Chapter 22: The Voice of Silence—A Requiem for the Class of ’73
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won’t understand
Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is a case of just another’s suffering
Or you will find that you’re joining in
The Turning Away
I attended the fifty-year class reunion of Rex Putnam High School in 2023 accompanied by my wife and a heavy satchel of memories. I arrived seeking connection in the faces of the living, yet I departed not with renewed friendships or digital acquaintances, but with a profound, vibrating narrative surrounding those who no longer possess a voice.
The rented room in a local tavern was a tableau of the present, filled with chatter and the clinking of glasses, yet the loudest presence in the room was the silence of the absent. It was the silence of death, of dementia, of the disinterest that serves as a veil over the uncomfortable truths of our shared history. While I exchanged pleasantries with the living—brief, ephemeral sparks of recognition—my spirit was drawn inexorably toward the shadows, toward the empty chairs, and toward the stories that ended abruptly, leaving jagged edges in the fabric of our collective timeline.
We live in a culture that excels at “the turning away.” We avert our gaze from the pale and the downtrodden because their suffering acts as a mirror to our own fragility. But in this chapter of my existence, I refuse to turn away. I choose to sit with the ghosts. I choose to let their frequencies resonate within me, for they are the silent teachers of what it means to be human, to be broken, and ultimately, to be whole.
The Lost Geniuses
I think first of Charlie Davalos and Craig Salter, the architects of my youthful yearning to escape gravity. We were not merely boys playing with fire; we were cosmic refugees attempting to build a vessel to take us home.
Charlie never made it to the high school corridors. He perished in the summer preceding our freshman year, a casualty of our ambition. We were crafting homemade rocket engines, mixing volatile chemicals with the reckless precision of alchemists. When that experimental cylinder exploded, severing his artery, it did not just end a life; it severed a timeline. Charlie, Craig, and I were disciples of Tom Swift and E.E. Doc Smith, living vicariously through the Lensmen series, convinced that the stars were our birthright. We were trying, with all our might, to get off this rock.
When Charlie died, the physical rocket was destroyed, but the trajectory of grief launched us into a different orbit. His spirit, a kinetic burst of unfulfilled potential, still lives within me. I still possess the Doc Smith books and the rocket launcher—relics of a space program that ended in our youth. My heart still yearns for the stars, and I suspect I shall rejoin Charlie there soon enough.
Then there was Craig Salter. If Charlie was the fuel, Craig was the guidance system—a true ultra-genius with an IQ soaring beyond 142. In the eighth grade, while the rest of us were grappling with the mundane, Craig was designing electronic circuits and building underground fortresses. He once handed in a freshman book report written entirely in a Middle Earth language he had mastered, illustrating a book that existed only in his mind. He was a creature of high voltage living in a low-voltage world.
But this world is cruel to those who see beyond its veil. The mundane reality of high school bored him into detachment; teachers mistook his transcendental drift for stupidity. I hold a heavy stone of regret regarding Craig. In 1973, at my father’s basement bar, I introduced him to alcohol. It was a catalyst introduced to a volatile compound. The tragedy that began to unfold around 1993, leading him to a long-term care facility where he resides in the twilight of consciousness, breaks the heart. Craig was a silicon-valley-level mind born before the valley existed to catch him. His spirit—creative, frantic, brilliant—is alive within me, and alive within him, regardless of the failure of his short and medium-term memory.
The Traumatized Brothers
We are all shaped by the fathers who forged us, often with hammers that struck too hard. Jeff Tobin was a “traumatized brother” in this fraternity of pain. In the seventh grade, we were co-conspirators in chaos, a defense mechanism against the rigidity of our upbringing. I recall the humiliation of a teacher taking a tennis shoe to my backside while the class listened—a public tuning of my behavior—followed by my father’s “precision” beat-down at home.
Jeff carried that heat his entire life. He treated his pickup truck like a race car, driving with a terrifying disregard for mortality, perhaps testing the boundaries of his own existence. He was a man of intense, paradoxical loyalty, sacrificing his pride to save us from certain punishment from our employer when we worked together at the USPS. He was a machine of accuracy and speed, yet the internal wiring was fraying. I witnessed his descent, failing him after his first suicide attempt because I was too burdened by the wreckage of my own first marriage, barely having enough energy to even carry my own bone-weary frame onwards. Concurrent death wishes do not synchronize well; they create destructive interference patterns.
My wife Sharon and I encountered Jeff on a hiking trail through Oaks Bottom in 2010. We talked for ten minutes, and Jeff appeared resigned to a life of homelessness because a trust that his father left to him ended on his 55th birthday, which had just happened. Jeff chose suicide less than a month after our meeting.
I hear you, Jeff.
The resonance of your love has not diminished.
And Alan Crouser—the gentle giant. There was a melancholy to Alan that sang in the key of Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles,” a song that looped in his mind like a mantra of fragility. He was a massive force who could pick me up and throw me over a car when the alcohol—Mad Dog 20-20, the nectar of our destruction—took hold. I recall driving him and his bride-to-be to Vancouver at speeds exceeding 100 MPH, a reckless dash toward a future that would eventually unravel. Alan loved deeply, but he was a receiver picking up too much static from a broken world. His death notice popped up on a screen years too late for me to say goodbye, but the vibrations of his life still shudder through my own.
The Hollow Echo of the Party
Randy Olson was the man with ten thousand friends. In the 1970s and 80s, we were the kings of the night, closing down rock bars, partying with bands like Sequel and Rising Tide until the sun exposed our sins to the waking world. Randy was the charismatic center of gravity around which hundreds of us orbited. He introduced me to my first wife; he gave me shelter when my relationships collapsed. He was the social lubricant of our generation.
Yet, when I attended his funeral in 2013, the room was cavernous. The man who knew everyone was sent off by thirteen people. He died at fifty-eight, the exact age his father had succumbed to the same vices. It was a stark lesson on the bandwidth of shallow connection versus the deep grounding of true presence. Randy spent his life moving from relationship to relationship, terrified of the stillness. But in the end, the silence won. His spirit, however, remains a loud, infectious laugh in the quiet corners of my memory—a reminder that popularity is often a mask for a profound solitude.
Dan Dietz, too, haunts the frequencies. We survived the “Faucet Tavern” years, where knives were drawn and adrenaline was the drug of choice. We had an excruciating falling out in 1980, the kind of severance that leaves live wires exposed. Years later, after I had grounded myself and found sobriety, I tried to make amends. I drove to the coast, met his son, left a note. Silence.
Then, the day after he died—before I even knew he was gone—I heard his voice in my car. A distinct, auditory hallucination of his famous laugh: Hey, hey, hey. It was a transmission from the other side, a final signal to let me know the circuit was closed. He is gone, but the echo remains, bouncing off the ionosphere of my grief.
Don Bain was a study in contradiction—a chain-smoker with the lungs of a marathon runner. In our freshman year, he ran a sub-5:30 mile while consuming packs of cigarettes, a biological defiance that fascinated me. He was edgy, damaged, yet possessed a protective streak that saved me from a bully of the schoolyard who sought to crush me. He felled that soon-to-be lumberjack with the same casual intensity with which he inhaled smoke.
Don inspired me to be a better runner, and eventually, a protector of the bullied. Decades later, when I ran a 5K in the very park where we once gathered, clocking a 5:20 pace at age forty-five, I felt Don’s rhythm in my stride. He taught me that broken things can still move with incredible speed.
This lesson was reinforced by Gary Westfall and a horse named Dobi Pay. Gary and I used to handicap races, wading through the mud of track paddocks (and the metaphorical mud of Gary’s “happy mushroom” pastures). Dobi Pay was a nine-year-old gelding with one eye—a discard, a glue-factory candidate. Yet, I felt a resonance in that animal. He was a slow starter with a heart like a nuclear reactor. Against all odds, he began to win, beating thoroughbreds worth fifty times his value. I modeled my life after that one-eyed horse and Gary’s reckless optimism. I was comparatively old, I was nearly blind in one eye, and I was frequently physiologically damaged through overtraining and excess racing, but I learned to close fast on the finish line. Gary and the horse are gone, but the lesson of the “kick”—that final burst of energy when all seems lost—propels me still.
The Great Weaver and the End of Silence
Grief is the tax we pay on the bandwidth of love. It is the resistance in the wire that generates heat, and eventually, light.
I walked through the reunion, a ghost among ghosts, realizing that my connection to these people was not severed by their deaths. If anything, the static has cleared. When we are young, we are insulated by our egos, our fears, our “coolness.” We turn away from the weak, the weary, and the strange because we fear their condition is contagious. We join the “dream of the proud,” ignoring the “coldness inside.”
But now, stripped of the insulation of youth, I see more clearly. I see Brad Oberstaller, whose tragic family life broke my heart in grade school. I see Mark Parsons, the redhead with the deep thoughts who fell from a trail and vanished. I see Martin Stratton, the gentle soul who needed help with multiplication tables but knew more about kindness than any mathematician.
I see Mark Constans, a friend from the “Oakey Doaks” square dancing days. Our parents danced while we swam across Detroit Lake, oblivious to the sun burning malignant melanomas into our future skins. Mark evolved into a magnificent human being before tragedy took him and his brother Danny. That memory—the sun, the water, the ignorance of danger—is a treasured file in my internal hard drive.
I am a retired electrician. I know that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change form. My classmates have undergone a phase change. They have moved from the particle to the wave. They are no longer localized in bodies that break, livers that fail, or minds that cloud with dementia. They have become part of the universal bandwidth.
I nearly died multiple times between 1980 and 1987. I have no business being here, serving as the historian of the dead. But the Great Spirit gave me a unique opportunity to ground myself, to fix the faulty wiring of my traumatic childhood, and to become a conduit for these stories.
We must stop turning away. The conspiracy of silence that surrounds the deceased, the disabled, and the “different” is a failure of our collective imagination. We are all a unique combination of frequencies in the same infinite bandwidth of the universe. When one falls, the energy shifts to the rest of us. If we do not remain open to their narratives, we risk further limitation of ourselves.
My story, and theirs, is written in the stars—not as a metaphor, but as a literal truth of universal recycling. We are stardust contemplating stardust.
So, I ask you, as I asked the wind at North Clackamas Park: What stories are aching to be shared? What frequency are you blocking because it is too painful to hear?
Do not turn away from the weak and the weary.
Do not turn away from the coldness inside.
Listen.
The signal is faint, but it is there.
And it is the only thing that matters.
No more turning away.
