The Doctor from the Harbor
By Tom Brosman
Allen Clemons was a doctor, with an MD degree from Stanford. His world was healing and mending the bodies of his patients. Once in a while, he closed his office door to discuss the deeper things in life, like wayward children, alcoholic husbands, and cancer.
Allen had a house built in the Queets River Valley. Early in the morning, if he had slept that night without a call from the hospital, Allen would walk along the banks of the river and watch the foam dance on the blue green water and observe the schools of salmon as they moved in the river as dark shadows. Allen fished a bit, but mostly his work was where he invested himself.
When Allen had first come to the valley, he was shunned as an outsider, especially since he was from California. Allen gave up trying to fit in and mostly just cared for the patients who came to him. His way of coping with his situation was to spend most weekends in Seattle, leaving the chilly people of the valley behind for the warm coffee houses of Seattle where the people were friendly and he felt accepted.
Allen left Seattle for home one Sunday night in the rain. It was pouring buckets as he headed west from Olympia to Aberdeen. He passed Montesano and started down into the Wynoochee Valley. From his vantage point, he could see across the valley to the Wynoochee River Bridge. There seemed to be a problem on the bridge. Allen could see police cars and an ambulance, lights flashing, parked on the bridge deck. Cars were starting to back up on the highway in both directions.
Allen parked behind the last car and got out to see if a doctor was needed. As he walked to the bridge, he saw the state troopers who were stopping traffic. Most of the troopers kept glancing up the hillside, where, teetering on the edge of a cliff above the river was a house that had ridden a wall mud down the hill. At the window, sobbing, stood a five year old boy, who could not get out, and who would never leave his sister who was trapped under a fallen refrigerator.
The house teetered over enough angry brown water to destroy it in an instant. Allen, from twenty cars back absorbed the situation. He was in old worn clothes from his college days and he had walked up to the bridge virtually unnoticed. Allen, for the first time, saw the small boy at the window screaming, and in under half a minute, Allen had sprinted across the bridge and was running up the hill to the house.
There were rescuers there, trying to find some way to get at the children. The troopers
and ambulance people had families, with loved ones waiting for them to come home. Allen had no one, and nothing to lose. He ran past two blue shirted state troopers and into the house. The troopers yelled, but Allen was already past them. As the doctor ran into the house, he heard a groan of the timbers beneath him and he felt the house shift, tipping, [tipping] and hanging above the river, waiting for one last reason to slide into the wrecking ball of mud, floating trees, and angry water.
The girl screamed to Allen for help. Her legs had been pinned under the refrigerator that ((had fallen)) on her when the house slid down the hill. Her little brother's face was red from crying at the sight of his sister writhing in pain. Allen put his all into lifting one end of the refrigerator up and off of her. With all of his strength, he lifted up and swung it away from the girl. The crash as the refrigerator hit the floor beside the girl started the house to tip on the fulcrum of rock that it rested on. Both of the girl's legs were badly broken. Allen gently took the girl in his arms and headed for the door, where the ambulance medic was waiting. The medic took the girl in her arms and headed for the ambulance.
Allen turned and ran for the boy who was petrified with fear on the spot where he had been crying. The doctor scooped the small boy up in his arms and ran for the door. He almost made it before the end of the house, in slow motion, started to rise, and the house began its slow decent. The floor rose steeply as Allen ran. The state trooper at the door held out her arms and with the last of his strength, the surgeon who graduated at the top of his class at Stanford, dressed as a street urchin, threw the child up to the trooper and fell back into the house, a tomb that carried him down the hill of mud to the waiting liquid inferno.
The trooper watched in horror, with the boy in her arms as the house plunged into the
brown, ugly water below. The state trooper from Aberdeen was not the only one who
saw what happened. The entire county watched the incident from the nightly news broadcast. A TV station had monitored a police scanner and had rolled a reporter and camera crew to the scene.
The police had run a check on Allen's license plates and for those who did not recognize Allen on TV, the authorities identified him. A stunned county watched ((as this stranger, who had saved two of their children, lost his own life in the dark deadly waters)). The house broke apart almost instantly in the dark waters with loud groaning and popping sounds.
In the river, Allen grabbed a limb on a big log that was floating by and hung on. He was bleeding from bumps and scrapes. He was cold and frightened. A small tree caught him squarely in the nose and broke it with a snap and a spray of blood as he clung to the big log with the roar of the river around him.
Twenty minutes later the log drifted into shore and his feet found the muddy bottom just below the small town of Artic. Allen crawled up the bank and flagged down a Weyerhaeuser log truck driven by a Swanson brother. Bing Swanson radioed to his dispatcher that the doc was alive and in the cab with at least a broken nose. Bing was instructed by the yard superintendent to take the load of logs and the doc to emergency at the Aberdeen Hospital. The channel Bing radioed in on was a CB emergency channel that was monitored heavily by people in Grays Harbor County.
Bing turned the big Peterbuilt full of fir logs into the hospital driveway and first thing the Weyerhaeuser truck driver and the doctor heard was the cheering. More than three hundred Harbor people had already arrived to make sure their doctor would never feel unwelcome again. Bing helped the doctor down and with the help of nine state patrol officers and six country sheriffs they cleared a way in the well wishing crowd and got Allen into the emergency room.
Two hours later, a nurse at the hospital, drove Allen home. In his driveway sat his car that had been driven there by a neighbor. There were more well-wishers waiting to
greet him with pies, cakes and packages of elk steaks.
It was a year before Allen went back to Seattle. He had too much at home to enjoy. He never had to eat lunch alone again, someone always noticed him and asked if they could eat with him, in the cafeteria at work or when he was out for a burger on a Saturday. The doc began to see how wrong he had been about the locals, as wrong as they had been about him. Allen belonged to Aberdeen, from the oldest to the youngest, they adored him and as it turned out that would have to be enough.
Allen met a woman named Elaine in Tacoma at a bookstore. She was alone in the world like Allen and she was beautiful, with long, flossy, red hair, stunning features and a southern drawl that was sweet and sensual. Allen was not her first husband, but he wanted to be her last. The courtship was short but intense, and Allen brought his bride home to the Queets River Valley, and to his Harbor people.
All of Allen's experience had been in healing the body. Elaine's wounds were in her soul. She had been deeply wounded by men, starting with her grandfather when she was a small girl. Allen thought that he could be what she wanted and needed. With each day, the doctor from the Harbor fell more in love with his wife. Allen asked the Universe for only one thing, a lifetime with his Southern Girl.
The more he tried to build a strong marriage with her, the more it eluded him. With each kindness he extended to her, from fresh flowers, to gifts, she seemed to move further from him. Elaine, from her dark past, had learned early that love is pain and if there is no pain with a man, there can be no love from him. She felt unworthy of Allen and the harder he tried, the worse it got.
He called her his "11," better than a 10. He even had a gold pin made for her, with the number 11 written in crusted diamonds. Allen told her that in all the world there was no one like her and she was all he ever wanted.
Allen tried too hard and held on too tightly. Always, the Universe pries from our hands, that which we cling to. Elaine felt smothered and would pick fights, looking for a reason to leave. After the first couple of months, it was mostly misery between them. Allen still loved her, and the first time she asked for a divorce he was shocked and tried harder to make it work, with the same disastrous results. Finally, he gave her the
divorce she wanted. She left with enough money for a new start and no forwarding
address.
The night she left, the doctor sat in his living room and without thinking, deep in his soul, closed a door, that no woman would ever again be allowed through. A couple of years later, Allen made some inquiries about Elaine. She had moved to San Francisco and remarried. But, for Allen, she was his only love and his last. Not a day went by that he did not think of her. The town knew about her. They also knew that the doc would never get over her. There are some loves that are disastrous, but are forever.
Allen had a nice home above the river. The floor was of polished oak, the furniture was from all over the world, and the rugs were pure Persian. The artwork on the walls
was stunning, from Charlie Russell to Monet. Sometimes, in the evening, Allen would sit and watch the sun set in the Queets River Valley and as soft music from the stereo washed over him, he would remember her face, and how her hair looked when her head was tucked under his chin and the sound of the Southern Velvet of her voice. Allen always felt the air was sweeter and his life was richer from having known her. He never asked the Creator for another sweetheart. Allen figured that even He had only made one "11".
Allen saved many lives in the community and he loved the people and the tall coastal mountains. He practiced medicine at the Hospital in Aberdeen until he was 67, mending bones and suturing wounds, as the wound in his own heart bled freely until the day he
died.
He passed away, in his living room, an old man, looking out on the Queets River Valley and up towards Aberdeen, where he had doctored the Harbor people. His neighbor found him and called the authorities. The Doc left his money to the hospital and he left his attorney the job of arranging the funeral.
The parking lot at the funeral parlor in Hoquiam was full and the overflow of
vehicles, from pickups to Mercedes were parked along the streets of Hoquiam
for blocks. There was no need for a canned sermon for the doctor. The pastor
said a few words and then, for the next two hours, people stood and shared their
thoughts about the doctor.
The first to rise to his feet from the audience and pay his respects was a middle aged man who was just a small boy when the doctor moved to the Harbor. The man began, "I thought my sister and I were going to die in the house above the river, when this man, a stranger, ran in to help us. Doctor Clemons was a Harbor man, he was one of us, and he will always be a part of us."
In the back row, sat a silver haired woman in a new black dress with a piece of diamond jewelry pinned on her chest that looked stunning against the black fabric. The stranger was a beautiful lady and as the people spoke about the doctor from the Harbor, the tears fell freely down the front of her dress and splashed on the jeweled pin, making the number 11 on the face of the pin shine even brighter.
One of the state troopers at the service, whom doc Clemons had delivered as a baby, watched the woman get into a black Mercedes with California plates and head south out of town.
