Rafting the Big River

Tomorrow would have been my brother Henry's 55th birthday. He died last November. Even though he lasted years longer than anyone, including him, dreamed he would, it is still a shock to comprehend that he's gone. I held him as a newborn. Mom let me change his diapers (that was before Pampers). I was in the hospital when he was just a new baby, so when I came out, he was there and I thought he was mine. In photos, I was always wrapped around him, keeping him from flying out of the frame. He was a busy guy even then. Above, concocting his specialty, sauteed squid.

No one in my life has ricocheted from angst to joy to horror the way he did. Yet the ballast of his relentlessly resilient and uncanny sense of humor always popped him up out of the morass. No one could tell a story like him. Sometimes the stories he told himself were so negative and accusing, they made him sick. The triple Leo slow-burn was never far from his eyes, except when he was engrossed in helping out, which he did often; or being funny, which he did often. He took a special interest in those who had the deck stacked against them, like the young Hispanic men on his jobsite. He found them tools, spoke their language, gave them tips on keeping the boss man happy. Their mothers and aunties invited him for dinner and thought he was a god. For years when we would see each other, he and I swapped fifty dollar bills, depending on who was flush at the time. It was usually him.

When he was a kid, he was so defiant and self contained that I worried about what he would do; how he would make his living. He would take off hitching to Los Padres forest with his white wolf dog and spend his spare time in the woods. At twelve, he discovered rafting rivers, by fifteen he was working them, and by eighteen, he was running his own trip on the Salmon. Later his small kayaking outfitter business gave people a tour of Kealakekua Bay and the Captain Cook Monument.

Sometimes the people you have known all your life are just too enigmatic to capture in words or photos. Bottom line is that he was sick for decades and didn't know it: heart scarred in his twenties, kidneys cooked by his medication, nerves shot from overzealous administrations of Haldol. A classic bi-polar (he had diagnosed himself when his doctors couldn't), he oscillated between ferocious mania lasting months, to crippling catatonic despair that also lasted for months, to periods of incredible productivity and joy. But he had been climbing a mountain everyday for so long, dodging the manic beast, carpentering under grueling conditions, that he didn't recognize physical illness until it threw him on the ground. Even when it did, he just shook his head and got up for more, like a prize fighter in the ring. He was a survivor in the highest sense of the world.

When Kay Redfield Jamison published An Unquiet Mind, he bought a box of them and handed them out to us. Finally someone had described what it was like to be inside his head. Finally an advocate who was both bi-polar and a physician. And finally we understood the journey he was on and what a powerful courage it took to not give up. He became my hero rather than my messed up little brother. Loving Henry was like loving a porcupine. You did it very, very carefully. I had to learn to shut my mouth. Not be a bossy big sister, which I certainly was. As family, we were a problem to him. We were too much. We had seen and said too much over the years.

Anyone who gave him advice (except Fern Pule on the right, the only one who could line him out) better be ready for the withering look of scorn. Henry could 'wither' with eloquence. He had been irrevocably harmed, by those claiming to help. So if you even looked 'helpful', watch out.

Henry was a privately spiritual person, his practice rooted in the sacredness of the natural world and rituals meaningful to him. He always had an altar. Living in Hawaii so long, he was intimately acquainted with the old gods. When we lived and worked there together and raced to Kona for the weekend, we joked about crossing the line between Pele and Lono's domains. There was literally a place in the road where he felt the shift.
There were large tracts within him that no one ever glimpsed, but something shone out from there. He was the most private person I have ever known. Yet his playfulness wowed me. His creativity was off the charts. The cartoons, legendary. Weird answering machine messages. My favorite was him impersonating the local postmaster explaining a large, smelly crate waiting for me at the loading dock marked Kahlua Pig. Or the time he called me early one early Sunday morning after the most intense Hawaiian lesbian bash imaginable, and impersonated a transsexual who had the hots for me. Jeez, I was mad when I finally figured out who it was.

But don't those 'bigger than life' people leave a colossal hole, a big rip in the fabric. I'm still patching that up and some days I do better with it than others. Henry changed me just by being him. He stirred up our family, roiled the waters, by being so original, so unreachable at times, so determined to not be diluted by everyone's idea of who he should be. And he wasn't, ever. Those he loved deeply, he loved forever and intensely. He, Bill and Dad shared a powerful bond, helping one another over the years. His best friends were friends for life: Jason, Jana, Kathy, Alan, plus river running buddies, and people I never got to meet...the whole raft of us now wishing he was here to ply us with hilariously dark stories or even give us the 'back off' look. Wherever you are, Henry Lee Wenner, a.k.a. Doctor H, Heneli, Hona... I imagine people either running for cover or holding their sides helplessly with tears running down their cheeks.