that he could no longer function in school, and so he dropped out of college. He moved in with his dead friend’s mother, serving as a buffer against the morbidly curious outside world. He cooked her meals and sat with her during the long evenings. He wrote “Thank You” notes to those who had attended the funerals and who had brought casseroles and flowers. Mark Biggins himself was too traumatized to go back to college. In 1974, when he was twenty, he began hitchhiking across the country. Accompanied by friends, he headed west, seeking the serenity that he assumed existed along the Pacific Coast. He and his companions weren’t that different from a lot of young people in their twenties then, together, they made up a ragtag army sweeping west across America looking for some elusive dream that might come true in California or Oregon or Washington.

Like his peers, Biggins had been only a child during the sixties with its student riots, hippie culture, and rampant rebellion.

But in the seventies they were all precisely the right age to feel disenchantment with society. Now, Richard Nixon had been impeached, Patty Hearst kidnapped and turned renegade herself, and the war still raged in Vietnam. It was an age of broken dreams and promises for the young, and many sought geographical solutionsor the temporary euphoria of drugsto ease their troubles. For Mark, who had seen too much death too soon, finding peace was paramount. He smoked marijuana and drank, unaware that he had little tolerance for either. Unlike many of his fellow travelers, Mark Biggins never felt alienated from his parents.

He always kept in touch with his family back in Minnesota. He was a dreamer, but he was also a worker. That was fortunate because nothing, beyond his native intelligence and musical talent, would ever come easy for Mark Biggins. He stood well over six feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds now.

He resembled the poet he aspired to be with his mop of curly hair and soft brown eyes, but his muscular build looked more like that of the basketball star he had been. When Mark and his fellow hitchhikers reached Estes Park, Colorado, on the eastern edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, Mark put down tenuous roots. He moved in with a group of people who had come west from Chicago, and he found plenty of work painting houses. Still, after ten months, Mark Biggins headed home to St. Cloud. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in Colorado. He ran a gas station for eight months in Minnesota, but his wanderlust whispered in his ear and he soon started thumbing rides west again. In 1975, he made it all the way to California. He traveled up and down the coast for four months, writing poems and playing his guitar, but even California failed to fulfill him. He made trips to New Orleans and Brownsville, Texas, always touching base with his home in Minnesota. Finally, Mark Biggins found the place he had envisioned.

He was enchanted with Washington State from the moment he arrived. In 1976, he moved to Forksa logging town in Clallam County, Washington.

The logging industry was booming in the mid-seventies, and Mark found work as a choke setter for cedar mills in Forks and La Push. He also split cedar shakes. It was dangerous work, but he was young and very strong.
 
Clallam County is a triangle of land, located in the far northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula. It is surrounded by the seathe Pacific Ocean to the west and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north. The area is misted with fog and rain, its heroes are lumberjacks and fishermen. Mark Biggins worked hard and made a good living in Forks.
 
He rented a cabin and settled into the life of a woodsman and logger. A year later, Mark met a striking town girl named Annie, * who was eighteen and nearly as tall as he. They fell in love and began a complicated and chaotic relationship. Mark and Annie would be connected through the next fourteen years, perhaps for the rest of their lives.
 
However, theirs would not be an idyllic love story.

Their goals were different, but, unhappily, one of the things they did share was a weakness for alcohol. At first, neither of them recognized the danger signs of addiction.

Once Mark Biggins had a home of his own up in the woods country, he was generous in sharing it. One of his friends from St. Cloud, Glenn Jansen, moved to Forks, looking for work. But the Marine Corps veteran had picked the wrong time to arrive in town, in July of 1978, most jobs in the forest were shut down because of the threat of fires in the woods due to a record-breaking hot, dry summer. Glenn was camping out and near the end of his cash reserves when Mark offered help. “I was living in a tent as fall approached, “ Jansen remembered. “Mark helped me find odd jobs at some of the cedar shake mills. He also gave me food for a few weeks when my money ran out.”
 
Mark Biggins found a cabin in La Push that Jansen could afford. “He was a godsend to me that summer and I am forever in his debt for his helping hand, “ Jansen wrote one day, remembering their friendship. The two young men became fast friends.
 
Helping out those who were temporarily down on their luck wasn’t unusual for Mark. He was a man who seemed to feel an obligation to look after anyone who had hit a rough patch.

When Pete Shelkin’s girlfriend broke up with him just as their travels brought them to Forks, the Virginia native found himself alone in the isolated logging town thousands of miles from home.

Mark befriended Pete, found him a job, and even shared his own home until Pete was able to afford his own apartment. Logging was not the ultimate career choice for Mark Biggins. Even though he made excellent money in the mills during the late seventies, he had never planned to abandon his education. Once he had found his equilibrium, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. In 1980, he obtained student loans that allowed him to attend Evergreen State College. It was a point of pride with him to keep current on his loans, so he lived in Olympia, but traveled the
 
130 miles to Forks and logged during his summer and Christmas vacations.