Karen Moran is a long-time Topanga resident who has a Ph.D in Archetypal Psychology. This article was written after interviewing Karen and reading her book, Forever Tourmaline, which mixes her life story with metaphors she uses to face trauma. The text in italics and some of the quotes are from the book.
The Chair
“I cried like I have never cried before…four hours. It was so deep. It was that traumatic for me…how much was underground,” Karen said to me. I had just commented on a large wooden chair across from us before sitting down with her on a comfy couch, with cozy pillows and two white furry lap dogs, in her house off Old Topanga Canyon Road. The massive wooden chair had branches extending outwards for back support. It was impossible to miss. “I call it the petrified octopus,” she said with disgust.
Her husband, Ishmael, had it delivered without her seeing it first. Big mistake. He was at work when it arrived. When the delivery men brought in the colossal piece of furniture, Karen fell to pieces. She immediately called her girlfriend Pat, at the Eden Ranch. “He brought a tree stump into my house. I was thinking soft and cushy. This is a turning point for me in my marriage,” she joked with Pat. “He thinks something is beautiful. I think it’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” The two friends laughed and cried. “I told her all about having to sit on tree stumps for my whole life, you know, growing up. We didn’t know anything different because…we never had a chair.”
Ishmael was eventually forgiven for ordering the wooden chair. “He’s more than made up for that.”
The Cabin
In 1949, when Karen was seven months old, her parents Cy and Vera Wood moved her and two older sisters into a roofless burned-out river rock cabin, one of twelve built in Topanga in the early 1900s. Karen grew up on the Hondo Canyon property, which extended twenty-five acres between Old Topanga Canyon Road and Saddle Peak. The cabin remained roofless for the first three years after they moved in. The family slept under the stars and when the rains came, Cy would cover a third of the cabin with a tarp. Although they were roughing it, Karen remembers the raw beauty that surrounded her. She would sit on stumps alongside her mother and sisters in the morning light in a sea of periwinkle flowers outside the cabin. “We’d sit there and listen to her, you know, wake up the day.”
The Magic Forest
Cy Wood, Karen’s father, was a pacifist. During the McCarthy Era, he was labeled a communist. Cy was born in 1911 in Alaska during the gold rush in a remote trading post. When he was just a boy, a group of men surrounded him and his best friend on the docks and made them fist fight. He witnessed hunters taunting grizzly bears before they killed them. Men would often fight, sometimes to the death. The violence and cruelty he witnessed shaped his pacifist beliefs.
After his family barely survived a battle with the Spanish Flu of 1920, they moved to San Francisco, where he met Vera.
“She was a dark-haired beauty with a twinkle in her eye,” Karen described her mother.
Vera came from England to the United States when she was 10. She was a natural-born artist. Cy and Vera met folk dancing and the attraction was immediate. The couple moved down to Southern California for more opportunities.
“They were just beautiful people and wonderful. Creative and vibrant,” Karen remembers. Cy despised the shopping malls and suburbs of Los Angeles. “He wanted to get out into the woods and clean air, clean food, and keep us healthy.”
Her parents, along with many other like-minded families that moved to Topanga in the mid twentieth century, wanted to be closer to nature and live an artistic and more communal lifestyle.
Karen grew up with the freedom to immerse herself in the forest and said she “experienced God in nature.” She explored the oak groves and streams with her sisters. “Playing in the Magic Forest, daily chores left behind, freed my soul to dance to the songs the earth was singing.”
Cy and Vera had given their children the gift of nature, but their views were extreme. Vera wanted to shelter the girls from the outside world and prohibited the reading of any current events, world news, or comic books. Cy made sure that no meat, alcohol, cigarettes, soda or packaged food entered the house and under no circumstances were the family members to receive vaccines or injections of any kind.
The Panther
The panther must have come down from the mountains for the same reason I had-to watch the glistening gold upon the water. I suppose what he saw instead was the sunlight shimmering through my hair. Perhaps it was simply my innocence. The reason doesn’t even matter anymore. When he was finished with me, I was cut into as many pieces as all those logs on the table saw at the mill.
“Sometimes you have to lie to tell a greater truth,” a professor once told Karen, when she was working toward her Ph.D, studying archetypical psychology. Did Karen actually get attacked by a Panther? No, later in life she used the Panther as a metaphor to symbolize her traumas. The panther would appear at night, clawing on her bedroom door while she was sleeping. To heal, she needed to face the panther. Having no chairs as a child was the least of Karen’s traumas.
The Sawmill
When she was seven years old Karen’s family took a camping trip to the Kern River. The sisters spotted a beautiful stream turned golden by the sunlight. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” one of her sisters yelled. Karen followed them down to the water and jumped in. Underneath the surface was a piece of sharp thick glass from a bottle someone had tossed. The pain shot through Karen’s body on impact. When she raised her foot out of the water blood was spurting everywhere. Her family desperately wrapped a towel around her foot, blood soaking through, they thought she might bleed to death. Cy remembered passing a sawmill and from his experience in the wilderness, knew there would be a doctor there.
“We have to get her sewn up quickly,” said the doctor. At that point, Cy and the doctor started arguing fiercely.
“Momma don’t leave me,” Karen yelled as her mom exited the room.
“I have to give her something to numb the pain,” the doctor continued.
“No! absolutely not!” Cy insisted.
The doctor cleaned the wound, cut the flappy skin off, and sewed up the gash. Karen laid on the table screaming in excruciating pain. She could feel everything. She had to forgive her mother for abandoning her at that crucial moment and her father for not letting the doctor use anesthesia.
“Were you angry at your parents?” I asked.
“She couldn’t handle what was going to happen,” she said about her mother. “He didn’t believe in shots. He did the best he possibly could to save my life,” she reflected on her father’s judgment. “There was no anger, just a wound.”
Hurricane Hashish
At age fourteen, Karen fell in love with a young man named Victor. At sixteen, she was traveling across the country with him, back to his family home, a Victorian mansion on Key West, where she planned to spend the summer. With permission from Cy and Vera, the two lovebirds married.
That summer of ‘65, Hurricane Besty struck the island. Victor boarded up the doors and windows. Karen held on to him for dear life in the humid night as the storm ripped off rooftops, sank boats, flipped planes and tore down powerlines. Key West was ravaged by the storm, but the hundred-year-old mansion was still standing, basically unscathed.
Victor’s behavior started to change. He was gone all day, leaving early in the morning to go crawfishing with his friends. Karen said she was forbidden to leave the house alone. She felt trapped and isolated in the unfamiliar, far away from Hondo Canyon. She said that Victor became mean and angry and told her he would catch her if she escaped. With the help of her father, who bought her plane tickets she fled the old house in the night and flew back to California.
Over the years she maintained a relationship with Victor. He was the father of her two daughters. Eventually, she divorced him, but Victor would still come to visit his kids. One night, later in life, when Karen had already started dating Ishmael, Victor rolled up “to say goodnight to the girls.” The next day he vanished. Shortly after, Karen said she received a visit from the DEA. She said that the agents told her Victor was involved in one of the largest hashish smuggling operations of all time, called the Olaug conspiracy.
When I met Victor, an older man, he offered me protective love, but he also carried a strong sense of mystery and danger. And the combination was the embodiment of Panther, into whose arms I fell.
The Deep Canyon
I strolled through the Hondo Canyon property with Karen. Night was approaching. The property had been sold after the death of her parents. We walked down a brick path that she had laid down when she was seven. Karen bent over and peered through the window of the old cabin, her reflection looking back at her.
“I always feel their souls are here,” she told me.
She walked to the edge of the dirt road and looked back into the deep canyon. “This was my playground. We thought we had everything, and frankly we did.”
We continued up the road and the temperature dropped noticeably as we entered the canyon. Like a beautiful ghost, Karen floated through a tunnel of oaks, her silver hair and white blouse glowing in the dark blue dusk. The gentle sound of running water was amplified by the canyon walls as we passed the pools where she once played with her sisters as a child.
For Karen, the death of her parents was the end of the Woods as a family. It had a profound effect on her, both physically and emotionally. When her mother passed in January of 2005, a violent storm flooded Topanga and Karen had a vivid dream:
The road is overgrown with sage and chaparral. The once-majestic oaks lie fallen to the ground, their branches twisted and torn. A dense thicket of barren wild lilac, covered with prickly cucumber vines, tears at my clothes and scratches the surface of my skin. I trip and fall stumbling over my own fear and cutting myself on a wall of jagged shale…
Surely Momma will be waiting for me…
The crushing sound of thunder, then lighting, followed by an avalanche of mud and water, freezes me in my tracks. The earth beneath my feet begins to rumble, just as I see the face of the mountain behind the cabin give way.
It hits with such force that I drop to my knees.
One night when Karen was looking out the window of her Topanga house, she saw the full moon rise. Sliding over the bright white moon was a black panther, coming to visit her. She no longer feared the beast, it had become a symbol of her healing.
