Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (54 page)

Six blocks away, at the corner of Fourth and Taylor Streets, is where Adina De Zavala’s primary residence in San Antonio once stood. A
parking lot—the bane of history, I’m coming to realize—is there now. The land is next to the Toltec Apartments, and I duck into the building to say hello to the owner, Paul Carter. Fifty years old, Paul is a fifth-generation San Antonian and also living proof that many developers are devout history buffs; he is working to make the entire street a historic site with a marker that specifically mentions De Zavala.

“My father grew up right beside her,” Paul tells me. “He used to deliver chocolate pudding to her house when he was a boy.”

“In most of what I’ve read, Clara Driscoll is called ‘the savior of the Alamo,’ and De Zavala receives less attention, if she’s mentioned at all. Why does Driscoll get so much of the credit?” I ask Paul.

“Because she cut a check,” he replies without hesitation.

Paul makes clear that he isn’t diminishing Driscoll’s role, and we both feel that their falling-out was especially sad because, despite holding different views of how the Alamo should be remembered, the two women were its most stalwart advocates and jointly responsible for its survival.

Paul invites me to lunch, but I have to rush to Dallas. We agree to keep in touch and work on getting De Zavala a plaque where her home used to be. Between that and some sort of recognition at the Menger Hotel, she’ll be well represented.

I’ve tried to cut down on these detours, but I’m flying out of Dallas anyway, and there’s a rare document on display at the main public library that I’d be remiss not to see while I’m in Texas. When I reach the city, I find the library, park my car, and take the elevator up to the seventh floor. I enter the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room and walk into a semicircular alcove that features just one item: an original Declaration of Independence printed by John Dunlap. This was the broadside discovered at Leary’s Book Store in Philadelphia forty years ago. Displayed in an oak case, the document is dimly lit and, from the way it’s mounted, appears almost to hover behind its protective glass cover, creating an effect that’s both solemn and arresting.

Within seconds I hear footsteps off to the side. A guard comes
around the corner, looks at me, and nods. I say hello and ask him if the Declaration gets many visitors.

He shakes his head. “I don’t think a lot of people in Dallas even know it’s here,” he says, and walks away, having confirmed that I’m not wielding a baseball bat and don’t seem like a raving lunatic intent on doing harm. Several closed-circuit security cameras maintain vigilant watch as well.

It’s unfortunate that this Declaration—which, again, predates the engrossed copy at the National Archives and is the only Dunlap broadside freely exhibited on a permanent, year-round basis—doesn’t draw much of an audience. And yet there’s something wonderfully intimate about experiencing it this way, without hordes of other tourists angling for a glimpse. One can actually read the words and reflect on their import and the context in which they were written. Had we lost the Revolution, a likely prospect in July 1776, when our ragtag militia was challenging the world’s most powerful army, members of the Continental Congress could have been hanged for treason. They were not, like William Travis and his men at the Alamo, surrounded by enemies in Independence Hall when they drafted their declaration, but they had placed themselves in real and imminent danger. And like Travis’s climactic “Victory or death” sign-off, Jefferson’s last line alludes to what was at stake. “And for the support of this declaration,” he concluded, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” The currency of patriotism is easy to counterfeit, but these were genuine sentiments.

I head downstairs and am almost out the main entrance when I remember having read that a copy of Texas’s own Declaration of Independence used to hang next to the Dunlap broadside. (This same source, I believe, also noted that Texans literally battled one another over where to house their historic documents, including the state’s original declaration. In what became known as the Texas Archive War, President Sam Houston ordered that the manuscripts be moved from Austin to Houston, the city already named for him, but the men he
sent to grab the papers were hunted down and shot at by an Austin posse. Eventually, they surrendered and forked over everything at gunpoint.) I approach the general information desk on the first floor and ask a librarian about the two declarations once being side by side and why Texas’s is no longer there.

“You should really check with the staff on the seventh floor,” she tells me. “They’ll know for sure. But I think we put it back in storage for its own protection, to keep it safe.”

“What about the actual Declaration of Independence that’s still up there?” I ask. “I mean, isn’t there concern about its safety, too?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she says, “but goodness gracious, if anything happened to the Texas declaration, folks around here would never forgive us.”

IN A PARKING
lot near the base of Mount Baker in northern Washington State, Ed Hrivnak opens the hatch to his Subaru Outback, pulls out a giant rucksack bulging at the seams, and hoists it over his shoulders. Feeling somewhat self-conscious, I glance at my own backpack, which is so small and flimsy compared with Ed’s that it might as well have “Hello Kitty!” written in pink puffy letters on the side.

“Aren’t we only going on a day hike?” I ask rhetorically. “You look like you’re about to scale Everest.”

Ed, an old friend and skilled mountaineer who lives in Washington, is guiding me to an area on Mount Baker close to where a PV-1 Ventura
plane crashed in 1943 and was accidentally discovered fifty-one years later.

Not without reason, Ed is ignoring me, and I ask more directly: “What do you have loaded in that thing?”

“A bivy tent, sleeping bags, extra clothes, food,” he says. “I like to be prepared. The weather could change.”

The sky is an endless sheet of clear-blue cellophane.

“Ed, it’s at least seventy degrees out, and there isn’t a cloud in sight.”

“You never know. And considering your age and how overweight you’ve gotten, I assumed you couldn’t handle all of this, and I figured I should carry it myself.”

“I’m younger than you are and in better shape,” I shoot back. Ed is indeed older, but only by six months, and having served twenty years in the Air Force, he’s built like a triathlete. I, to put it mildly, am not.

Variations of this ridiculous banter have been going on between us for the past five years now, and, truth be told, Ed is one of my favorite people on the planet and someone I admire enormously. I don’t quite understand why we mock each other constantly, but I suspect it’s because we’re both desperately clinging to our youth, and trading adolescent taunts sustains our delusional mind-set. (Just for the record, though, Ed started it.)

We first met while I was involved with a government initiative called Operation Homecoming, which encouraged U.S. military personnel to write about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. The troops sent in thousands of short stories, poems, diary entries, letters, and e-mails related to their wartime service, and my job was to pore over and help organize the bins of submissions. Ed contributed eight months of journals chronicling his medevac missions with the Air Force’s 491st Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron. He never recorded names or betrayed confidential information, but he described the horrors of war in gut-wrenching detail and captured both its physical and emotional toll on service members and their families.

In one entry, Ed wrote about a fellow medical officer who’d been
delivering humanitarian supplies to local Iraqi hospitals when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in his Humvee. His head was burned so badly that the tops of his ears were seared off and his face had melted into a red, expressionless mask. Covered in ointment and bandages, the officer confided in Ed that his greatest concern was how his wife and children would react when they saw him. Before deploying, he had assured them he’d be safe because he wouldn’t be anywhere near the front lines, and he felt he had broken that promise.

Another patient told Ed how traumatized he’d been by the sight of Iraqi kids being forced at gunpoint onto a highway by insurgents trying to make a U.S. military convoy brake to a halt. Knowing it was an ambush and under strict orders not to stop, the drivers barreled forward, and their multi-ton vehicles struck and killed the helpless, screaming children.

Ed’s entire life has centered on military and public service. He joined the Air Force while in high school and was only seventeen at the time; his father—a Korean War–era veteran—had to cosign the enlistment papers. Ed served in Desert Storm, then flew peacekeeping operations in Rwanda, Somalia, South America, and Vietnam, earning almost two dozen medals. While on reserve duty he volunteered for the Tacoma Mountain Rescue Unit, and he’s now a fireman.

Ribbing aside, I’m hassling Ed about his cumbersome backpack for his own good. Less than two weeks ago, he burst a blood vessel in his left calf while fighting a wildfire, and he’s supposed to be taking it easy. Carrying excess weight will only exacerbate his condition, and he probably shouldn’t be hiking at all. I had told him we could postpone the trip, but Ed, being Ed—obstinate, reckless, proud, and incredibly loyal—was adamant about not canceling. “Any later in the year,” he said, “and the weather becomes too unpredictable.”

When Ed first mentioned his injury to me, he downplayed its severity. I asked a doctor friend of mine to tell me honestly how serious these ruptures were, and he explained that they usually healed within a month but hurt like hell. “Every time you take a step,” he said, “it feels like someone’s firing a blowtorch inside your leg.”

Ed has brought along a buddy and fellow veteran, Mike Vrosh, who retired from the Air Force in 2003 as a colonel after thirty years in uniform. He, too, served in Desert Storm and has led multiple special operations and peacekeeping missions. I’m guessing Mike is in his early fifties, but he looks like he could run circles around us both. And he’s as selfless and tough-minded as Ed; Mike recently came down with pneumonia but also refused to back out of the trip.

While Mike finishes stuffing his own behemoth backpack to the brim, Ed unfolds a topographical map of Mount Baker and shows me where we’re headed.

“We’ll start up that way,” he says, referring to a narrow, zigzagging trail, “and then cross along this ridge.”

I ask Ed how his leg feels, and before he answers we hear Mike in the throes of a coughing fit.

Making light of their ailments, Ed jokes, “One of us should get you up and down the mountain alive.” While I’m concerned about their health, I know I couldn’t be in more capable hands. As it so happens, Mike and Ed are among only a few people in the world who know precisely where the PV-1 crash site is.

The first was Chuck Eaton, a welder from Ferndale, Washington. On October 6, 1994, Eaton was hiking with his dog, Candy, through a ravine on Mount Baker’s western face when he spotted a curved black object jutting out of a rock pile. As he got closer, he realized it was a tire still attached to its landing struts. And then he saw two large engines. Eaton quickly contacted Whatcom County authorities, who, ironically, had just finished combing Mount Baker for a lost exchange student (sadly, they found him dead in a creek) but hadn’t noticed the PV-1 wreckage.

After Eaton’s call, a recovery team from McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma was quickly assembled and dropped in to search for ordnance and human remains. From the plane’s identification number and dog tags retrieved at the site, investigators were able to determine that the aircraft was an antisubmarine PV-1 Ventura that had gone missing more than half a century earlier.

Records indicated that the plane was conducting navigational drills between Bellingham and Everett, northeast of Seattle, on August 29, 1943. Radioman Pete LaValle had communicated with Whidbey Island’s Naval Air Station at approximately 3:20
P.M.
to report an engine malfunction. This was his last transmission, and the PV-1 never returned. For several days Navy planes scoured hundreds of miles over land and sea to locate the aircraft but found no evidence of a crash. Squadron commanders assumed the plane had plunged into Puget Sound, killing all six crewmen: radioman LaValle; the pilot, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Beacham; copilot Charles Nestor; and machinist’s mates Carl Brown Jr., Robert Gray, and Livio de Marco. Beacham, at thirty-one, was the oldest. Nestor was twenty-four, and the rest were all just twenty-one.

Having made our way up a short but steep ascent, Ed, Mike, and I come to a wide and less precipitous ridge. I stop for a second to take pictures of Mount Baker’s 10,781-foot summit, which mercifully we do not have to climb, since the crash took place well below its peak. Named after Joseph Baker, the young lieutenant who spotted it in April 1792, the mountain is technically a glaciated volcano and capped with snow throughout the year. Local Lummi Indians referred to it as Koma Kulshan, which translates roughly to “white sentinel.” Even at this elevation and in direct sunlight, there are patches of snow everywhere.

“Ed, why is that snow over there pink?”

“Algae,” he says. “Don’t eat it.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” I say. But now that I think of it: “Is it okay to drink from the little streams up here?”

“No, they might have parasites.”

Ed is maintaining a brisk pace ahead of us and turns around every so often to check that I haven’t wandered off to gorge myself on discolored snow or contaminated water. He doesn’t say a word about his leg, but from the way he’s limping, the pain must be increasing.