Lingering Memento

At this writing, next month (November 18) will mark the 108^th anniversary of WWI’s conclusion. History has its way with us, blandly stomping through our times as an enormous, amused adolescent might kick through an ant colony. No hard feelings. Change is good, it’s said (often with a ragged sigh of resignation). One would rather it wasn’t ushered in through blood and fire, but the Complaint Department walk-up window is shut and the blind drawn. 

Corners are turned and unasked-for new epochs seek our approval and embrace. It happens over and over and over. Through decades and centuries and millennia, massive, sorrowful, world-altering conflagrations fade in memory, their lingering mementoes often surprisingly prosaic.

Laurie

Laurie Rutherford. There’s a name for a boy. Today a name like that would earn you a beating by the merry-go-round, or endless snickering in the office kitchenette. Per the custom of the time, though, the young guy’s given name derives from his mother’s maiden name. Born in Goleta to Scottish arrivistes and recently relocated a few miles downthe coast to swinging Santa Barbara – along with his parents and five much-loved and anymore intolerablesiblings – Laurie is today making his brazen escape from Santa Barbara, the small provincial village planted inthe confining little strip between the annoyingly modest Santa Ynez mountains and a broad Pacific ocean aslooming and omnipresent as a jailer. 

Young, restless Laurie Rutherford is headed out, is ready to see Someplace Else, orAnyplace Else, whichever comes first. You know the feeling.

Now he alights on the gilded, steam-shrouded, surprisingly filthy street of fabled New York City, and he knows it’s finally real, knows he’s truly made it out of SB and into the larger world he’d scarcely had the imagination to envision. Laurie Rutherford, all idiot grin and rapid heartbeat, shoulders his duffel, merges into and is carried along with the thronging khaki crowds making their way to the docks. His eyes are aimed up, ever up. Every building he sees is six times as tall and twice as swanky as the Arlington Hotel back home. 

The Arlington….

Aww jeez. Seriously? Laurie Rutherford, escapee and adventurer, feels his heart twist a little, and he moans. Aloud. It’s only been seven days since he left home. 

Stephen

Stephen gets it. Boy, does he get it. When Laurie had asked his dad’s permission and blessing, the response came without hesitation, surprising Stephen himself. He saw in a flash that Laurie’s impulse to quit town and light out for a more expansive world was the same longing that had driven Stephen and his brother John out of Aberdeenshire, Scotland those years ago, and into the opening paragraphs of an embryonic California whose future they would help write. Aberdeenshire, with its damp spires and clocks and cobbled thoroughfares – the Rutherford
brothers had traveled, at great expense and not a little hardship, to where a guy could breathe, spread his arms, maybe own a little something, build a little something.

When Stephen had settled himself in his job at Glen Annie Ranch in Goleta, he sent for his love back home, and Agnes Lawrie was as excited as he to see through sunstruck eyes a new life in a new place. They’d married and begun a family, raised six kids; had energetically interwoven their shared story with that of Santa Barbara.

Alongside his brother and sisters, Stephen’s son Laurie had grown up a native Santa Barbaran, knew the town and landscape cold, had explored every corner, every hill and cove and stretch of beach. Laurie had morphed from a gangling awkward boy running up and down State Street with his buddies, to a shy, uncertain teen, and finally to a young man yearning for just a glimpse of what lay beyond his over-familiar hometown.

Saying goodbye to Laurie had been hard, almost unbearable, really; particularly given his destination. But his son would be the first of the stateside Rutherfords to take up arms on behalf of their new home, the heroically-christened United States of America. Laurie’s unguarded desire to feel Life had stirred in Stephen something of the fire he’d felt on arriving in the westernmost reaches of this crazy experimental country.

Perhaps most important of all, Laurie would have to leave their family home to finally see it, Stephen had assured his Agnes. When Laurie comes back he’ll finally see what we saw when we’d arrived in California, Stephen had said. And if he doesn’t (Stephen mused darkly to himself, not sharing this brute possibility with Agnes), Laurie will find his own home somewhere and build his own future, love it the way we love this place. When Stephen spoke quietly to her about their Laurie, his hand on her forearm, what could Agnes do but nod? She wasn’t hearing a word of it.

In the meantime, Stephen had his hands full. He’d done well since arriving back in the [18]70s, had managed at one point to buy the seaside Dos Pueblos ranch out there in the overgrown Goleta hinterlands, but the year before Laurie left he’d unloaded it. Things were really beginning to happen in the next town, and with the Dos Pueblos Ranch proceeds, Stephen bought 120-some acres of agricultural gold between San Roque Road and Alamar Avenue from the manager of the Arlington Hotel, just down the coast in Santa Barbara – a picturesque slowpoke coach stop with an Eastern elite fan base and growing sense of Self. Stephen had plans.

The Sightseeing Sixth

So, France. Laurie looks in vain for the Eiffel Tower. What he sees instead is countryside that looks like it’s been through a meat grinder. Twice. On the anxious and nauseating voyage over, he’d finally come to grips with both the scale and stupidity of the conflict, and the stalemate nature of the individual battles savagely fought by tens of thousands of men at a time, the soldiery on both sides falling like faceless chaff in numbers too huge to understand, for meaningless territorial gains of 10 and 15 meters which would be reversed the following day. The ballyhooed Sanctity of Human Life was mocked by the meaningless scale of the death-dealing. 

And for what? Because some guy got shot in the backseat of his car in Sarajevo? Really? One guy? And where the hell is Sarajevo? The war, if that’s the word for it, is not going well for either side. Eighteenth century battlefield tactics are bumping up against 20th century war machinery in a stupefying chapter of viscera-spraying folly. But the belligerents, comfy jackass Royals actually related by blood, are too busy cabling each other churlish messages to notice that their subjects are being mown down like grass in complete anonymity. 

Laurie’s division had been initially sent marching all over France, feinting in order to trick the Germans into misapprehending large troop movements. The constant zig-zagging movement of the division has earned them a nickname – The Sightseeing Sixth. Now all Laurie can think about is Stearns Wharf, the St. Charles Market downtown, the fam’s new house in the foothills; from which you can see the ocean on a clear day, by the way. Hello? What, exactly, had he been thinking?

Dark and Deep

When he and the guys are finally assigned to the Vosges region and real action, the world turns inside out – pitch black, seamlessly deafening, and screwed. Incoming artillery turns men into hamburger, chugging on approach like boxcars flying through the burned air. And the barrages include mustard and phosgene gases; stuff that will turn your lungs to liquid if you don’t manage to get your Jules Verne mask pulled over your face in time. Laurie and the guys find themselves running full tilt across chewed-up, smoldering fields, terrified German kids sweeping the advancing line with machine gun fire and everything else they can lay hands on, Laurie’s newish buddies ducking and screaming and sprinting on either side of him.

He’s learned their new orders are taking his Sixth Division to a forest that stretches along the entire length of the war’s Western Front. The plan? He and about one million other guys will rush through dense, muddy woods and a storm of flying metal, and with sheer blunt force will shove the allied cause through the enemy’s defenses, break the line and finally end this stupid thing. Right?

Daydream

On September 28 Laurie is feverishly focused on a picture in his ringing head – the shady place where Stearns Wharf meets the beach, and where he and his pals would sit like ninnies under the pier for hours, swapping stories and watching the water lap the sand and the tarry pilings.

The order arrives and everyone gasps. On the call, and completely against his better judgment, Laurie jumps up with the others and charges screaming into a fusillade of hot steel that rips up the trees in front of him, green leaves momentarily raining like ticker tape in a Welcome Home parade. 

Home

When word comes to the Rutherfords it buffets them, a gale. They’re stunned, destroyed. But why? They hadn’t been paying attention. Stephen recalls the farewell at the train station, his hat in his hand like he’s saying so long to a neighbor, and not his beloved boy, Laurie. Through the crushing sorrow, Stephen’s dream of a uniquely beautiful place, the land he’d bought the year before Laurie deployed, begins to hesitantly bear fruit. Though these forays into real estate development, of all things, transpire for Stephen in a fog of heartbreak, his mind begins to clear as he begins to envision this work as a tribute to Laurie. Initially called Rutherford Park, the development between San Roque and Alamar will defy the bland, grid-like layout of the growing frontier town. This place will be like Laurie, Stephen decides; colorful and restless and unpredictable, but with a still center.

There will be curved streets, and in a nod to the town’s tradition they’ll bear the fashionable Spanish nomenclature of Santa Barbara; “calle” this and “calle” that. But the neighborhood – a couple blocks north of today’s Peabody Charter School – will have a hub, the politely disorienting chaos of curlicue roads and houses will be anchored by an orderly, perfect circle which, despite the confused pleas of Stephen’s advisors, will have a French name and not a Spanish one; the name of a French forest, actually. Stephen Rutherford is adamant on this point, he won’t be talked out of it. It’d been the last place on Earth his son saw with living eyes.

In 1939 Stephen Rutherford’s dying breath will sigh the memory of his gallivanting son, his restless, lost Laurie – the young guy who simply had to see what more there was to the world, what lay beyond little Santa Barbara.

Laurie resides in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in Romagne, France, alongside his buddies of the Sixth Division, all of them fodder in the war-ending cataclysm that was the Battle of the Argonne Forest. But this anomalously laid out, newly-minted little Santa Barbara neighborhood, Stephen thinks as the light fades on the curtains, will bring Laurie home for good. Argonne Circle will see to it.