Jennifer Lauck - Found

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Table of Contents

For Spencer & Josephine

My Beloveds

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritageto know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

Alex Haley

AUTHOR COMMENT

Blackbird was a book I needed to write. Dead parents, a spate of homelessness, and countless moves from Nevada to California and back to Nevada had me emerge from my childhood in a spinning haze.

The voice I discovered was that of a child who seemed to be in shock. Writing was like debriefing a disoriented witness. As I wrote, I tried to form opinions about all I had gone through, but like my narrator, I could only feel numb and amazed. I found myself asking a series of questions instead: Did my life have some meaning beyond all the loss? Was there some higher purpose to suffering? Could a person heal from such a childhood?

Over the next few years, a series of extraordinary events unfolded and are detailed within this book. It seemed that in writing Blackbird, I had begun a long journey that, in the end, would provide answers to all my questions and much more.

Blackbird was a witness account conveyed by a little girl. Found is a widened perspective narrated by a reflective woman and mother. Both memoirs are my truth. As part of the creative process, I have taken liberty with conversations, with time, and with identity.

My great hope is that this story will be of benefit to all who read it.

JENNIFER LAUCK
PORTLAND, OREGON
2010

I am now seventy-one years old, I feel, still, deep in my mind, my first experience, my mothers care. I can still feel it. That immediately gives me inner peace, inner calmness. The mothers physical touch is the greatest factor for the healthy development of the brain. This is not due to religious faith, but because of the biological factor.

HIS HOLINESS THE DALAI LAMA
VANCOUVER DIALOGUES
2007

The separation from the mothers body, at birth, is the most dreadful thing. The baby was one with the mother and then the people take the child away and put him somewhere else. Dreadful.

ECKHART TOLLE
FREEDOM FROM THE WORLD

ONE

WHEN I WAS BORN

I WAS GIVEN the perfect name, although it would take the better part of forty-six years to puzzle this perfection out.

Jennifer, popular in the 60s, is my first name and seems on the surface to be a fad. But in the end, it is my first name that leads me home.

Lauck, my last name, is the family surname and a German derivative of lock. Lock weaves a path of connection, at the root, to the verb form of luck. Coincidently, pull a from Lauck and there it is again. Luck. Of all the things I have been in this life, it is most accurate to say Ive been lucky, indeed.

And here comes Caste, my middle name, which is core to the circumstances from which I began my life.

Caste originates from the Latin castus, meaning chaste, pure, innocent. As caste traveled through Portugal and Spain, it shifted to casto, meaning lineage, race, breed. In English, caste most often loses its silent e and becomes just cast.

While there are many meanings to the word cast, the markers on my map are these: to cast is to throw something away from yourself, usually with force; to cast also means to remove or banish something from your mind deliberately, decisively, and often with great difficulty. A castaway is one set adrift. An outcast has been rejected by a particular group or by society as a whole.

I WAS BORN in Nevada, which jigsaws against California. Most Nevadans occupy the narrow band of land situated along the western and southern borders. The population clusters in the big cities of Las Vegas, Carson City, and Reno, and then spreads wide in the smaller towns of Elko, Fallon, and Lovelock.

The largest part of Nevada is owned by the military and is unoccupied. At the bottom corner of the state, five hundred miles from Reno and seventy-five miles from Vegas, the U.S. Department of Energy operates the Nevada Test Site. Between 1951 and 1992, more than a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. Octopus clouds could be seen from Las Vegas and it was not uncommon for tourists to gather on hotel balconies to gape at supernatural detonations that smeared the sky.

I wonder what these day-trippers thought as they watched tendrils of radioactive debris spiral back to earth. Were they afraid? Or did they feel proud, confident, and safe somehow, in the knowledge that these bombs were being perfected? And what of their senses? Did they notice the texture of the air transform from clear and clean to spiky and bright? Underfoot, did they feel the earth buck and then collapse? Could they detect any reorganization of atoms within their own cells?

OVER THE MONTHS I gestated, during 1963, more than forty nuclear bombs were detonated at the Nevada Test Site. They were given names like Chipmunk, Gerbil, and Pleasant. The combined explosive power of those blasts was equal to thirty-eight attacks on Hiroshima.

MY MOTHER WAS named Catherine. She lived in Reno and had blond hair and a heart-shaped face. Her eyes were a dove-soft shade of medium blue that might be called gray. She was seventeen.

My mothers boyfriend was Bill. He was also seventeen and had moved to Reno from California. Bill was a tall, awkward teen who passed time with the boys who wore leather jackets and smoked cigarettes from packs rolled in their sleeves.

Being unmarried, pregnant, and a teenager in 1963 was a dangerous combination that blew nuclear families wide open. Loyalties melted. Love vaporized. Protection was withdrawn. Shamed and afraid, the girls were scuttled to secret locations. Evidence of their pregnancies was hidden. Once babies were born, papers were signed, birth certificates were altered, and files were sealed.

Catherine had heard the whispers about girls who got pregnant and knew they always vanished from the halls and the classrooms of her high school. She didnt admit to being pregnant herself until she was five months along.

On a July morning, on or about the day a super bomb called The Sedan was dropped at the Nevada Test Site, Catherine told the truth.

In the same way the Nevada Test Site became a national sacrifice zone, meaning it became uninhabitable forevermore, Catherines teen landscape evaporated. Gone were the simple times of drive-in movies, date nights, and long, languid kisses in the back seat of a souped-up Chevy while Moon River spilled from the radio. No more whispered secrets to her best friend on the telephone, no more Dear Diary, I kissed a boy for the first time, and no more dreams of white weddings and picket fences waiting in the future.

Catherines world became an unfamiliar and unforgiving place. She was humiliated by her family, isolated from friends, forbidden to see Bill again, and restricted to her bedroom for the duration of her pregnancy. The only person allowed near Catherine was a private tutor with the unusual name of Carmel. Her name was not pronounced like Carmel, the sea-splashed town below Monterey, California. Carmel came out of the mouth as

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