Excerpt: Strange Piece of Paradise
May 3, 2006 — -- Terri Jentz was 19 years old when she embarked on a cross-country bike trip in 1977 with her Yale roommate. Just a few days into their journey, the two women were brutally attacked, in a crime that made national headlines. Both women survived, but recovering from the attack wasn't so easy.
In an attempt to make sense of the attack, Jentz traveled back to the town where it happened 15 years later. She found a community still shell-shocked by those events, and a near consensus about the identity of the perpetrator -- a man still living freely in their midst.
In a new book, "Strange Piece of Paradise," Jentz combines elements of the memoir and the true-crime thriller to chronicle her journey toward understanding that terrible night and its implications.
You can read excerpts from the book below.
Chapter One -- A Dangerous Summer's Night
Poised on that twilight edge between life and death, I felt intimately the part of me that was flesh, and I knew also that I was something more.
I came to that insight early on. I was scarcely twenty.
* * *
IT WAS 1977, a drought year in the American West, the driest year in recorded history, although history in those parts went back only a hundred years.
Back then, all of America was in a drought. The fever dream of the sixties had simmered down and the country had lost its way. The national mood was dispirited, in recovery from shocks and traumas, pinched by stagnation and inflation. Fatalism shadowed sunny American optimism.
Gas prices had never been higher. But I didn't care. I was riding a bike.
America was hardly past its two hundredth birthday as I was nearing my twentieth. Its bicentennial year called for celebrations to restore a sense of the nation's magic and promise. Out of that came a bicycle trail, the BikeCentennial, forged from coast to coast through America's most spectacular countryside. My college roommate and I were riding the trail on our summer vacation. Encouraged by the 1970s culture to strive for self-discovery, we were hoping that the song of the open road would enlarge life's meaning.
In the Cascades of the Northwest, drought conditions were melting the glaciers left from the last ice age. The mountain passes cleared unusually early in the summer of '77 and allowed us to scale the highest pass. On the seventh day of our journey, we rode up through green rain forest.
At the summit, a field of lava, night-black, surrounded us from every direction, as if a devastating fire had burned through only yesterday. Breathing in the air of the heights, we headed down. Trees abruptly appeared again. Only now they were reddish desert trees.
We set up our tent along a river in a small park in a desert of juniper and sage, and bedded down for the night. It was Wednesday, June 22, the summer solstice. As the earth slowly turned in the dark, Americans in one time zone after the next settled in front of their TVs, safe in their living rooms.
They watched the CBS Wednesday-night movie, the world television premiere of a dark and unsettling Western, one of those edgy films made in the seventies that reflected the mood of national cynicism. It was a film complete with psychopaths and moral degeneracy, a new American mythology that turned the romantic version of the Old West on its head.
The sound of screeching tires woke me. It was near midnight, and we had just gone to sleep. A stranger deliberately drove over our tent, then attacked us both with an axe. I saw his torso. He was a meticulous cowboy who looked like he had stepped off a movie set.
My great voyage across America ended abruptly there. And that was how I reached young adulthood, with a certain knowledge of life at its farthest edges.
Chapter Two -- Its Long Life
I entered young adulthood with a story that cast a spell on me. The details of the attack and of how we managed to survive gave me a dramatic tale to tell. But to make a full accounting of this event and its aftershocks seemed for many years impossible. Could I ever apply meaning to what had long seemed a senseless act, one that happened without pattern or reason? Was there even a "why" to it?
It took fifteen years before I finally realized that a long-ago incident had transformed me, divided my life into a before and an after. My personal history bewildered me, but two questions kept surfacing. The first was elusive: How could I get the recurring dreams to stop, the ones that haunted me through the years -- dreams in which I was captive at the age of twenty, unable to progress to another stage of life? What dislocation of spirit had arrested a part of my psyche?
The second question was easier to grasp: Who was the man who emerged that night in a desert park, bent on destruction? This question had but one simple answer: an individual with a name. A man with his own history -- a past, a present, and, impossible to imagine, a future. Fifteen years had passed, and the crime had never been solved. Its reckoning was long overdue.
Both questions converged in a flashbulb image that struck deep into my memory: the headless torso of a fit, meticulous young cowboy suspending an axe over my heart. The image conjured for me a villain out of myth and legend.
I began an education in such mythic imagery early on, when for my fourth birthday I received a 3-D Viewmaster that came with a package of sample discs. I remember holding the Viewmaster to my eyes and clicking the button on its right side. I clicked my way through 3-D views of beautiful American landscapes and frames of iconic American imagery until I froze at one: a headless torso wearing a costume out of the Old West, a holster slung around his waist, his hand training a revolver on me, the viewer -- which, in its startling three-dimensionality, forced me to stare down the gun's cold gray barrel.
The image stayed with me until that summer of '77, when I conflated in my mind what I remembered from my childhood toy, a cowboy torso trying to shoot me, and what I actually saw in the flesh. The memory of my attacker -- that cowboy torso trying to axe me -- crystallized at the margins of my consciousness as the nocturnal visitation of a villain out of legend.
It was the gripping power of this image that would compel me to set out to solve a crime -- one that I hoped could solve me.
* * *
IN 1992, I RETURNED to the scene of the incident, a place in the Oregon desert called Cline Falls. The visit turned out to be catalytic. If my vision had before been blinded by the trauma of the attack, now I was keen to see. What was the panorama that surrounded me? What lay across the river and across the highway? Who else happened to be in Cline Falls Park that night? Who lived in the surrounding ranches, and in the town four miles away? Who were the souls of this rugged community of the American West: the courageous ones who rescued us that night? the passive ones who wouldn't speak up?
I took frequent journeys back to the scene of the crime over a period of several years, and the questions continued to unfold. Why did the community still remember an event from long ago as though it happened only yesterday, as if it were an open wound? Why did some tell me that the event had devastated them? Why were others indifferent? And what about the people who, I would discover, claimed they knew the identity of the attacker all those years?
Conversations were seldom journalistic interviews. Often they turned into infused encounters, my story forging an intimacy among strangers. People were, for their own reasons, eager to look through my eyes, and into what might have been my last moments -- sometimes it was a far-out symbol of their own worst trauma, which if not life-threatening was at least soul-diminishing. They answered my questions; they made valiant attempts to resurrect the past; they helped me with my investigation, which they understood as my personal mission. When I met someone for the first time, I learned always to begin with the story.
I realized the tale I had to tell wasn't mine alone. The events of that long-ago summer night had driven deep into others in that desert community. Mine was not a solitary, isolated experience in one person's life. It was a collective experience, even for those who hadn't witnessed it. On some subterranean level it was as though they were waiting for me to return, to tap their potent remembrances, and by doing so to bring some kind of integration to a memory that never fit into any narrative they knew.
For more information, visit www.strangepieceofparadise.com.
Excerpted from Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz. Copyright © 2006 by Terri Jentz. Published in May 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.