Coming of Age

Coming of Age

by William Luvaas

Photo by Davis Matos, Unsplash

We were perched on a narrow platform high atop a scaffolding overlooking the stage sixty feet below, upon which a Fife and Drum Corps from Pennsylvania went through its paces. Heat waves wrinkled the air around nearby spotlights; giant speakers either side of us thrummed with drum beats and whistling fifes, rumbling the steel catwalk under our feet and setting my teeth chattering.
        Given my problem, I had no business up there with five other boys from Eugene, but my mantra was: “Whatever the other boys do, I will do”: ski hell-bent down slopes at Mount Bachelor, jump off the bridge by Armitage Park into the swirling McKenzie River, swim a mile out to the raft on Siltcoos Lake, and climb up this tower overlooking the stage. The risk of having a fit up there didn’t cross my mind, given the faces of thousands of Boy Scouts in the audience below, bathed in light, uplifted toward us. Fingers pointed, a low rumble built through the crowd. Paul flashed me a thumbs up and a huge grin. He loved to climb; a year later he would fall forty feet out of a fir tree and break his back.
        Speakers suddenly died with a crackling that shook the tower and about put our ears out. Bright lights caught us from below and a stern military voice barked, “You boys get down off of there this minute.” He was drowned out by the roar of thousands of boys, leaping to their feet and hollering approval. We Oregon boys had already made a name for ourselves, trading our sea anemone and starfish tie clasps for Texas boys’ horny toads and Kentucky boys’ corncob pipes. There were no red or blue states at the 1960 Boy Scout National Jamboree in Colorado Springs.
         “Take your time coming down, boys,” the voice prompted. Cops met us at the base of the tower and escorted us back to our camp and scoutmaster, Mr. Kitts. They didn’t seem to know what to do with us. A little amused, I think, by our spunk.
         Paul knew about my little secret because his dad was my doctor, but the other boys didn’t, and I sure wasn’t going to tell them. After rule number one, always remember to take my meds, rule number two was, tell no one!
         Some years later, after graduating high school, I took a bus from Eugene to the Army Induction Center in Portland for my draft physical. A heavyset, middle-aged draft board secretary, with an angry mouth and dusty gray hair clinging to her scalp like a pelt, glibly told us, “Six months from now you boys will all be in Vietnam, and some of you isn’t coming back!” We talked little on that bus ride north (two boys I knew on that bus didn’t make it back). “Any misfit better haul his ass up into Line B on the double!” a sergeant at the Army induction center barked. I wasn’t going into any Line B, even though I clutch­ed Dr. Myers’ letter saying I was an epileptic behind my back. Damned if I would admit it in front of the others to a master sergeant whose crew c­ut head was flat as an aircraft carrier deck. I stood anxiously in Line A, knowing when I reached the doctor at the table up front I would be outed. Just before reaching him, I trudged over to Line B, feeling the “normal” boys’ eyes burning into my back, every fiber in me scream­ing: I’m as normal as you are, I’m no misfit.
         Tall and cold-eyed, the Army doctor at Table B had earlier given us a rousing speech about the virtues of jingoism and what an honor it is to die for your country. Dulce et Decorum est! “What’s the trouble, son?” he asked. “What’s to stop you­ from serving your country? You yellow?” I mumbled incoherently about black-out spells and seizures and showed him the letter from Dr. Myers, which he dismissed with a wave of the hand­ and ordered me back into line A. “Rejoin the normals. On the double, boy!” I did, both relieved and outraged that he didn’t believe me. Then again, how could I convince him I was an epileptic when I didn’t want to believe it myself?
         A few weeks later, I received notice that I had passed my physical and had been classified 1-A. I could be drafted at any time. My mother put her foot down. Doctors wrote letters. The draft board reversed itself, and I was given a 1-Y classification—to be drafted only in case of formally declared war or national emergency.
         Our family lived with many secrets: my epilepsy, my mother’s alcoholism, radical mood swings, and bouts of rage (likely fueled by having been sexually molested as a girl) that sometimes led to ugly fights with my father, and had us kids tiptoeing over broken glass, afraid of setting her off. We assiduously kept our secret family life from the world, which wasn’t difficult since we denied it to ourselves. However, the whole family accepted temporarily that I had epilepsy because it helped to keep me from being sent to Vietnam. Once the crisis had passed and the draft board acknowledged my condition, we all swept it under the rug again, as if I’d never taken that physical. We continued playing out our backstage whisper drama.
         It’s a common motif in epileptics’ families both to accept and deny a child’s seizural disorder. ­Such doubling is often true in alcoholic homes as well. ­Given an alcoholic mother and epileptic son, my family had a double dose of denial in our lives. We were damned good at it. Such doubling is also common in the personal lives of those who have seizures; we spend a day or two recovering from an episode, then shove it aside. Perhaps we must. It allows us to maintain a semblance of normalcy. I retained only vague memories of that draft board physical: the sergeant’s flattop, a blinking yellow light in the hallway of the dingy hotel where we stayed—like faded yearbook photos of my classmates who never returned from Vietnam.
        ­ Fear that we will be publicly exposed and humiliated keeps us in the closet, ev­en to ourselves. Also, the need to move forward and lead productive lives. We can’t be crippled by constant fear of seizures and have much of a life. A little denial is therapeutic. Many fa­mous and accom­plished epileptics remain in the closet their entire lives, including Charles Nobel, Flaubert, Prince, and Soren Kierkegaar­d. All of them members in good standing of the Secret People Society. Tragically, those whose seizures can’t be controlled by drugs or surgery don’t have the luxury of denial. Some have so many seizures a day it’s all they can do to survive. These brothers and sisters of the Secret People are not able to hide.
         A serious stigma was still attached to my disorder at mid-point of the Twentieth Century, fed by two fallacious beliefs that persist to this day: epilepsy is hereditary and results from inferior genetic stock (shades of Social Darwinism); plus a belief that it is a psychological, even a character, disorder. I myself was seduced by the latter belief for years, convinced my disorder had its roots in rage against my parents, especially my father. Still today, many people shy away if you reveal you are an epileptic—including physicians I have known—as if you have leprosy of the soul, as was a common belief in the Middle Ages. It’s not something you talk about.

                                                                

We start out before dawn from Timberline Lodge under a full moon, the stars like ice crystals sparkling overhead, the air so cold it hurts to inhale, our breath lingers about our mouths. I’ve always wanted to climb Mount Hood. We take the south face Hogsback/Pearly Gate route. Hood is famous for going instantly treacherous when violent storms roll in without warning off the Pacific. Add to this the dormant volcano’s crevasses and fumaroles. We slog through heavy spring snow in the lower snow field before we reach Palmer Glacier above the ski lift, sinking in up to our knees with each step. It’s hard work, and I regret that I have worn lederhosen; my knees are purple and nearly numb, but we are in high spirits. I love the squeal and crunch of snow underfoot. I have often skied these slopes. But it’s easier going down than up. By the time we reach 9,000 feet, we are breathing hard, feeling the altitude.
         At eight A.M., halfway up the ice field, we stop for a brunch of half-frozen ham and cheese sandwiches beside a crevasse that disappears into the mountain’s blue depths. Portland spread out below, the Columbia River, toy bridges. “Was this worth it or what?” Gary asks. As if on cue, the sky darkens and thunderheads hurtle toward us out of the west; gusts of wind nip our parkas. “We better get down,” Mike says. Blinding blizzards can turn the mountain instantly dark and deadly. Experienced climbers have fallen to their deaths, snow blind and disoriented, or are stranded overnight and die of hypothermia. We don’t even have tents.
         We are maybe 1,800 feet from the top, approaching the Hogsback, an icy spine wending up toward the Pearly Gates above us, through which we must pass to reach the summit. It’s like the ridge of a steeply pitched roof, a narrow path through thin air. Icy slopes drop precipitously away either side. Fall off to the right and you plunge into the Bergschrund Crater hundreds of feet below. Clouds collide with the mountain’s face and are torn to shreds. Wind lashes our clothes. Nonetheless, I find myself agreeing with Dave and John that we have time to summit and get off the mountain before the storm hits full force. I point out that we can still see the rugged mountaintop. Five of us decide to push on, three turn back.
         A passing climbing party jokes about my purple knees. It cheers us to meet other climbers on the mountain, although we are headed up and they down. They warn us that we don’t want to get caught on the Hogsback in a whiteout and have to traverse it blind. When we reach it, the ridge isn’t as narrow as it appears to be from below; a path has been worn into it by previous climbers. The snow is firm, and our crampons bite in well.
         It sneaks up on me, given the altitude, lack of oxygen, and a sudden drop in barometric pressure—a seizure trigger for me. Clouds envelop the summit and shroud us in fog as we approach 10,000 feet. Thunderheads pulsing with electricity build up inside my head. Not now! Not here, where I will surely plunge to my death if I lose consciousness. I never have events while active—skiing, swimming, driving, playing football—but I’m rarely at such a high altitude, accosted by a precipitous drop in atmospheric pressure. Clouds invading my brain cause plains of time to rub against each other like tectonic plates. I’m not sure what time it is or where I am, whether the humming I hear is aural music inside my head or wind piping in my ears. Inner and outer worlds intertwine. Feeling dizzy, I drop to my knees on the snow, fall forward and rest my forehead against the ice a moment, hoping the cold will revive me.
         Through thick fog, I watch the others traverse the Hogsback, drifting in and out of sight like ghosts plodding in slow motion through the sky. I need to get up. I can’t burden them with my problem. If I have a fit up here, they will have to carry me 5,000 feet down to Timberline Lodge with deadly weather closing in, putting us all in peril.
         You’ve got to concentrate on reaching the summit, put one foot in front of the other, go through the Pearly Gates and step onto the summit plateau. There’s nothing wrong with you, just a bit dizzy given the altitude and exertion, the cold. Just a slight pressure behind the eyes.
         I break through my brain fog out into the icy fog bank encasing the mountain. Rise to my feet. Far ahead, Dave waves his arm for me to catch up, for God’s sake. We need to summit and get off the damn mountain. Snowflakes slant sideways out of the west. Air sears our lungs as we climb the last few hundred feet, pass through the Pearly Gates, and step onto the summit. For a miraculous moment the fog clears. We see Portland stretched out below, the slate-blue Pacific, Mt. Saint Helens to our east, then turn to look down the spine of the Cascades: Mt. Washington, Jefferson, The Three Sisters. Incredible. I am ecstatic. Tears course down my cheeks and freeze against my skin. Wind plays the flutes of rock and ice pinnacles around us. All of us cheering, throwing fists in the air. The sky closes. Whump. We get the hell off of there.
         Below the Hogsback, we remove our crampons and glissade on boot heels down the slope toward the lodge, hoping to reach it before the storm sets in full force. Victorious, we grin at each other. We have struggled together and succeeded. However, they know nothing of my secret struggle, and I don’t dare tell them.

                                                                

By my senior year in high school, I’m aching to leave home. The move to a dormitory on the University of Oregon campus across town is like going to another country­. I feel liberated from the domestic tensions and confines—even from my ailment, which seems tied to the toxic matrix of family life. Just to walk across the vast lawns under the great oak, sycamore and fir trees on campus, past stately old brick buildings, promises a new beginning. I love college life. I read a lot through my freshman year and develop a passion for writing (very bad) poetry. A biology course gets me excited about the life sciences. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and theory of evolution come as a revelation to me. Not surprising that an epileptic boy raised in a church that still preaches demonic possession should find Darwin’s scientific empiricism gratifying, just as I find The Enlightenment, the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries, ­and novelists of the 19th exciting. Here are thinkers seeking liberation from superstitions and limitations that have enslaved generations.
         My fraternity brothers don’t know I’m epileptic, nor do my friends or the girls I date. The Dilantin I take mostly controls my seizures. Moreover, I am an avid skier, I go white water tubing on the McKenzie River with my pals, shooting treacherous Martin Rapids in an inner tube with a keg of beer in tow. I recently drove to San Francisco and back on a sleepless seventy-two-hour marathon with three buddies just before finals week. Epileptics don’t behave this way. It doesn’t occur to me then that my hell-bent need to prove I’m not a coward is an attempt to nullify an ailment that terrifies me.
         Epilepsy is the secret affliction. People may have it for years without knowing they have it, may have simple-partial seizures or absence seizures and not be overly alarmed, until one day they are seized without warning by a full-on grand mal (tonic-clonic) seizure. Our friends and colleagues don’t know we are epileptics unless we tell them or have a seizure in their presence. We remain the secret people until we undergo a grotesque metamorphosis, as if possessed by a ghoul, and begin a Saint Vitus’s dance of the face and long muscles; our legs quake, our eyes roll up in our heads. Onlookers are understandably horrified by this metamorphosis.
        It’s little wonder that people have long feared our disorder and have, for centuries, stigmatized and associated it with witchcraft and demonic or providential possession. It can’t be natural: this seemingly normal person, whom we think we know, carrying around in them the hidden seeds of a horrid doppelganger, a secret other concealed in the brain. Little wonder that the draft board doctor couldn’t accept I was epileptic—I wasn’t acting epileptic—and my father couldn’t fully accept it for years. Nor could I. It’s no easy thing for epileptics to come to grips with this stealthy other we carry inside us. A sinister Mr. Hyde who knocks against our skull and announces, I’m coming out. Dreadful beast.
         Although I had no grand mal seizures my first two years in college, I often experienced minor seizural events: auras, simple-partial seizures, which might best be called “fugue states,” momentary lapses accompanied by an echoing effect, as if I am in a cathedral—sounds, voices, even thoughts reverberating around me—a sense of expectation and urgency, sometimes a touch of euphoria. Unlike full-on seizures in that I don’t lose consciousness for more than a few seconds. It’s as though I am flipping back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. We epileptics can remain in this in-between state for hours. Sometimes, I “feel epileptic” for entire days, experiencing minor events again and again.
         In those student days I often had remarkable auras. I heard celestial music, as if sitting in church listening to Bach on the pipe organ or some vague cantata from deep within my brain, although seeming to come from outside, while a light tingling worked up and down my forearms. I sat staring off into space in a kind of trance, devoid of any focused thought, but tinged with the dread that a seizure could follow. Epileptics experience many varieties of auras before their seizures. Dostoevsky felt religious ecstasy; Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift experienced micropsia and macropsia, wherein objects shrink to miniatures or swell to giants. Such visions surely informed their writing. Some smell a vivid scent, say of lavender or garlic, before seizures, or hear a musical phrase, say from Beethoven or The Beetles or Britney Spears. Some hear their mother calling their name, even in their seventies, or revisit a vivid memory. These auras remain relatively constant for each individual. We may be tempted to think they initiate seizures, but no, they simply foreshadow their coming.
         None of my minor college events were noticeable enough to evict me from the epileptic closet. Odd then the confession I made impromptu to my roommate, a Dutch exchange student. Likely it had much to do with my sense of confinement, living in a fraternity house behind Central Lutheran Church, which I had attended all my life and where my grandfather was once pastor, attending a university that my father and seven of his sisters and brothers had attended, plus my own brother. I was beginning to feel stuck in a backwater akin to a post-seizural depression. It was, moreover, a time of change and excitement: the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, the hippie counterculture, sex, drugs, and revolution. I longed to be where the action was. Perhaps most of all I felt confined to my secret closet. I needed to break out.
         Vim was a companionable, level-headed, liberal-minded fellow. We often discussed racial injustice and the Vietnam War. He had no use for religion or “other superstitions,” as he put it. He was a good listener. So I thought I could safely confide in him. I blurted out the confession in one of my rants against my father and dysfunctional family. Vim knew my parents and couldn’t understand what I had against them.
         His reaction ambushed me. He placed a hand against the wall behind him as if to rise and flee the tiny room, took nipping glances at me, then sat down and grimly told me that it was believed in Holland that epileptics are insane. Now he understood my rages against my father. “This is always puzzling to me. You know, van Gogh also suffered these rages. I suppose it is part of the illness. This is probably something which can’t be stopped, you know.” My confession nearly destroyed our friendship. Vim was never relaxed with me again.
         I had never so directly faced the stigma attached to my ailment, embraced by a friend I expected would know better. I half wondered if he was right. Was epilepsy the cause of my rage against my father? Or was it the other way around? Maybe Vim was partly right that we epileptics are mad. After all, the amygdala, center of our emotions, is located in the temporal lobe, where we temporal lobe epileptics have damaged neurons. Possibly that organ is mixed up in the whole complex anatomy of our fits. When I raged against my father, I sounded crazy even to myself. I sounded like Dmitri Fyodorovich in The Brothers Karamazov.

                                                                

In an introductory lit course my sophomore year, we are assigned Dostoevsky’s great novel, which the professor, Stanley Greenfield, tells us is “the greatest book ever written.” Like any self-respecting nineteen-year-old, I scoff at this high-flown notion. I don’t start reading the huge novel until two days before our final exam, then read day and night in a study carrel in the fraternity house attic, drinking huge quantities of coffee. It’s a bad idea for an epileptic to go sleepless, but I always cram for finals, and I’ve never paid much attention to putative “bad ideas.” There’s the Christmas break and a ski trip to Sun Valley to look forward to: tucking ski poles under my arms and schussing down the fall line of “Exhibition.”
         Dostoevsky at once casts a spell over me. It intrigues me that he was an epileptic. Greenfield makes a point of this, how the author was always seeking cures—going to spas in Europe, placing ice packs on his temples—without relief, suffering terribly from his ailment. Greenfield tells us that the primary character was named for Dostoevsky’s beloved son Alyosha, who died at about age three from complications of epilepsy. Dostoevsky suffered profound grief after his son’s death and soon began work on his masterpiece, determined to pour into it all the major themes of his oeuvre. I can’t help feeling he is speaking directly to me. I know exactly what his character, Dmitri, feels about his father. Not that I’m considering patricide, as he seemingly does, but I understand his rage. I know how Alyosha feels about the world. I know what Smerdyakov experiences in his fits. He tells Ivan Karamazov that he feels he will have a fit the next day. “One of them long fits, sir, an exceptionally long one, sir,” telling how he has sometimes fallen down from the garret. “I can feel that I’m going to have the falling sickness, I have a sort of premonition, and it will come upon me out of pure fear, sir.” Oh, yes, I know the feeling. Likely Dostoevsky experienced such states himself—lingering fugue states, a prolonged neural holding of the breath—forewarning him of his own oncoming seizures. Describing Smerdyakov’s partial seizures, he writes that the servant halts in place wherever he may be and stands for ten minutes, staring ahead. “There was at work no thought, no process of intelligence, but rather some form of contemplation.” I know exactly what he means. I’ve been there. Deep contemplation, as if trying to collect together all the hidden workings of the mind. No state of meditation, for meditation implies focused contemplation. Epileptic contemplation lacks conscious focus.
         The cold attic room where I am reading is a bit like a cell in a Russian hermitage. Occasionally, I go down to the warm fraternity house kitchen for more coffee, where I meet a fellow late-night crammer. “What page you up to now?” he asks.
         “Five-hundred-eighty. Only four hundred to go.” I am a slow reader. Besides, I regularly drift off into daydreams about the upcoming ski trip. I hear the squeak of fresh powder snow under my skis, envision sitting hunched stoically forward on the chair lift with my father, on frostbite watch in the sub-zero weather, checking each other’s faces for white patches.
         A matrix of interconnections between The Brothers Karamazov and my own life, conscious and unconscious, leads me to see the novel as a kind of existential primer. There’s the epileptic theme, of course, and I identify with Alyosha Karamazov. I’m inspired by his kindness, idealism, wisdom, and love of humanity. The notion of living a saintly life is nearly an obsession with me at the time. Alyosha amuses those who know and love him. Curiously, I play the same role among family and friends for no reason I understand. I’m struck that all three Karamazov Brothers lost their mothers in early childhood, just as my father lost his to the Spanish Flu in his infancy. Grandiose as it sounds, I feel Dostoevsky is spinning a web between mine and the fictitious Karamazov family. Fyodor Karamazov reminds me of my dad in his seeming indifference to his sons; my brother and I could never win his approval, just as the Brothers K could never please their father. However, my father is anything but the passionate wastrel in the novel—“cruel, enslaved by passion, carnivorous, Karamazovian.” Dad is a good man: judicious, reasonable, conscientious. While stern and critical, he is never malicious, never Karamazovian. Perhaps a bit emotionally challenged.
         But while I identify with kindly Alyosha, I empathize with passionate, raging, rash Dmitri Karamazov. I’m moved and fascinated by him—unrestrained, but bold and honest, wholly himself. Alyosha is almost too good to be convincingly human, but Dmitri is every one of us. All human passions rolled into one. I can’t stop staring at him. If Alyosha is a saint of love, Dmitri is a saint of fury, folly, and lust. If Alyosha wants justice of the heart, Dmitri wants justice of the blood. I can’t decide which makes the greater impression on me: the love or the fury. It is as if the cunning author has seen into the minds of his impressionable readers (mine at least) and presented them with a conundrum. Which will you choose? The way of human passion and revenge? Or the path of love, forgiveness, and open-heartedness? Dmitri represents the raw id, Alyosha the superego. I’m torn between the two.
         Never before have I realized that literature has the capacity to reach inside the human chest and pull out the heart. Strung out on coffee and insomnia, jittery, nearly ecstatic, I read and read. It’s as if Dostoevsky whispers my thoughts back to me. The knowledge that he is one of us adds poignancy and urgency to what I read. I have never before considered writing, have never truly discovered literature. Never fully realized that the written word can be so soul stirring and consequential. For the first time, in that attic, I see beyond my narrow world. Intellectually and philosophically, I come of age. Though I don’t know it yet, I have begun my journey toward becoming a writer.
         At dawn, the schoolboys surround Alyosha on the path by Ilyusha’s stone, shouting, “Hurrah for Karamazov.” Tears stream unabashedly down my cheeks. Hurrah for Dostoevsky. For his ability to touch the soul of another person through the written word as he is touching mine. To declare: “You are yourself and it is good,” as Alyosha says to the boys. Yes, even to say, “You are an epileptic and it’s okay.” If Dostoevsky could be boldly epileptic and write from such a height, I too might proudly declare myself an epileptic. What shame can there be in it if such greatness can come from the pen of one of the Secret People, one of us with the trembling nasties? Maybe some day I, too, can accomplish something noteworthy. I am in a fever of excitement and joy. I feel redeemed. No need to be a secret person any longer, not at least to myself.
         Not only do I feel somewhat liberated from the shame of my illness, but I feel the first stirrings of liberation from hometown confinement, a thirst for the larger life that Ivan Karamazov speaks about, an amorphous presentiment that I must leave school and do something important with my life, must reach beyond myself and help others. “How good is life,” Alyosha says at the novel’s end, “when one does some good and upright thing.” I can no longer remain here and go through the motions of attending class and fraternity functions and ski trips and football games as if nothing has happened, when something momentous has occurred. It feels like I’ve experienced a prolonged conscious aura all through the reading of the novel, a profound sense of wonder. It leaves me spent. Somehow, I stumble into class for an 8:00 A.M. essay exam, with breakfast and more coffee in my belly, and write the best essay I’ve ever written. Here is a novel I understand. I collapse afterward into the sleep of post-seizural exhaustion.