Author Jean Rikhoff’s life often reads as if it were fiction instead of an actual catalog of facts. She’s had no interest in settling down into what would be described as a normal life. In this memoir, she recaps her life’s out-of-the ordinary adventures against the backdrop of water, earth, fire, and air.

Earth, Air, Fire, and Water is Rickhoff’s account of growing up in the 1950s. She tells about trying many roles, such as writer, wife, mother, professor, friend, with her real role in life always seeming to evade her. Her adventures include several years spent in Europe and numerous visits to Africa and India as well as remote locations such as Cambodia and the Easter Islands. Among her many experiences are a doomed love affair with a Spanish count, an extraordinary encounter with a Masai chieftain in Kenya, and an intense and humorous friendship with the famous American sculptor David Smith.

With anecdotes and photographs, this memoir shows that through all of Rikhoff’s many exploits, she is searching for who she is—not an appendage to someone else, but as a woman who wants to carve out a life that is uniquely her own.

Best Memoir of 2011 from the Adirondack Center for Writing

Earth Air Fire And Water

A MemoirBy Jean Rikhoff

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Jean Rikhoff
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-0936-7

Chapter One

WATER

The ocean is where the first speck of life emerged, some 3.8 billion years ago. The speck evolved into algae capable of photosynthesis, resulting in the first supply of oxygen. This oxygen, interacting with ultraviolet rays from the sun, encased the earth in a protective vale called the ozone layer

Then, some 420 million years ago, life took its first step out of the water, and fed itself from the depths of the ocean with the help of oxygen and the ozone layer.

Masaru Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water (New York: Simon & Schuster Atria Books, 2001), 59.

I remember someone grabbing me under water and hauling me up by the hair, but my father claims I came up on my own and that I splashed a few strokes toward him—he had swan dived directly after me from the ledge of the pool. From that time on, anything that had to do with large amounts of water was something I looked upon with suspicion. I grew up in Indiana, a landlocked state, so all I had to fear were lakes and large rivers, not the true terrors of dark oceans and black seas.

I had a hard time growing up. The only thing that seemed to give me respite from the violent world around me, which my father controlled, was finding a place to hide and then pulling out a book and reading. I lived in books. I thought the people who wrote them were gods. They could create and control whole worlds, and the thing I wanted most to be was one of them. From the time I was eight, I wanted to be a writer.

This is ironic, because I have dyslexia, a term not widely used until the '70s. At the time I was growing up, you were just labeled dumb or stubborn about not learning to write right, or you were a cutup for transferring your numbers around, as if you were setting up a code to test the teacher.

That I could read at all was a miracle. Lots of dyslexic people never figured out coping skills to be able to bury themselves in books. I had to teach myself so that I had an escape to worlds that were not so dangerous as the house I lived in. I read and I dreamed of a family like the one in The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie.

I think that's how I came to marry so young, while I was still in college. In those days—the late '40s—you had to have the permission of the president of the college (a stern man who belonged in the pulpit of a chastising church, who ruled with a male iron hand over the women's college Emily Dickinson had fled in consternation). My about-to-be husband's reminiscences of his family were straight out of the fantasies of The Best Families of All Time. As a young boy, he had spent every idyllic summer on an island off the coast of Connecticut. His grandfather was one of those '20s Fitzgerald tycoons; he couldn't find an island that suited him, so he had one constructed, which I believe he named Potato Island, but surely a man like that would have named it after himself or found a more romantic-sounding tribute to his ingenuity.

My husband's grandfather constructed the island, whatever it was called, by having rocks piled up and then cemented together until they formed the rudimentary outlines of an island. Then he sent barges out with good top soil to fill in the outline of the island, until he had earth rich enough to sustain vegetable and flower gardens he could plunder all summer.

On his man-made island, he also built a fourteen-room house, a seven-room bungalow, a tennis court, and a large boathouse next to a seven-hundred pound mushroom anchor. He equipped himself with a seventy-foot yawl, a forty-foot ketch, a Star Class boat, something I thought my husband said was a Weskit, two or three dinghies, and several motorboats. Then, with the same determination that he had exhibited in constructing his own island, he taught himself to sail.

Every year during the winter, the sea knocked part of his island's perimeter wall out, and the precious topsoil seeped away. Each spring, before the annual migration of the family to Potato Island began, barge after barge made the three-mile trip out to refill the island. It was on this man-made cement-and-soil oasis that my husband had spent all his summers from the time he was three or four until he was fourteen, sailing a small boat alone, much the same way, I thought as he told me about his adventures, as I had escaped between the covers of adventure books.

In 1938, The Big Hurricane put an end forever to the island, washing the bungalow away, smashing the big house in two as if it had been struck by a giant fist, depositing the seven-hundred pound anchor in the midst of the tennis court, and spilling the top soil back into Long Island Sound. From that time on, my husband never again set a sneaker on a small boat, but he had never stopped dreaming about getting another one so that he could relive the magic moments of those long-ago summers.

One weekend, when we were first dating, my boat-husband, as I now always think of him, and I drove up to Stony Creek and hired a boat. He rowed us out to see what was left of Potato Island. It was not a happy sight, and my husband said he never wanted to go back. So far as I know, he never did. But then, I haven't seen him in several decades, so I couldn't testify to that in court, and now that he's dead (in 2008, at Belfast, Maine, loyal to the water to the last), I will never know. I was not mentioned in the obituaries, nor was his second wife, who had helped him put together a book about contemporary fiction. Of course, the obituary was written by his third wife, also a writer. Make of this what you will (and there seems to be a lot).

Even after five decades, I still recall the stories my soon-to-be husband told about the cohesive lovingness of his family—how a group of mothers would get together the day after Thanksgiving to make Christmas fruitcakes, how in spring they planned the annual Easter egg hunts that were filled with excitement because whichever child found the golden egg collected a twenty-dollar bill. (In those days, twenty dollars was a fortune.) At the Fourth of July picnic—with all its splendid food, each part of the family vying to bring bigger and better dishes—the dark night would be splashed with the splendor of sparklers and fireworks. Most of all, the tales my soon-to-be-husband told centered around those memorable moments when he had been out all by himself in his small sailboat, exploring the nooks and crannies of Long Island Sound.

"They let you go alone when you were that young?" I asked, horrified. From the look on his face, I was missing the point. After we were married, it turned out I missed the point of most of what my husband tried to tell me. At the time, I put it down to a bad marriage; now, I wonder if men and women don't usually miss the point of what they are trying to tell each other.

I was envious of that island off the Connecticut shore, where a family went every summer and seemed, the way my boat-husband told it—I never think of him now as anything but my boat-husband, as if he were a species of a generic brand. This was a family that had traditions and got together to laugh, a family that seemed straight out of a child's primer, one I would have given anything to have had. My own family had been so filled with arguments, violence, rage.

The first time I was invited to one to one of my husband's family get-togethers (I see now I was being vetted), I was thrilled with how warmly affectionate everyone was, even toward me, the stranger. Well, there was one moment when I happened to mention that I had been brought up in the Catholic church. A deadly silence fell on the room, but everyone went back to smiling when I announced I had left the church when I was fifteen. It took me way too long to conclude that if these people were anti-Catholic, they were probably also anti-Semitic, plus against desegregation, women's rights, and equality for gays. They had such a polished façade—except for that brief chilling moment when the word Catholic swamped the family dinner table—that I mistook their good manners for good morals. A psychiatrist would probably have concluded I married my husband's family, not my husband.

My mother was the most helpless of all. Her looks were the thing she prized most, and they were the first thing my father went for. He quieted down when he saw the blood run from her nose or her lips begin to purple and swell. I hid under the bed or ran out of the house and down the street, my brother trailing behind. "One day I'm going to shoot him," my brother often said, and I hoped he would. It is no coincidence, I think, that he became a big-game hunter.

Because the man I was going out with was better looking than Brad Pitt (Razzle-dazzle Rust, I used to call him) and belonged to a picture-perfect family, I married him in a daze of delight. I couldn't wait for the first Thanksgiving and the day after, when I would be one of the makers of the Christmas fruitcakes. But holidays bring out sins and shortcomings. My husband's family, whom I thought never spoke a cross word to one another, let alone raised their hands in anger, turned out not to be like the Walton family I had worshipped on TV. During my first Christmas as a new wife, I found people banging pots and pans in the kitchens, slamming doors throughout the house, throwing clothes out an upstairs window, screaming at spouses, ignoring crying children, weeping in the bathroom, running out into the night with the car keys and disappearing from the tree trimming and the Christmas dinner, Christmas day itself. I didn't realize until it was too late how much I had created a Walton-family veneer. There was no way my husband was or ever would be John Boy. From that first day my husband had rowed me out and showed me the wrecked family island, I was hooked.

Now that the ring was on my finger, I noticed things about my husband that I had never seen before or had overlooked or had thought in the beginning were endearing that were now rapidly becoming major irritations. At first, while we were working our way through school, my husband and I had become stars of at least some luminance at our Ivy League schools. People thought we were very avant-garde to get married and still keep going to school. We both had scholarships and worked all the scut jobs we could find, because our parents seemed to feel that the day we wed, their financial responsibilities to us ended.

We graduated and went on for our masters', and then we were out to work and were no longer the trophy couple of the young and rebellious. Now we were just an average married duo in Manhattan looking for jobs that paid enough to afford food and rent and an occasional night out. My husband was looking for a career. Women looked for apartments and then jobs, or the kind of jobs women could get in 1949, not career jobs, but the peon work of low-wage earners. Women would just get pregnant and leave, so what was the point of training them? The first question I was asked at any job interview was how long I expected to stay before I started a family. I'm not planning on starting a family, I would say, and that seemed such a bald-faced lie that the interview ended. No one wanted to hire a liar.

My husband landed a position selling trade books for Henry Holt. I went to every magazine whose name was familiar to me and filled out an application. After each application, I was told I had to take a typing test, no matter how much I protested that I did not want to be a secretary, that I did not take shorthand, that I had a master's degree in English and wanted to write. Those interviews did not go well. Finally, I ate humble pie and took the typing test. I could type, but not well. I never got any callbacks.

I finally got a job in the business department of Gourmet magazine for forty dollars a week, twenty-eight something after taxes and all the other deductions were taken out. Gourmet was publishing its first cookbook (ten bucks a book, which would be like a hundred dollars today). If you bought a book, you had the option of having your initials printed in gold on the spine. My job was to divide the people who wanted initials from those who didn't. Most everyone wanted initials. I then had to type up a list of those who wanted initials, which ones they wanted, and send it to the printer. When the books came back, I had to check the initials against the original order to be sure they matched. Hundreds and hundreds of names and initials a week. It was like counting paper clips.

The elevators at the Plaza Hotel where Gourmet had offices in the penthouse and the floor above let me out at the eighteenth floor, the last number on the elevator panel, which opened onto lavish editorial offices. There were stairs in back, where no one would see them, that went upstairs, where all the lowly people like me worked in the business office sweatshop. There I typed names and addresses and initials for over a year, all the time pleading for a job in the editorial division downstairs, where the posh offices were. Upstairs—as if we were in the attic—the peons who worked at entering subscriptions and taking calls from people whose bills or initials were mixed up, plus some lower-echelon factotums of advertising who were out on the road a lot, lived in cells painted gunmetal gray. It had all the glamour of an insecticide company instead of a posh culinary magazine.

I was finally, after a lot of lobbying, transferred to the editorial offices on the eighteenth floor just before Thanksgiving. No one (fortunately) asked me if I knew how to cook, because the only cooking I had ever done—and I don't know if it could even be classified as cooking—was making some Jello-and-marshmallow dish for Campfire Girls, for which I was awarded a badge. I was to work in the library—paneled in oak and lined with hundreds of cookbooks—which I would share with an associate editor, Ann Seranne—blonde, beautiful, and an authority on desserts.

My first day, she told me to answer the phone. It was the week before Thanksgiving, and I kept getting frantic requests for the best way to cook a turkey. I had absolutely no idea, but I grabbed what looked like an interesting recipe from the files and gave that out over the phone. It turned out that the dressing I recommended for stuffing the turkey used two hundred dollars of truffles (I had no idea what truffles were). When Ann found out, she took me off the phone and put me on answering letters, where people had been to such-and-such a restaurant and eaten such-and-such a dish in such-and-such a country and wanted the recipe.

The letters also contained samples of strange herbs and spices the subscribers couldn't identify that they had picked up in, say, Thailand or Madagascar. I opened the mail in the morning and put the recipes I thought I could trace or approximate in one pile, and those that I thought of as hopeless in the to-do-later stack. This pile increased exponentially, so that the area around my desk began to have a peculiar smell. Even the Oriental houseboy, whose main job was to take the two poodles to Central Park in the early morning, after lunch, and at closing time, complained. The dogs were not well trained. They often relieved themselves in the elevator, and some Plaza lackey was constantly being sent up to complain.

If I let more than two weeks go by without identifying an herb or spice or sending a recipe, a terrible vitriolic letter arrived demanding to know why the strawberries with that special sauce they had had in Milan—or was it Paris?—had not been sent to them. My big mistake came in the moments when I pulled myself up short and said to myself, Is this what you want to do with your life? Was knowledge of Bifteck Haché à la Lyonnaise, Fricadelles Veau à la Niçoise, or Mousseline de Volaille really going to make some significant statement to the world? This thinking was a grave error, I realized the day I got fired, because—I was told in no uncertain terms by the owner of the magazine—I had no respect for the serious mission of the magazine. You think it's funny to write Don't let your beans be has beans? he thundered. Do you? You're through here, this man who couldn't toilet train his dogs yelled at me. Just clean out your desk and get the hell out. I had no idea where I was supposed to be going, but one thing was certain: Gourmet didn't want me anymore.

(Continues...)

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