Helena Worthen and Rhonda Kingman

00:03 My name is Rhonda Kingman. I am 67 soon-to-be 68 the end of this month. It is October 11th 2014. We are here at the San Francisco Public Library at civic center, and I'm here with Helena home. I just meant

00:26 And my name is Helena Worthen. I'm going to be 71 in about two weeks. Today is October 11th, 2014 and I'm here with Rhonda at the San Francisco Public Library and I just met Rhonda and I didn't I didn't try to arrange for one of my family to come and be with me because I have mixed feelings about what I want to do today. And I'm going to try to explain that by telling a little story about somebody that I had in a class when I was teaching at Contra Costa Community College in the 1980s. I was an English teacher. I've done a lot of writing. So I was teaching English and there was an old guy 82 years old who is taking everybody's classes. He was a cheerful open-faced white hair the little guy, you know, very sturdy and he would show up in in

01:26 Just about any class that was open and he in my class. He functions kind of business assistant teachers or the Vogue almost like a social worker in the class. He was he was so friendly and supportive and interested. In other people. He didn't take up extra space. He was he was a real blessing to have around he had been a house painter in Philadelphia and one time after class. He described how he had come out to California. His wife had died. He's been very depressed. He came to California to be with his children and grandchildren, but they really didn't have a lot to do with him. And so he started coming to these classes and in order to kind of build a family around him.

02:13 But he said that there was one thing that he couldn't tell anybody and he was telling me because that's his co-teacher I guess but this this was something that he said was so sad that if he told any of these people that he was that he was being friends with it. Wouldn't it would be make them cry unbearably and this was that when he was a little boy in Philadelphia. He could leave Center City and run to the outskirts of the city and in 15 minutes, he would be Out Among the apple orchards.

02:52 And now at 71 I know how that feels because I don't think my kids or my grandkids are ever going to live in a city where they can run from the center of the city in in 15 minutes. Not the in some suburb or some Walmart parking lot or some, you know, some strip mall somewhere and you just the idea that you could go from a city into the country and have that unknown uncluttered open Shore agricultural space. But but open space where everyone could walk the idea that that is kind of Gone Forever in our country and probably most other places is to me almost too painful to talk about but I still feels it.

03:52 This may be a place where I actually could talk about it. And in order to do that. I want to describe the landscape where I spent my Summers as a little girl. This isn't coming to Massachusetts and it still exists as I will you know, what that the end of this interview if I let it run to have it so that it becomes a real interview at the end. I want to describe a little bit about what it's like there right now, but here's what it was. Like when I was little my grandfather bought this place right around the end of world war. So we're talkin 19 1619 17th, and my mother would have been about eight years old and her little sister Margaret would have been

04:38 About 6 years old and it was an old house that had at one point been a stage house because they used to be a road that went all the way up the mountain passed it half of that road. That's the part up the mountain beyond the house was now overgrown and it turned into kind of a brook was a big house with a barn and an attic and in the Attic they were many rooms and nooks and crannies. We were always discovering another part of the attic that had something in it that we didn't didn't expect when I say we I mean myself my little brother Hillary who now lives in Berkeley, which is where I live and my cousin's Allison who is a retired librarian in the Southern California and my other cousin Jeffrey who lives in New Hampshire and we would explore inside the house, but what I really wanted to tell you more about

05:38 Is what it was like to explore outside the house and if we go around in kind of a 360 degree sweep around this landscape.

05:50 To the west of the mountain there was a long pipe that went all the way up to a spring and the water from the water that said the house came from that spring and it travels through logs that were got it out and then hooked together with metal or Leather So the the water in the house tasted strongly of whatever kind of wood the water was coming down from the spring in.

06:21 If you continue around the circle, then you come to the old road that would go up kind of a long hug along what was now of a washed-out brook and you'd come to a crossroad about half a mile up beyond that was former Gurney's Farm where he had pear trees that would get ripe and would have the best pears in the world and he had a huge Barn. He had a black and white Dalmatian that would catch us named the black and white Dalmatian with pepper and he would call out Peppa Peppa and we would that would prevent us from climbing up into his barn and jumping in his Hayloft, which would have been a great thing to do.

07:10 Then if you come back down to the house and you're moving a little bit more to the north you come to the dump.

07:18 At the dump is where we would carry out refuse.

07:24 Tin cans bottles pieces of lumber anything that you wanted to get rid of you would follow this path and walk way way way out into the forest and there we would dump whatever you wanted to dump. It was kind of unlimited open space. So you could you know, nobody ever thought about there not being enough landfill, right but this dump had been there since the Seventeen hundreds. So at the far end of the dump, you could start to go into under things and find beautiful bottles and dishes with mural painted dishes that were cracked but that were painted in gorgeous. So the dump at one end was a place where you got rid of things and at the other end, it was a place where you dug up the whole history of everyone you would lived in the house and archaeological dig exactly 40 40 ft long.

08:24 And the far side of it was all overgrown with Ferns and fine sand.

08:30 Then moving to the right to the east there was the badminton badminton field and the incinerator where we would burn anything. We wanted to burn. The incinerator was said a big metal barrel and you just dump stuff in it and watch it burn and that was actually fun and you're taking the stuff out to the incinerator after a meal was considered privileged, but then beyond that was just something you could see kind of through the trees was a little white house by bird house with a green shingle roof and green painted steps going up to it.

09:12 And in that house where all my grandfather's books because he would leave Swarthmore where he was a professor and pack his books into wooden boxes and ship them up by train and in the summer, he would be in that house working on his books all summer long and he eventually published quite a lot of stuff academic stuff. But the thing that still is still going is the meaning of Shakespeare which I actually cash a check from the University of Chicago every year for about $500 sitting in that little little white house there after he died his books stayed there he died when I was about six his books just stay there and so my cousin and I would go out there and read and so as you know is a nine 10 11 years old. I was leafing through things like The Illustrated version of

10:12 Golden ass of a poodle. Yes, which is a if I remember correctly is tournament in scene medieval. Nobody said don't read this or don't read that so I read everything. I wanted to sitting in his old Morris chair.

10:33 In front of that little white house was actually a while strawberry field where there were real wild strawberries that were extremely sweet beyond there was what we called the 10-acre field which might have been bigger. There was a farmer named Charlie Thayer whose name is still mentioned with respect around Covington and he farmed all the areas around our house and he farmed a whole lot of other people's land as well and that field when Don seem to me as far as the eye could see that we would often play tag running through the tall corn. Which Charlie Thayer didn't like we would knock the we would knock the corn stalks down, but there's really nothing like having 10 acres of tall green corn stalks to chase your cousin's in.

11:28 There was also a site of an old Lumberyard must have been back in the twenties when they're going to lumbering operation. So there were piles 30 or 40 feet high of sawn lumber. That wasn't good Lumber in what had bark on it. It wasn't what they carted way. But there was also a sawdust pile and in the middle of this artist palette is Imagine sawdust pile. That's about 25 feet high and in the middle of it. Some trees have grown up so that the Saudis Pyle is kind of clinging to these trees and you can climb up the Saudis file and hang from the top of the trees and swing out into the rest of the satisfy Wonder.

12:12 And of course when our parents found out that we were doing this they could think of all kinds of ways that it could be dangerous when I like the the piles of wood could fall on your head or the Saudis balcony collapse, but by then we have been doing it for quite a long time and we certainly hadn't told anybody what we were doing at the far end of that field. There was a a rock formation that was very suited for sticking a ridgepole from one nearby tree into the top of the rock formation and building a whole bunch of hot. So we build Hots there and we slept in them and my father who really my father was a history teacher who had been in World War II and been very Navy oriented kind of believed in telling scary ghost stories and

13:06 Disciplining children by scaring them, which I unfortunately he would he would actually come out in the middle of the night and bang rocks together and go like that when we were trying to sleep. Then these hats I have to mention that near that hot is a place where my cousin Jeffrey and I had been planning to go on a adventure of some sort and my little brother Hillary who was just crawling was trying to follow us all and we stepped aside to avoid having Hillary follow us and he actually kept on going apparently the entire length of the 10-acre field and up over the rock formation and down into the other side of the mountain is wise when lunch came and dinner came and he was nowhere to be found.

14:06 My mother put me locked me in the bedroom and by then the police were there and The Bloodhounds from Northampton and where they are and it was The Bloodhounds that found my little brother crawling along way way way off in the woods with his diapers arranged in a line and he said he was playing to chew. So that was actually a terrible. I was actually really terrible. I did not lose him on purpose. I'm wondering in case I didn't do it on purpose. I see him. I just didn't want him following this and besides it turned out that although my mom should have been aware of where we were right. Sometimes we didn't want her to know where we were but technically it was her responsibility. She was in the middle of editing my grandfather's book by then. My grandfather died. The book was in the Pro.

15:06 I'm going to editing they were worried about the footnotes and she had hired a babysitter and they were actually was a babysitter who was supposed to be on duty Quinn Jeffrey and I walked off and he'll wonder.

15:21 So then if you go keep moving around the circle.

15:27 And you go to your right you come to an area which I remember from before my grandfather died something he used to do with his students was have them take selections from the great authors that they read and he talked poetry and modern Russian literature and lots and lots of Shakespeare in Yates and everybody Blake especially he would have his students yet quotes their favorite quotes from poets or from novels novelists and write them on little slips of paper.

16:04 And think of them as medicine.

16:08 Like a dime inspiring quote that would cheer you up or something like that and he would have them put them in nut shells and then he'd build a pharmacy for different afflictions that could overcome you with. It was full of all these little quotes from Blake and Dusty ASCII. He also hung little bags of poetry from the branches of the pine trees in the next part of the woods. So he had a there was a walk that you could take with him that I remember going on where you would pass pine trees with these little of mesh bags with toiletry hanging in them.

16:51 I just seems a little hard to believe but but by that time.

16:58 He was finishing his book. He was mostly retired. He had cancer and he had a short, you know, short Horizon out in front of him and he was dedicating a lot of his life to me personally that Beast that was my experience of that time was that he had really nothing else to do except tell me stories and draw pictures and take me on walks. So that was one area where we would go on walks the DeLand had been all pasture to begin with and then as farming became less and less of a big do you know profitable deals that were abandoned would become the first blueberry patches with birch trees and blueberry bushes, and then the Pines would set in and so this was a part of the part of the land where the pine trees were already there and you could walk along us all.

17:58 Brown pine needle pass among these fairly young pine trees

18:06 Continuing around the circle if you go to the southeast of the house now and you're lucky if you're on the back Terrace of the house looking out from under the maple trees over the tops of my grandmother's Garden which was all delphiniums and roses and blocks. Then you would see the stone wall. That was the boundary of the Maine blueberry patch, which is where we got most of our blueberries and down at the bottom of that blueberry patch. There was a brook that ran down the mountain probably from the same spring where the house water came from and it passed into an area where they were cows.

18:53 And when you get cows mixed with birch trees and a brook the cows actually nibble the grass down so that it's like being on a golf course. So it's like a golf course with a Brook running through it and blueberry bushes with blueberries that are up High where the cows be on for the cows can reach them and my cousins and I and my brother would go down there and having read a lot of Little Greek and Roman mythology due to going out to spend a lot of time in the blank whatever was available. We would all take her clothes off that was soon as you were out us at the house side of the house. We would take her clothes off and be nymphs and dryads and seizures and that was the game. We would also dress in ground Pine Long strings of ground pound to the extent that we dressed and we would spend the Day More Les splashing around the Brook on this Earth.

19:53 Golf Course grass seed under the blueberry bushes with an occasional cow wondering by we had names for different parts of this area. Very simple names like Billy Goats Island was one. I remember that was with Jeffrey had to spend most of his time until he goes silent. Allison and I played Somewhere Out There were also little pools where you can actually swim very pretty little pools. The name of the Brooke was the White Stone Brooke and beginning with my grandfather. The idea was that every time you actually cross the brook whether it was on foot or in a car you would drop a white stone into it. So

20:44 Was really Little Brook the it went under the road in a Culver that was about two and a half feet high and was just the right height for a kid to crawl through and go and get a little tiny bit of an echo, but we took it very seriously that you had to put white stones in it. And I remember that when we actually sold the place and it's usually we usually say when my father sold the place because this was in about 1960 and it was really too big for him to handle. How old were you at that time in 1960. I would have been 17. I just I was just going off to college and I remember we drove down we drove down to the road and my mother threw a white stone into the white Stonebrook.

21:44 So

21:48 I wanted I wanted to tell one more thing about its what was close to the house and then if there's time I want to describe what it was like to be able to leave that area on foot as a child instead of what I was allowed to do as compared to what kids are allowed to do today.

22:11 Long time ago when that when the road had been built. It was a dirt road and still is a dirt road. Someone had planted Maples all along. The roads are about every 20 ft great big old Maples and when my mother was a little girl, she had named the closest Maple to the house yggdrasil, which is the the name of the tree out of which the whole population of Earth Springs in Norse mythology. I think that's right.

22:48 And so there was a tree called yggdrasil and to do what to say. Where you going. I'm going out. I'll be over when you're in your silver. I'll meet you at 8 or so and I would build towns that the roots of yggdrasil went way out in many directions and I would build towns and villages in among those routes.

23:09 So

23:11 When I think it was by the time I was about eight or nine, I mean you might be wondering where all the other kids right because you know being up here. It was a wonderful place with a lot to do when my cousins were there. But when my cousins weren't there the lack of other kids to play with was a big deal and there was one place where kids would gather

23:37 And that was the swimming hole down in the village and we were probably four or five miles from the village and furthermore. The swimming hole was on the far side of the village. So I'll bet it was and I haven't measured this recently, but I would guess it was five or six miles and I was allowed to walk there as a little kid which I can hardly imagine a parent these days letting a kid do that, you know, just to take us swimming towel over my shoulder and having my bathing suit on under my shorts and my t-shirt and I would walk off down the road and I would cut across Farms not following the road climbing the hills up behind the village because that was a short way to go and then down into the West River. Maybe it's the Swift River. I think it's actually the Swift River and not the west river and find the swimming hole and that's where you would see other kids.

24:37 So this was a hugely motivating for me would be to go to go down there and find other kids to play with and then when I was done, I would walk all the way back if any idea how long it took you to hike that pretty much all day.

24:58 Oh, yes. I've been back.

25:05 There's you leave a road. There's a two-lane asphalt road that contains that goes that follows the river and you so you follow some dirt tracks that were actually car tracks down through some Sandy Sandy floodplain.

25:27 Territory and then its slopes and there's a rocky Shore and then the water is not moving terribly fast unless there's been a lot of rain and then there are Stones Out Stones it for some reason are lined up along the flow of the river that stick up out of the water and you can you can make your way out to the first set and then if you're one of the big kids you want to get into the next part of the water and make it out to the next set which actually climb up into the hill and there would be always some older boys who are jumping off the the top the top rocks and doing cannonballs into the water.

26:15 Now where these rocks placed their do you think too damn know? This is all mantises. This is this is the way the river looked at.

26:28 Cummington itself you were likely to meet not just Village kids there, but the people from all over the place because coming to his self and I had

26:42 To music school in it and some very interesting history. It was one of the towns that welcomed Jewish refugees from Austria right after the porch and there's a movie actually called the only one coming to end. It was made about the the about how this cranky little Berkshire Town. Welcome to these complete strangers from Vienna and from around Austria into their midst some of these people were friends of my parents cuz my mother was a Pianist and she would play I mean there was a man named mr. Kernig's broker who is a violinist. He'd been in Insurance a Jewish insurance agent in Vienna, and now he was in the United States and he and my mom would get together and play Mozart sonatas. So you would need people like that at the swimming hole who might be speaking with accents or

27:42 I'm even speaking in other languages and then there would be people who came for the music schools. The Covington School of the Arts was flourishing at that time, and it was an early. It was a summer destination for Bohemians from New York. That was the first place I ever saw in there and their Coke law somebody wearing beautiful bright colors. And then another Music Camp there is called Greenwood at the time that I was going up there Greenwood with relatively accessible mean if you played an instrument you could go and get the license and be part of an orchestra and sing in the chorus now, it's incredibly competitive. It's the kids were already in the Juilliard programs to go out there now and they have concerts that are just amazing.

28:35 Can I ask you interrupt for just a minute? So all of this activity took place in the Summers? That's true when you were visiting. Yes. So where did you live when you were in your sort of mundane life when you were going to school? And where was your home? That's a whole different story. I can say we were my dad taught at a boys Prep School South of Cleveland called Western Reserve Academy, and we would get in the car and make the two-day trip pre pre interstate from the Berkshires out towards Cleveland and then South to Hudson Ohio, which is where we lived. Okay against we lived in faculty housing there and he thought he was, you know, he would be on duty at night and teaching available 24/7 and

29:32 We lived in a very different life there.

29:44 Impacted you

29:48 I think it for a long time.

29:52 I was I was saying to myself that I will never I will not have children until I have a hundred acres from the display on I think of I think of that amount of open space and freedom is something that's really necessary for kids to grow up. Of course and I had my first child. I was living in a little tiny ground-floor apartment in Berkeley and we managed just fine with a park nearby, but it it it gave me a I think I still have a set of minimum expectations for what everybody ought to have and I'm glad you asked that because

30:29 Is know as I think about how wonderful it was for me to be able to just walk off for the day and be going to wander through everybody's Farm since right back yards. I think about the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and how important that is and how important the beaches and I

30:51 I think the California coastal zone commission is something everybody should defend with their lives with their last breaths. And I don't think that there's really Ever Enough good beautiful. Well kept public space around for everybody. And when I you know, when I think of children growing up where they have to get in a car in order to go to an green open space, it just makes my heart sink.

31:23 Hahaha

31:34 What about the little white house? But could you describe like what it was like being in there and reading and with it in the morning or in the afternoon?

31:43 What was it like, okay.

31:47 There were there were really two rooms.

31:52 When is rooms had a cot in it, which implied that somebody stepped in it?

31:57 The other room had bookshelves made of raw pine does hammered together.

32:08 But there was a big chair which had belong to my great-uncle when he was a student at Amherst back in the Watts. It was a real Morris chair in over there with the bar in the back that flips back 3, you know simple design and I could curl up in that chair and be very very comfortable for many hours.

32:35 I know since you asked.

32:40 It was of extremely private place so that when my cousin Alison and I got out there we would engage and stuff that we felt nobody would ever find out about

32:53 For example, she had a huge collection of stuffed animals.

32:59 And we wrote little books on about those stuffed animals. We used those black and white spotted spiral notebooks and we wrote them and the stories we always graded them and we gave those animals hypothetical sex lives.

33:17 I love this because why did we know? You know, I've been reading the golden ass of a. All is Greek moussaka with you know, people romping around the urns and so we continue to turn.

33:43 I think it was just sort of you know, I had to hypothetical. What if what if this happened what if that happened? What if they did that they did something else and sometimes they would be human beings in the story something good. My point here is that it was a very private place since we were just as we could leave and walk through everybody's backyard. We were all so imaginatively

34:13 You know what? He's not released in about what we what we thought about it, but we we do need to figure out now I have to say that Alison did tell on me and my mother got very upset and actually burned or no.

34:33 In the fireplace in the fireplace in the living room and I remember watching the pages burn and the other Quest.

34:47 Wonderful stories just wonderful. Every kid should have a place like that. Really? Yes. I think so every kid to really truly have that freedom to just explore a lot of things that they've been wondering about and thinking about and now they've got this private place maybe where they can do it and there's nothing wrong with any of that. I think it said, yeah, right exactly.

35:26 You know that but remember that I started this by talking about this house painter from Philadelphia didn't want to tell the story about how yes about how

35:41 How's the ability to start at Center City and run in 15 minutes and be among the apple trees? He didn't even want to tell people that story because he thought it would be too upsetting for them to hear it. And those are also my hesitations about telling the story as well. And I think in my once I came out to California and I went to landscape architecture school and hardly, you know to the extent that I practice landscape architecture. I did try to build the gardens that would make that kind of experience possible, but I don't

36:20 It it makes me sad.

36:23 Beyond something that I feel safe communicating to think about the world in which my grandchildren are going to grow up. I've just finished reading on the sixth extinction by Elizabeth. Kolbert did that makes it that makes me think that when my grandkids are in their 40s, they're going to if they if they do well if they have money they will live in a world in which

37:03 Land is either destroyed or managed and animals are either domestic or extinct in the animals that the animals that they know and can see and be around we'll all be there because

37:22 It'll be because they have been there being raised for food at there being raised our entertainment or for work or something, but the wild animals write the animals even like the porcupine that would eat the wood in the Woodshed will be gone.

37:43 Can you describe a little bit about yourself when you were young? What kind of by young person where you like, but if you like to wear just a little bit about who you were I was skinny and I could climb trees very fast.

38:02 I thought I took my shoes off in early June and didn't put them on until September.

38:11 There's a whole Victorian tradition of sort of wild girls.

38:20 W h Hudson has a book about a kind of a wild girl in the Amazon and I kind of pictured myself as being of a forest creature go wild a girl like that. I just I sowed a lot. I sold the doll clothes and I began sewing my own clothes as soon as I could.

38:46 And of course, I always

38:48 I wanted to buy a lot of clothes, but we didn't have a lot of money. So I wasn't going to be going out buying clothes and department stores, but I did cut pictures out of the New York Times and I kept a fashion scrapbook. So it's funny combination of being this, you know, girl who dressed in ground Pine down here near the Whitestone Brook and also was cutting out pictures of Chanel and DaVinci dresses from the New York Times on Sundays.

39:25 I also became very interested in music and threw myself starting at about age 10. I threw myself into practicing the cello. So I would be playing the cello by the time I was finishing High School. I was playing for 5 hours a day and that kind of comp me down.

39:47 How did you feel at 17 when you found out that this was no longer?

39:54 A place where you were going to be able to go.

39:58 Oh, I made a pact with my brother that we would buy it back.

40:03 Which we have not done. He says that he he actually spent two summers on an island in Maine which is probably a nicer place and I spend my husband and I spend our summers at a little village in southern Vermont which is right up against the Green Mountains and it's where Three Rivers come together and didn't just fine. And I also solved my spatial Problems by getting into a red truck with my boyfriend and coming to California a dancing on the beach along with a lot of other people like that.

40:47 Helena I am so glad you came in today. This has been an absolutely delightful and you've reminded me listening to your story of a lot of things that I did as a kid, which I can tell you that when we step out of the booth, but I am so glad you came in and wonderful this thank you very much. You've been to the perfect interview or