Given A Sign That I Never was Sure How To Read

Rising Up



Greenfield was a mysterious place. I went to teach there in 1986 leaving South Central LA, Watts for teaching migrant farming children. And to teach as well the children of the ranchers and business owners in a town then about 8000 people in the Salinas Valley.

It was a place of odd coincidence and unforeseen challenges and twists of fate. It worked “on many levels”, on all the levels one’s psyche wishes or needs to go. Thus it isn’t surprising that death called there and found form in the fields, as well as life and birth, and that two kids got to grow up on their feet in the push and pull of realities in learning to teach and live. Many I hear blogging on teaching are doing the same, figuring it out.



There is a sign on the highway welcoming you to Greenfield and foretelling it as Home of the Broccoli Festival with this insidiously silly looking broccoli man with two skinny arms in a big wave. Right beside it I had quite a welcome right after our arrival and “learned” something I’ll never intellectually know the meaning of, or interpret adequately. For me a metaphor about life. It ...was.



And in a sense for a teacher I realized at some level that learning, study and domains of knowledge and universe have greater complexity and current than I ever fathomed prior to my stay there. It was the scratching of a surface. But it was a sign on the highway of life as different from broccoli boy as one gets and as deep in meaning as I have capacity to contain.



So there came this “ sign” into my life one day and I never rode by the Broccoli man waving that anonymous welcome again down highway 101 that it wasn’t my greeting in the morning and my goodbye in the evening. I went to work for seven years with that detached place mark in my memory of an equally anonymous night. All with that silly broccoli boy grin and string arm wave. Whether it foretold seven years of good or ill fortune or the future or simply foretold, I can’t quite think though adequately, certainly I never rode by it without recollecting what happened in my first October living in the fields.



We had to take classes to get our credentials “more valid”. This is an ongoing California issue for teachers. I should say a never-ending issue for teachers. In my case I had to get a California credential on top of my West Virginia teaching two because though they had a status called “reciprocity” with other states, all it meant was a dip in your pocket and “Emergency” status for a couple years while you essentially did much of it a second time “their way”. So I had to take Mainstreaming, California history, a class in the Constitution or pass an exam, a computer requirement, and the Teaching of Reading, again. Jack had to take the coursework and fifth year requirement or just in a few words be in school at night forever. Fourteen years ended with PHD and debt, I stopped with the two Masters and three babies. It meant going into debt right from the start because it was very expensive to do this and the salary paid to us was very low. And though they talk of great advantage programs around school to those that work with the disadvantaged, they always found a way to “deny” just the specific real estate our school sat on for fitting a criteria for a program to give help to new teachers. We paid.



We had to go several nights a week up the 101 highway to Monterey, stay till 10 PM and drive back the forty-five minutes in the darkest night I ever saw to our apartment in Greenfield. At times the darkest fog rolled in to shrink an expanse that seemed enormous to a kind of foot around your car surrounded by the sense of possible disaster. It was very tiring to work all day and need to be at class by 4PM and sit till really late, go through the strain of a long drive home and get up the next day. A real strain on my health. I think of this listening to younger teachers who are training at night. It's hard. And you are losing no matter what you do.

And later when I was done with the school part myself a terrible strain on me waiting for my husband to come home for what ultimately was a twelve year invasion into our time together. Something quite hard for him to consider its effect on me as I had pregnancies and young babies and thoughts of needing his company and his help. To look would have hurt. He was in a survival mode too. And in time when my Mom came out to help, the burdens of waiting for him lifted just a bit. It had became a great fear of mine, those drives of his, largely from what happened that first October when we arrived and started our lives with this chore to do in Monterey. The why of this piece.



On the way home from our third class on a very crisp clear night in October of 1986 just a month before Jack's Aunt and Father died in sudden collapse of our life in their early 50's from heart attacks, I could not see the Greenfield broccoli sign up it’s little knoll, because off the side of the road was a truck, a semi, reentering the highway in the right lane. It was slowly re-entering.We had just been passed a few seconds before in the right lane by a blue nice looking pickup and I had sensed and looked so briefly at the man driving by. It was usual to be alone on the highway at that time of night save for truckers or a lone driver. And there are always so many trucks hauling vegetables in the day and goods on 101, night is far less traffic even in trucks. I looked up to see the pickup ram into the back of the semi. It was just right in front of us, but we were over in the left lane. Jack was not breaking and I was pushing back in my seat. And then…… Instantly I saw something rise up from the truck. I saw a shimmer of a kind I could call “light”, but I’d need to redefine light. And from my repertoire and experience and belief “spirit” is what I chose for discourse on it. But that would be fitting a word to an experience. And it was something I knew without word context.



It rose and I knew it was this man, he had died and it was over.



I said to Jack “Be careful”. Though he had to be looking to drive he did not perceive any of it. He almost hit engine parts spewed on the road surface and he let me kind of push at the wheel to get him further left. By then I was yelling “Brake, brake. “ I saw the truck glued on and smashed into oblivion on the semi’s back end. Jack pulled over slightly ahead of the stopping semi and went back to see what he could do. I was just frozen. For one thing I knew and told him the man had died, I also knew what I saw and in a sense what it implied and like any being, “I was sore afraid”. I was coweringly afraid.



I sat in the car in the dark with my window down listening to the field sprinklers while a braver man than I talked to the truck driver, they called police on the trucker radio. Then the Police officer, Mr. Green who looked in on me with his flashlight and asked a few questions and expressed calm and resolve had to take care of it. I also talked to a young officer on his first night of service who like myself knew that a life was lost and much more to come would enter the world of another group of people that night. I sat and thought about this and listened to the water rotate over the crops. My husband got into the car briefly and told me “the poor guy” was smashed beyond knowing but he took a pulse. He was pure adrenaline and he had done something hard. It was just a terrible moment in time. A stopping in time.



Then we waited, and at some point after getting my witness name, address and info., we went home. I really was the only witness. To the spirit of a man that rose from a pickup by a sign on a highway in the middle of the night on a day when his time stopped forever.





Later I read the San Jose paper and found his obituary. Somehow coincidentally because we did not take the paper, but at Perko’s diner it fell in my hands on our lunch break and I tore it out and kept it. I use to look at it. He had a two-year-old son. He was 32. And much later lawyers would ask me out to the highway and walk me around to recollect the scene and what I saw. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them about the experience of seeing him die, the moment. I’m ashamed of that, because the family might want to know, but I knew I’d be considered “a kook” and if his family had a case or not it wasn’t fair for me to get off the fact I saw the semi, saw it’s reflectors and lights and saw the small truck run straight into it at least 65 miles an hour. It was what happened. He was drinking a coke and threw his head back, they theorized.



The next morning after the accident of course I was called in to sub. I went into a class that had no teacher since year’s beginning. She was trying to break her contract to take a job in Monterey that opened suddenly and it was in limbo whether or not the Greenfield District would allow it to happen or so I was told that morning. Had they allowed that break I would have had a job. Instead they didn’t let her and rarely saw her that year as she waited them out, giving a group of kids one lousy year of rotating subbing people. Bad issue all around. So the fifth graders were unruly. A new friend's niece was in the class and so were a good many kids who knew each other quite well as “town kids”. The Principal was in to “watch” me, I don’t know why with odd advice on ways to dismiss kids which just didn’t fit the moment. Finally saying my way of doing this was too “controlling”, I just ignored it. These guys needed to know who was leading or I’d be following. I may have been too controlling. After LA I was sure it was better not to lose anyone to early on in a day. He was a strange fellow anyway.



And in the room was an aide working all day who waited till after lunch then quietly told me her husband was the Mr. Green who had met me on the highway the night before, the officer, and in a few seconds I found that coincidence just a bit much. Just a little bit too much. She listened to me tell that I saw the trucks collide. But here I did finally stray into what I really saw. Just very briefly and slightly and she silently listened and said it was “his time”. But the trouble was it was my time too.



And in that time I understood time and many things quite differently.

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Taken in (See more photos here)

This taken in 2007, the Broccoli boy was "taken" a friend tells me which might be 'rural myth', but this is the sign a few feet from where I saw a man lose his life on Highway 101 in about 1986. No in 1986. On my roadtrip in June 29, 2007 I saw another horrible accident up Soledad way further down, and I pretty sure some folks didn't make it. That highway was awful.