In late summer 1973 I found myself in the Greenhouse at Menucha Retreat and Conference Center, a bright and airy meeting room, being interviewed by Chuck and Rita Knapp for a job. It was my first ever job interview, though not at all indicative of those that would follow. The room was called the Greenhouse for the obvious reason that it had once been a working one, providing ornamental plant starts for the lush gardens of the estate and fresh cut flowers for the mansion in the 20s and 30s. By late summer 1973, surrounded by overgrown Douglas Fir forest, the room would have been useless as a greenhouse even if there had been a desire or need for one, which there was not. Fifty years is a long time in the woods for manicured gardens to be reclaimed. Nature will always win. I was there to meet the directors of Menucha, an “Ecumenical Retreat” perched on a bluff above the Columbia River just a couple of miles from Corbett High School, where I would attend only my freshman year before fleeing to the “big city” of Portland. Chuck and Rita Knapp were cleaning in a bright and airy blur while we talked in the bright and airy Greenhouse. Mostly they talked. Their energetic approach to things was a phenomenon I would witness many times over the next 5 years. I followed them as they worked their way from the Greenhouse through a couple of guest rooms and bathrooms, making final preparations for the incoming “group,” due to arrive at any minute. I had no idea then what that meant, or even what Munucha really was—“ecumenical” was not in my teen vocabulary—though I had been to the place many times on hot summer afternoons as a child to swim in that remarkable pool with one of the world’s great views of the Columbia Gorge. A few years later when I became lifeguard for a summer I learned that providing this service to the locals was a part of Menucha fulfilling its nonprofit mission, and that’s why a country boy like me was able to experience such a special and private place. As a teenaged lifeguard though I can say nothing was more nerve wracking than the unruly community swims.

I know the Greenhouse meeting was in 1973 because I had just turned 14, the age at which kids could legally work at that time in anything other than agriculture, at which I had labored for at least 3 prior summers, hauling hay and picking berries for money in addition to my daily chores on our own small farm.  I know it was 1973 also because the dominant topic of discussion that first year at Menucha, mostly among staff somewhat older than me, was Watergate. Almost exactly one year later Nixon would resign the presidency. These older teens would have witnessed the end of the draft that year – just in time for them –and they were highly sensitized to all things political. This was new to me and I enjoyed listening while they talked like well-informed adults. Politics at home was my dad’s head buried in the evening paper. It turned out Menucha attracted a smart group of kids in the 1970s, and the place made us smarter. I obviously got hired that day in the Greenhouse, though I don’t think I could have been a very impressive candidate. I can’t even remember Chuck or Rita asking me any questions, though in retrospect what would you ask a 14-year-old in a job interview? They had known and employed many many kids over the years and they clearly had a sense for the thing. They also knew the potential transformative power this place could have on young people, while I on the other hand had no idea what lay in store for me.

Chuck and Rita Knapp both died within the last couple of years, and only very recently in re-reading their obituaries did I learn that they had, in that very same year of 1973, testified before the Oregon Statehouse in favor of a gay rights bill (homosexuality was a crime in Oregon until 1972).  Rita’s testimony made national news. They also that same year co-founded the Oregon chapter of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Had I known either of these facts that summer day at fourteen in the Greenhouse it would have meant very little to me, but knowing it now explains so much about who they were and the environment they created for us—their extended family—and the impact the place had on me personally. I was always a little afraid of Rita, the stern, statuesque lady who floated through the old mansion silently lighting candles and arranging flowers, but she and Chuck would ultimately play a significant role in making Menucha the single most important place in my own coming of age story, and I suspect many others who spent their teens working there with them. The first time I would utter those three little life-changing words: “I am gay” was in fact at Menucha, though in truth it probably came out something more like the four little timid words: “I think I’m gay,” for fear of being challenged for lack of experience.  I only wish that I had known at the time that perhaps Rita was the person I should have said it to—chances are though she knew.

Charles and Rita’s openness and questioning approach to faith (Chuck was an ordained minister of some Christian ilk) made them perfect mentors to countless youth from the surrounding rural working class community, who were like me, not from educated families on a par with Menucha’s paying guests, nor for that matter the millionaire Jewish governor who built the place in the late 20s.  By 1978 though, the Knapps had become too liberal in the eyes of the leadership of the Portland church—which still owns Menucha today—and in what seemed at the time a mysterious coop, they were quietly replaced for good; a seeming injustice to all of the staff that they had nurtured and devastating for them personally. Now it just all seems like part of the same collapsing in of a progressive chapter of thinking that marked the end of the 70s. Soon regressive Ronald Reagan would be in the white house, and even my “alternative” high school would close forever—while the specter of AIDS was waiting in the wings to help launch a backlash against open-mindedness and freedom that has taken 30 years to somewhat right itself. The Knapp’s demise at Menucha also lead to my own as I had initiated a letter-writing campaign in a fit of teen righteous indignation in support of the Knapps, and also made somewhat nasty references to their incoming replacements, whom I always thought reeked of religious insincerity. The letter, addressed to the board of directors and signed by many staff members, was accidentally left on the copy machine in the office where it was discovered by the new incoming director. This marked the beginning of a lifelong habit of mine of bridge-burning and rash reactions to perceived injustice, which for a time I would misconstrue as activism. However, by then I was nineteen and I wouldn’t have stayed on at Menucha much longer anyway. Summer camp has to end sometime, though working at Menucha in the 70s was way better than any summer camp; at least as I could imagine summer camp to be for those who could have afforded such things.

In the beginning though, there was the swimming pool. That is where this whole long chapter started for me, on those hot summer evenings with that pungent cum-like scent of Horse Chestnut blossoms hanging in the air around a frigid white pool packed with screaming white kids 750-feet above the Columbia River. It was an oddly shaped pool not really designed for serious swimming. It had a very shallow shallow-end with a fountain, only good for splashing about, and a diving board at the other end silhouetted against the sky that disappeared bellow the horizon of the pool deck, opening up to the vast expanse of the Columbia Gorge beyond. A giant outdoor fireplace sat along the north side of the pool like the ruins of some old stone castle. It had a complex network of grills and ovens and even water pipes for heating the recirculating water from the pool, though I never saw it used this way and doubt its efficacy. It was just one of the mysterious over-sized relics strewn about that to a kid made the place feel an unlikely private home. Gender segregated changing rooms were reached down two sets of stairs flanking the pool deck. The large rooms were white and airy with a wall of frosted glass and smelled of fresh paint and chlorine, but decades of seepage through the tiled deck above had covered the ceiling with calcium stalactites, giving the rooms’ whiteness a creepy other worldly feel. The old pumps and giant spherical green steel filters filled with sand had lasted well into the 70s when they finally had to be cut apart with torches to fit through the doors so they might be replaced with modern blue plastic ones. Originally filtered water was returned to the pool in a single vertical fountain jet centered in the semi-circular shallow end, perhaps intended for proper ladies to wade in hiked skirts in the 1920s in no more than a foot of water. However, what is most memorable about the pool is that it was always absolutely frigid, exactly as you’d expect a large unheated pool, perched on the northernmost border of Oregon, to be. I must ask my mother how she would have known the pool was open to the public at all in those pre-information age days—though a few years later as secretary of the middle school she tended to know pretty much everything about everybody within a wide radius of our little farm. Menucha though was quite disconnected from the community around it and a very mysterious place to a local kid with an active imagination who of course deeply wanted the place to be haunted. We used to have a regular substitute teacher for 8^th grade algebra, perhaps having something to do with the regular teacher being the high school football coach. The rotund substitute apparently didn’t know much of anything about algebra, and instead spent the entire class time telling ghost stories. I suspect even his name, “Pasquale,” was made up; but at storytelling he was masterful, and one of his stories in particular we were certain was about the haunted mansion at Menucha, which had in fact lain vacant for a time before the 100-acre estate was purchased by First Presbyterian Church in 1950 for an paltry $60,000. We could neither confirm nor deny Pasquale’s detailed descriptions of the creepy interiors of the great house because none of us kids had been inside, and he pretended to have never heard of Menucha when challenged. I suspect he’d been there for some teacher conference and knew exactly what he was describing. Carved ram’s heads after all are not common features on living room walls, but they can’t be missed, leering from the rafters in the Great Hall at Menucha. In later years I often found myself staring at the wooden beasts alone at night in the Great Hall while the notorious Gorge wind whistled and rattled through old windows, but they never twitched to life as they had in Pasquale’s ghost stories.

The place has massive stone gates that hold a heavy Iron chain spanning the entry drive, set back from the old Columbia River Scenic Highway as if modestly hiding in the forest. It is not readily visible to passersby, though to catch a glimpse of these monuments is to know that something different lies beyond.  None of the estate is visible from any roads or public places except for a glimpse of the white rail at the edge of the swimming pool that can be seen from the Vista House at Crown Point a mile away, but you really have to know what you’re looking for.  The estate is accessed down a long winding one-lane drive through thick Oregon woods, emerging quite suddenly into what feels like a small dense village. Buildings are directly adjacent to the drive, which slips past the 150-foot long main house with little fanfare. In fact you’re so close to it when you drive past that you can’t grasp its size at all, the tallest peak of roof over the Great Hall being completely invisible from the front entry. What you do see though are the grotto-like rock gardens and waterfalls opposite the front of the house as you drive through a sort of narrow canyon under big tree canopies along toward the parking area. As a child I was so intrigued by this teasing glimpse into an elite and romantic world of which I knew nothing that I looked forward to swim nights more for the total experience of the place than the actual frigid pool. I did love swimming as a kid and later became a lifeguard, but never loved crowds—joyfully screaming or otherwise—and still don’t.

It would have been my “adopted family” who turned me on to the job possibilities at Menucha. Except of course that I wasn’t adopted, I merely sought out more freedom and less boredom at 13 and 14 than I thought I could find at home. At home I felt stuck in some mold, forged for me in childhood by someone else, not expected to grow or surprise, and I wanted to do just that, even if it meant leaving my own family for a while, or changing high schools three times. The matriarch of my “adopted” family was a true intellectual, open to discussing anything hours on end into the night, though she wouldn’t finish her own formal education until years later to become a high school teacher in middle age. She too had been a rebellious youth, growing up in Hawaii and marrying unfortunately young.  As interesting as she was, her husband was decidedly not, alternating from arrogant to silent—mostly silent when he found me suddenly sharing their roof and sleeping with his 14 year old daughter. With her mother no topic was out of bounds, god, ESP and the meaning of life would be discussed until dawn, sometimes sitting in the car at a bank watching the illuminated numbers on the clock change surrounded by the detritus of burgers and shakes—and of course we also discussed sex and sexuality. She took her daughter and me aside one day to ask if we understood how to use condoms and offered to help with alternatives if needed. We squirmed a bit and lied that we weren’t doing it, though we were. I think I was 14. The two teenaged daughters and I drove 25 miles to Adams High School on NE 42^nd Ave in Portland together every day for part of a year in an old 1954 Buick. It was a progressive “alternative” high school in a black neighborhood with hippies in interracial marriages as teachers; the kind of school that would be hard to find today—and it was public. Adams was known for its modular scheduling (which just means there are always kids in the halls) and for its innovative “schools within a school” structure. I had joined Alpha School of CEX (College Exploration) mostly because it was fun to say. I drove myself every day from Menucha the following year, my last, to graduate at 16. The matriarch and her two daughters both got jobs at Menucha, though I don’t remember seeing much of my “girlfriend” after I told her I liked boys. Alas, there is no easy way for that conversation to go. I owe a lot to her mother though, and she would not be my last adult female friend and mentor.

(I recently reconnected with my girlfriend from those couple of formative young years and I realize that I perhaps owe her a more thorough airing. She read this piece and wasn’t super happy with it. As for me, after just rereading it, I’m not sure what I would change. In the hierarchy of my life’s influences and loves, it’s just about right.)

In the mid-70s I also joined up with a middle-aged couple who raised Morgan Horses on their farm very near Menucha.  I was invited to travel with them and ride their horses in shows in “junior division” events. I gained experience—they got some kind of points. Linda was excited to find out who would be judging the first show that I rode in with them, and she assured me I had a very good chance of placing.  Boys were rare on the horse show circuit and what she had meant but never said was that the judge was gay. In fact I did win and came home with a couple of little silver goblets and blue ribbons. The dog people of “Best in Show” have nothing on the obsessive weirdness of horse people. Katie Rebel was briefly the love of my life and a super horse and of course did the actual winning. I was a good rider though and later took to wearing white gloves, the ultimate act of arrogance in the show ring, as any movement of the hands would be very apparent. Mine did not move. For two years or so I spent many hours tramping around on trail-rides in the Gorge with the heavy drinking middle-aged mother of two who my own mother would later tell me was rumored around town to have been my lover. I found this very funny, and almost cool that people who knew me actually believed it. Her husband on the other hand was hot. The true affair I was having was of course with the horses. Riding bareback is a very sexy feeling, nothing between your body and the animal, sharing heat and sweat (a horse’s body temperature is naturally hotter than ours) while wearing the tightest possible jeans to keep the balls from moving about. In winter the horses were boarded at a stable in Troutdale with an indoor arena where we would ride at night after school to Elton John on the sound system. I still literally smell horse whenever I hear “Bennie and the Jets.” It is certainly true what they say about smell and memory.

Jobs at Menucha were oddly divided up into gender specific categories in the midst of the otherwise enlightened atmosphere created there by the Knapps. There was the kitchen work: helping to prepare meals for groups as large as 150 at a single seating, under the command of the loveable but fiery old cook Zelda Mae Dyer. Zelda was from Hermiston Oregon where they grow watermelon, and while she clearly had lead an entire lifetime prior to Menucha, to me she seemed like part of the building. Kitchen jobs were mostly for the girls and women. Then there was the dishwashing, which for whatever reason was linked to grounds-keeping and firewood hauling and mostly done by us boys. Interaction between guests and staff was limited to the two swinging doors that connected the kitchen with the dining halls, created out of the house’s large porches enclosed with glass and swallowing the original dining room in the process. Designated servers from each table of eight guests would pick up their own food in large serving bowls; one “in” door and one “out” door. Occasionally a group would deem itself too fancy and pay more for table service, and we would have to dress up and pretend that we knew how to wait tables. Luckily this was very rare. We grounds-keepers would do all sorts of maintenance projects, mostly outdoors, depending on the weather. Gardening largely meant hacking back the encroaching forest, mowing acres of lawn and cutting wood for the many fireplaces. Enough trees were felled by wind every year to keep the giant fireplace in the Great Hall blazing as well as all the others around the estate. Firewood was stored in a big room in the basement of the mansion and then raised to the main floor in a hand-cranked wood lift to be ceremoniously carried into the Great Hall to stoke the fireplace that was so big you had to walk into it to throw on a log. Stoking the Great Hall fire with those 4-foot logs to the delight of guests was a favorite winter performance among all the boys. Painting the swimming pool on the other hand was a springtime favorite, as it marked the coming of summer and was a great way to get a jump on your tan. “To every-thing there is a season…” Whatever the job and wherever we’d be on the 102-acre grounds, work would stop at the sound of the big bell used to call guests to the dining hall at meal time. Indeed ringing the bell by pulling on a rope was its own coveted job that Ms. Zelda Mae would dole out with a good deal of ceremonial fairness, and whoever was chosen would play along with feigned excitement. Disappointing the cook was not a good idea. We would all gather in the staff dining room at every meal, the real and permanent social hub of Menucha, where the indoor staff under Rita and the outdoor staff under Chuck would all come together and share stories of the day and opinions on current events. At the end of each meal the grounds staff transformed into dishwashers and the dish room would come to steaming noisy life. The whole teen-aged kitchen dance seems remarkably well organized to me now, though I imagine it took years to get it just right. Dishwashers had a certain macho cache in the kitchen as they emerged from the steam carrying stacks of dishes and pots and swiftly replacing everything to its proper place. Dishwashing was a race against the clock, especially after dinner, as your shift ended when the job was done, and teens do after all have other things to do at night.

However, no job rivaled the near movie-star status of summer lifeguard, and my first summer there the lifeguard was a particularly dreamy California beach bum type in his tight Hang Ten cut-offs. He was American, while subsequent lifeguards would be more exotic, having been hired through some kind of international summer exchange program—one year Dutch the next German—but none was ever more beautiful than the Hang Ten wearing blond that first year. Girls in the kitchen (and even one of their mothers) would openly discuss his “package,” and the cook would dote over him with special attentions.  On a river rafting trip on the nearby Sandy River that summer I was able to confirm the authenticity of the contents of that “package,” quite by accident of course. Our “raft” was just a bunch of over-inflated truck inner-tubes crudely lashed together with rope into a 10×15-foot monstrosity. It was a trip I would repeat many more times in my teen summers, especially after figuring out that a single inner-tube per person was actually safer in the rapids than our big raft of six tubes and eight boys. The joints would buckle when the raft struck a rock, sending one tube over the top of another, the whole thing becoming a tangle of rubber, flesh and rope. That came out sounding sexy—which it was—the point being that safety was of little concern in those days. One boy disappeared for too long after diving into a deep still pool between rapids, and before anyone else even noticed, Hang Ten lifeguard was off. They both emerged safe, the diving boy having gotten tangled in a submerged tree to be freed by the surfer dude lifeguard with the big cock; a true Gothic tale of chivalry—in my head.

In 1978 I took over the prestigious role of lifeguard for the summer, having earned my WSI (water safety instructor) certification the previous fall at Oregon College of Education, and working all that winter as lifeguard there—a tough place to learn the job with its many “special needs” swimmers in various states of catatonia, psychosis and fits, as part of the school’s special-ed training. One 19-year old “boy” in particular delighted in escaping his handler, dashing up the stairs from the lockers stark naked with a raging hard-on, and then throwing himself onto the metal drain grates around the pool and pulling himself belly-down along the sharp drains. The explanation I would get for this from his “educators” is that someone had once warned him to be careful around these drains as they were sharp, which they were, so that naturally he would try to cut himself—and that made sense to the handlers somehow. Menucha’s director-to-be had apparently been too busy that year staging a coop to take over from the Knapps to give any thought to hiring the summer lifeguard and was happy to let me step in when I asked. There were a lot of things wrong with that pool too from a safety standpoint, including every lifeguard’s worst nightmare, a diving board. Most of the paying guests were really not in need of any guarding though, but for whatever legal reasons I was provided. One group objected to me strongly that summer for being male. They were called “TOPS” (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) and consisted of very large women who ate massive salads constantly during their week at camp, from very large bowls purchased specially for their visit. I was given a lecture by my boss on how to behave with discretion around them and they reluctantly agreed—it was that or they couldn’t swim. I wore sweats to the pool that week as I was very skinny in 1978, and tried hard not to make eye contact or listen to their conversations, and I shut all the lights off at night. I was by no means a jock, quite the opposite, but they didn’t know that, so I tried extra hard to be sensitive. I remember one evening with half a dozen or so of these very large women bobbing around, seemingly un-phased by the cold water, when I overheard one of them remark that she didn’t understand how some of the others could so easily swim under water, something she had never been able to do. I broke my Buckingham-Palace-Guard-stance to glance over to see who was saying this, and there she was floating like a sea lion, completely upright, black-suited breasts completely above water—no kicking—no treading. I forced my laugh to escape as a cough at her preposterous statement, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Had no one told her that fat is lighter than water? I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to educate her.

An algae bloom got out of control late that summer, and before I could get it cleared again the kids of Corbett and their mothers demanded their community swim time. I very reluctantly opened the pool one especially hot evening and watched nervously as tiny heads began to disappear completely from view below the bright green water. The next day I drove to town (which town I can’t say) for chlorine since the gas system wasn’t working. I remember the look of shock on the clerk’s face when I told him I needed chlorine for a 90,000 gallon pool in Corbett. It certainly wasn’t huge, but about six times the average residential pool in volume. There was another year when the local water company was irate that Menucha had filled the pool without warning them, the exact implications of that were never clear to me, though undoubtedly serious.

Menucha’s pool almost killed me that summer when the connection broke off the end of a full five-foot tall tank of chlorine gas that I was changing out. I panicked, but was more terrified of getting in trouble than I was afraid for myself, and after first running outside for a big gulp of fresh air, I headed back into the pump room to try to turn off the valve—which I was finally, painfully able to do just before passing out and falling backwards out the door. There was an old gas mask there for just this reason, but I didn’t know how to use it—and there was no working phone at the pool, just the dead old intercom system from 1920s. It’s almost impossible to keep your eyes open in the presence of chlorine gas and it burns the back of the throat. Later I would learn that tear gas feels much the same, except for the fainting. It was dark when I woke up. Millions of brain cells must have died that night, but not wanting to jeopardize my coveted position as lifeguard, I told no one.

Other near-death experiences involving the tractor and chainsaws would follow, all more ordinary to country living than chlorine gas. However, when I a jammed a protruding end of rebar into my shin by hopping onto the old ruin of the concrete trout pond, which I had just discovered overgrown in the woods, I was left with no alternative but the unthinkable—to call my mother. I hadn’t spoken to her in quite some time, but of course she came and drove me the 25 miles to the hospital for some nasty bone chip rinsing and painful metal stitches. I won’t try to explain my break from blood family here, except to say that it started around age 13 and hasn’t really ended. I was lucky to be a child of the 70s as I don’t think my level of teen independence (i.e. runaway) would be tolerated today, or might have ended badly. Menucha was only one part of a larger safety net ultimately keeping me off the streets of Portland. (I know, it sounds funny to me too.) Portland is such a toy city, but there were in fact street kids back then, “rent-boys” before anyone used that term, sitting on and around a low wall at 3^rd and SW Taylor prostituting themselves to survive—or for fun. I have to admit being somewhat in awe of them at the time. They seemed confident somehow. They knew who they were, if not where they were going. Their campy good humored chatter masked dark histories and darker futures, or no futures at all, but for now it was still the 70s.