Giving back old photos

Scanning old photos and trying to date them always conjured up the most unlikely of memories. Like the photos I took of Pete Lang in Park City, near Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island in 1981. I never expected to find his daughters on Facebook when I posted some old photos on my friend Micaela Wall's page. It was such a magical time for me hanging out with Pete's family. I always adored Pete, I knew him since I was a child. Almost as long as I've known Micaela. She was called Miranda in those days. Pete was her step-brother. He mooned after her while she mooned after his handsome younger brother, Stan—a wild one with hair slicked back like James Dean. Those New Mexico boys by way of Sausalito, with their tall boots and tooled leather belts, seeking distant horizons, got under the skin like fine desert sand. I was always the one left out of the moon's capricious equations. Pete saw me as the little kid down the road. Sometimes he'd drop by to visit my granny and me in Forest Knolls after Micaela's dad, Pat Wall, sold the house moved north to Fort Bragg. Pete was living in a trailer on the headlands by the botanical garden. Paradise on earth. I've an early memory of Pete leaning against our sawhorse, by the woodpile, playing his Martin guitar. He left town, became a spy, joined the CIA, or was it the FBI? The Lang brothers went the way of lost cowboys in search of a one-horse townor a horizon that just wouldn't settle. Maybe it was the high desert winds spurring them on. But they couldn't stay still in any one place for long. We ran into each other in BC, by then Pete was married, with two daughters, but the wife was stepping out with the mayor on the side. It broke my heart. We lost touch. They moved to Florida where he built wooden boats, got divorced. Last I heard, he was in Galveston, Texas, working as a private eye, probably to be closer to his father, the Bohemian sculptor / painter Wilfred. Stan sailed off to the Virgin Islands became a carpenter, and met death by bottle on the old plank road. I eventually got a Martin guitar too, but I could never play it like that. Pete gave me some folk songbooks too—which I still have. Back copies of Sing Out!, a little Woody Guthrie, some Baez, but no Dylan. But I never could play those songs without remembering Pete bending over his guitar, head canted as if he were ciphering a story from those whispering guitar strings.


Wilfred A. Lang, painter (1915-1994)