Tenth in a series of installments documenting my failed political ambitions, my warped sensibilities, and my Portland Trail Blazers.
I spent the remainder of the sunny afternoon lounging around my back garden, admiring my beautiful Tropicana roses and filling Gerald Wallace in on the strange circumstances surrounding my father’s aforementioned disappearance, and previously assumed death.
I poured some stiff drinks and started from the beginning.
My father, James K Hinds, was born in the middle of the second Red Scare to ex-pat parents who fled post-war malaise in the northwest of England in 1948. His father, John L Hinds, was a leading member of the Labour Party in England who championed social justice and coal miners’ rights. John was a close friend and associate of Aneurin Bevan, hero to left-wingers and godfather of the National Health Service, the publicly funded healthcare system that was instituted in 1946 and is still active today across the United Kingdom. Although strongly defensive and proud of his friendship with Bevan, this association would eventually lead to his professional downfall across the pond.
John and his wife Hillary moved to the Pacific Northwest on the recommendation of John’s brother Eugene, who had married an American and settled in Portland, Oregon in the mid-1930s. John found a steady job at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, and later helped Eugene open a pub in Northeast Portland. They were ran out by the Feds, however, under the very controversial claim that John’s OLCC ties were a direct conflict of interest with the running, operating, and financing of a pub. It was shocking, given the massive amount of pub owners at the time with brazen OLCC ties, and the relative ease to achieve a liquor license in the 1950s. My grandfather, as you would imagine, was livid, as it was clear to everybody involved that this was likely due to John’s perceived communist background. McCarthyism was in full swing, and he was convinced that he was busted because of his history as a champion of left-wing causes, and the close relationship with Mr. Bevan was well known and unavoidable.
This whole affair had a clear effect on my father Jim’s sensibilities, even as a young boy, and in his teen years he was known to carry around leftist literature in his torn up backpack as he traipsed around the city, making friends and scrounging up spare dollars by washing cars and mowing lawns. He eventually got a job at the local lumberyard, and he saved up his hard earned cash to study engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. At Purdue, he made a good friend in Dean Bannister, and eventually met Dean’s father William P. Bannister, who worked at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Bannister the elder, upon spending some time getting to know my father, gave him a business card and told him to keep in touch if he was interested in potential future job opportunities.
Jim returned home to Portland to marry his high school sweetheart – my mother – and quickly became depressed after a fruitless search for lucrative engineering positions at local firms. After much deliberation, my mother finally insisted that he take Mr. Bannister up on his offer. My father called Mr. Bannister, and he was quickly flown out to Langley for a tour of the facilities. After some physical tests and a quick background check, he accepted a position in the South American division. His knowledge of Spanish, which he taught himself in his adolescence, led him to be stationed in Venezuela.
I was born on a clear May afternoon in 1982. An only child, I grew up thinking my father was nothing more than a gardener and a mechanic, who disappeared for months at a time without any real explanation. He spent most of his days at home working on his robin’s-egg-blue Jaguar XKE convertible roadster in our garage, lying on his back underneath the massive straight-eight engine. I have very fond memories of listening to Bill Schonely call the Trail Blazer games on his dirty little portable stereo in the garage, all the while Jim cursing Kevin Duckworth with a machine-gun ferocity. It was Jim, after all, who first jumped on the Blazer bandwagon in 1970, turning his parents and brothers onto the hip new squad of basketballers who arrived out of nowhere and out of place, seemingly from another planet. They arrived without much fanfare, but something clicked in the relationship between these strange-looking athletes and the strange-looking hippie denizens of our white-bred city, and a championship in 1977, the franchise’s one and only, embedded the team in the collective conscience of a city like no American city ever before.
During my youth, my father was working intermittently in Venezuela as one of the CIA contacts in the area, and privately he was growing ever more disenchanted with the work he was involved in. When he was first stationed there, he was responsible for organizing local and safe elections in the rural south, and maintaining contacts within the Venezuelan political elite. However, in 1988, he was instructed to assist in “free market reform” by ensuring the election of Carlos Andres Perez, who had already served as President a decade previously, leaving a legacy of widespread social inequality and corrupt petroleum exportation. The rigged election of Perez in 1988, to the surprise of nobody, led directly to massive economic crises within the country and the Caracazo Riots, which Jim predicted to his superiors many months before.
After the election of Perez, Jim was re-assigned to the rural west of Venezuela, this time to monitor a health initiative sponsored by the World Health Organization. This involved the distribution of medical supplies, surgical equipment, and penicillin throughout the tiny villages along the south coast of the country. He stayed in Venezuela with the hope that he could right the ship, although as the months and years passed, his optimism waned. He started friendly communication with a young Hugo Chavez, who at the time was an assistant to a high-ranking military General. So disgusted with the Caracazo Riots, during which the Perez forces killed up to 3,000 protestors, Jim suggested the possibility of a coup, led by the intelligent and vibrant Chavez. This was done clearly without the consent of CIA headquarters, whose interests clearly still lied with Perez. Jim found himself in a very difficult and stressful situation, having to juggle his loyalties in a volatile South American country about to burst open at the seams, with few friends to rely on and limited communication to his family back home in Oregon.
My father quickly realized why the CIA had stationed him in the rural south, away from the hustle and bustle of the big cities. He was issued a detailed directive from Washington to start depositing nitromethane in the water supply of a small town called Morichalito. He was instructed to gauge the severity and speed of the effect of the eventual outbreak. He was stunned. Nitromethane, as he knew, was a carcinogen primarily used in the synthesis of pharmaceutical chemicals.
Meanwhile, I started third grade. The biggest concern in my life was getting picked for the basketball team during recess.
One evening, after a lengthy drinking session with Hugo Chavez, Jim decided to show him the documents that detailed the cancer experiments in full. Chavez became enraged, and demanded retribution. As Chavez fumed, Jim informed him that he was leaving the country for good. He was aghast at the actions of his own country, and started to regret ever getting involved with his supposedly benevolent government. The following day, he returned to the United States and prompty resigned from the CIA, eventually taking a job as a consultant for a local engineering firm whose biggest client was the Bonneville Power Administration. Jaded and scared, he settled down to a quiet suburban life, a change that he later claimed to be the best decision he’d ever made in his life.
He told me the whole story as we lounged around the fire one evening during our annual family camping trip on Dungeness Bay, right next to Olympic National Park. My mom had turned in for the evening, and we had taken turns sipping Scotch and complaining about the Trail Blazers, when suddenly the conversation turned serious. He filled me in on the whole Venezuelan affair, and mentioned that he had been living his life in fear since then, fear of retribution from a vengeful government. After all, my father knew too much. The cancer story would blow a hole in American idealism so large that it would never recover. He told me of the sleepless nights, of the scratching and crunching of dry leaves outside his bedroom window, sure that somebody was sneaking around, looking to off him at the perfect moment. He told me of shadowy figures who would follow my parents around on their nighttime strolls through the lazy neighborhood. He told me about the tapped phone lines, the hacked email accounts, the neighbors who were just a bit too quiet… so quiet that he begged his sister to move in across the street, to keep a vigilant eye on the house.
“That was many years ago, dad,” I said to him. “Don’t you think it might be over?”
“It will never be over, son. It will never end. You’ll learn soon enough.”
Our relationship seldom veered into the melodramatic, and this sudden change had reversed any effect the Scotch had on my nervous system. I remember thinking it was a good thing my mom was in bed, or else she would have started to cry.
“Listen,” he said, motioning for me to come closer towards the fire. He sat across from me. “I only brought this up because I saw somebody watching us as we fished off the dock earlier today.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him.
“Positive. I’ve seen him before. Always wearing a green trilby, dressed in black, always smoking a cigarette.”
I urged him to relax, and stressed that we should call it a night. We brushed our teeth and headed into the tent, where I lied wide-awake for two hours before finally drifting off. At sunrise, I heard a faint rustling sound outside of the tent, towards the bay. I shot up and saw that my dad was not in his sleeping bag. I slipped on my sandals, and ran out of the tent to scan the surrounding area. I found a coffee mug that had dropped to the ground and shattered. I didn’t remember seeing this last night, and I knelt down to take a closer look. The spilt contents were still warm – it was fresh.
Dammit! I looked around again and instinctively ran towards the shrubbery that divided the bay and the campground. I saw a faint trail through the shrubbery that led toward the bay, but it didn’t lead to any clues. I sat down on the shore of the bay, looking out towards the horizon. I thought I saw a small boat off in the distance, slowly inching away from me. I slowly started to contemplate how to break the news to my mom.
My father was gone.
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