Sink Holes

I recently learned that Ed Clark passed away of AIDS in '92. If you're just arriving, please scroll down to the first post and read upward. This blog is personal and solely from my point of view. It honors this unique and gentle soul who changed my life forever at the first "hello."

"Love is just acceptance."

- Ed Clark

Four months after we met, during Spring Quarter, Ed moved back home to Jacksonville and whatever ground I'd gained under my feet thanks to our friendship began to slip away. We wrote to each other but the unsent letters still in my files:


Dear Ed:
I wish that I could meet you again someday when communication would not be so difficult. What is difficult about communicating for me? Fear of rejection. And what have you shown towards me? Acceptance. I miss your hungry drive for knowledge--not to acquire book learning, but an Answer. 
"Why do we go on?" I asked.
"Why not?" you said. 


Why not?


In Ed's absence, I took a break from philosophy and focused on politics, volunteering at a Socialist bookstore where I met Nick. Nick was cute and blonde and sweet and masculine. Easy and polite. He really liked me and got into the habit of picking me up mornings to drive to Leon Sink where we'd skinny dip as innocently as Adam and Eve before the serpent.


I was still a virgin but getting naked with guys seemed okay in the Woodstock sense of the word. It was a time when young women were encouraged to "go natural." I stopped wearing the makeup I'd learned to carefully apply the year before, and let myself gain weight.


The sink holes south of Tally offered the best free fun around. An Internet site informs me that most were closed for a while, but a few are now open again. They are still popular spots for swimming au naturele.


This Leon Sink had a rope that you could grab and swing yourself over the lake-like water before dropping down into the deep water. Here's a photo I took of a fellow student during a chaste outing with other suited friends a year earlier.

When I wrote to Ed about Nick, he wrote back that a nice guy like that was "a chance to come out of your shell." That response stung a bit. Not just the confirmation that we had no reason to possess each other in a vice of commitment, or the possibility that Ed himself was most likely dallying with whomever, but I also read it to mean:


"I tried and I give up."


Then in June he wrote:
Dear Marlan,
I’ve been caught up in things.  Quit one job and am looking at another.  I’ll find out Monday.  If you like Fromm, read Rogers On Becoming a Person or anything by Abraham asalow.  I’m still reading Nietzsche’s Just God, complete works on Zorasthutha, Good and Evil and a few others.  I’m fascinated.  I’m listening to Bartok and Mozart for pleasure.

My art is dwindling, but otherwise all I need is a good stone.

You should have more confidence.  A person’s merits are in their sincerity.  Have faith in your sincerity and it will carry you well.  Most doubts and fears are baseless until you act on them.  Trust your insights and desires.  They are your closest guides.

Love,

Ed

P.S. – I just reread your previous letter.  Down?  Relax.  Decide on small goals and a determined field of inclusion.  Enjoy what you do.  Get out of any situation that you do not enjoy by the simplest and most direct method, no matter the cost lest it be worse.  Or if it is worse, stay where you are till opportunities change.  They will in good time.  Then be happy, love what you can and broaden your interests and activities to the limits of your capabilities.  Be sincere, inquisitive and relax as often as possible.  Dream sweet thoughts and explore your imagination.  Go wild with pleasant winds and sweet fragrances. Enjoy yourself and those you can.  Imagine the world you want, then find out how to model it.  If it changes in the process, all the better.

That summer I decided to stay in Tallahassee and take a couple classes. I now had wheels, thanks to my dad selling me his Rambler, and I moved in with three female students in a large old 2-story house. My room was the smallest with a window facing the veranda. The only place for the bed was right under that window.


The whole upstairs formed a separate apartment and held four college-age guys. One of them named Bob took it upon himself to come down during our first week and say, "Last night I saw a peeping tom looking in your windows." The more we got to know Bob, the more likely it seemed that the peeping tom was probably him.

Missing Ed like crazy, I played Carole King's Tapestry album over and over: You just call out my name and I know wherever I am, I'll come runnin'... Then as it turned out, one night Ed did call out my name but I didn't have to run because he was just outside my window. I don't recall how he moved into my room. There couldn't have been much discussion.


Our relationship shape-shifted. He was now on my turf.


I didn't have to take him off the pedestal; he jumped down. Willingly. In retrospect, it was probably the best thing for his depression. Like me, he enjoyed hanging out with people as much as he needed solitude. We didn't listen to classical music and look at his artwork anymore. I was seeing a "new" side of Ed--the Valdosta, Georgia/Florida boy who was now "in town" and no longer living on the edge of it.


Gone was the naval-gazing contemplative Ed, and in his place was a sweet, fun guy with a teasing way who adapted quickly to house activities. The other girls had boyfriends who stayed occasionally, so I didn't think it was a big deal that Ed lived there day after day. He helped my actress roommate with her lines, fixed the screen door when it broke,  cooked meals (introducing his famous experimental "vanilla steak").


There was no tension. Our personalities fit as easily as we did in that little bed. His June letter turned out to be prophetic. One by one that summer, we fulfilled Ed's "recipe" for happiness:


1. Be happy, love what you can and broaden your interests and activities to the limits of your capabilities.  


2. Be sincere, inquisitive and relax as often as possible.  


3. Dream sweet thoughts and explore your imagination.  


4. Go wild with pleasant winds and sweet fragrances. 


5. Enjoy yourself and those you can.  


6. Imagine the world you want, then find out how to model it.  If it changes in the process, all the better.


Our lives quickly filled up with friends and fun.

Be happy, love what you can and broaden your interests and activities to the limits of your capabilities. We took short road trips with Ed at the wheel of my car. If Ed had said, "Marlan, I'd like to drive this car off a cliff with both of us in it, and we'll both survive because the car won't have a scratch," I would have said: "Go ahead."


Occasionally he did drive the car off a country road--rocking and rolling like it was a Jeep over rough terrain--with me sitting serenely next to him. When I took the car home on break, my dad was upset because I forgot to add oil. Thankfully, he never knew it could have been so much worse.


Throughout these experiences, I remained an observant passenger while Ed drove both literally and figuratively. He opened new worlds for me, but these were now on the Mundane Plane. Which is really where we needed to be at this juncture in our young lives.


Enjoy yourself and those you can. Our first excursion was a berry-picking expedition. One of my friends knew where there were wild "blueberries" growing, so we gathered some friends and took off to pick as many as our buckets could hold. My Columbian friend Suzy came with us at my invitation.


Here's Suzy playing on a rocking toy at an outdoor mall during our Freshman year.

Suzy was having a mad affair with a married older guy. On her dorm-room wall was a big poster of a couple locked in a Tantric sex position with the caption: "If you love me, please don't leave me." She had cheered me on when I went to NYC and booed my return as cowardice. We'd already been to D.C. and back in her car before I met Ed. Now she lived off-campus and came running with a bucket to get those berries.


My first roommate Debbie also joined us. A native Floridian, she soon set us straight: "These aren't blueberries. They're huckleberries!" Huckleberries Schmuckleberries, Ed made an amazing cobbler out of them; boiling the berries with sugar until they were thick as preserves, and dressing them with fluffy cobbler crusts. I was as impressed as if he'd pulled a rabbit out of the stove.


I didn't come from a home where cobblers were simmered on the stove. My dessert world came out of a box and in that regard, I was completely self-taught. In my eyes, Ed's cobbler was further proof of his genius.


Go wild with pleasant winds and sweet fragrances. 
We visited the sink holes often. Always with friends. Always in the nude. I don't remember drugs being connected to those times, although we did come across some kids younger than us sitting on some rocks around a sink with the unmistakable aroma of marijuana in the air.


Ed used to get a big kick out of a middle-aged guy who would show up, pickup truck motor running behind the shrubs where the cars would park. We'd hear the truck and scramble to get our clothes on. Then we'd head for our car and pass him, saying good evening. Ed believed the guy was a voyeur. "It's awfully nice of him to let us know he's out there and give us time to get dressed while he watches."


Nothing disturbed my equilibrium that summer. As long as Ed was there, I felt no harm could come to me.


One night Ed drove us to the Big Dismal. A recent Internet search confirms that the Big Dismal is a sink hole not for the faint at heart. Graphically it's all about the vertical. Cliff-like steep rocky sides lead to the water below that lacks both shore and a discernible bottom. There must have been a moon that night or we would have killed ourselves. I'm not an adrenalin junkie--far from it--but I went right in with the others.

Photo by E. Kosman

Treading the dark water, I felt the primordial power of the Amazonian vegetation above me. There was something prehistoric about this sink hole, wild and dominating. The silky sweet feeling of water against my skin merged with the pleasure of floating with friends in a bottomless pit.


If anyone had anything clever to say while we floated in God's Bathtub, I don't recall any bon mots. The memory is full of Silence. And maybe a teeny bit of fear that there might be snakes in the water.


One by one, we climbed out. As I made it up to solid ground, I felt a beach towel being tenderly wrapped around me from behind. And Ed's arms holding me.


In that moment I felt so loved. And surprised.


His gesture made swimming nude suddenly sexy. Opening his arms with the towel behind me so I couldn't see him and then moving in to wrap me up in it...made me feel admired and cared for.


When all is said and done, the keen pleasure in that embrace remains while the memories of orgasms that came later with others have faded.

Imagine the world you want, then find out how to model it.  If it changes in the process, all the better. Two players danced at the edge of our summer scenario: Bob and Barbara. They actually held the keys to Ed's AC/DC sexuality. Their imparted knowledge and history with him would give me a sharper image while in some ways blurring it.


I'll cover them in the next post.


A NOTE ABOUT THE SINK HOLES OF TALLAHASSEE:
*My Internet search today just now turned up a list of those sink holes south of Tallahassee, evaluating each one and cautioning that many have been closed to the public for some time and a few have reopened.