David William Hettig

David was unflappable. Several years ago we flew to Oregon through a storm in his small plane. With thunder and lightning crashing around us, David said, "Hmm.  We might try to take a small detour here."

My sons and I joined David on two raft trips that he organized - 18 days on the Colorado, through the Grand Canyon, and 12 days on the glacier-lined Tatshenshini River in Alaska. David was effortlessly competent, unflappable (again) -- even when two of our stronger swimmers were borne away by the Colorado current (discovered an hour later two miles downriver) -- generous, warm-hearted and fully engaged with life.

His untimely death is a great loss to all who knew him.

I’ve been procrastinating about writing something for David’s memorial web site, but perhaps that’s fitting – David sometimes procrastinated too, particularly about painful topics.

David was one of my best friends, but we only were in contact every few months – so I probably have postponed writing about him because it makes me acknowledge that I can no longer just pick up the phone and talk to him, or send an email message suggesting that we get together for dinner. Those are sad thoughts. I already miss being able to see David, talk to him, and share adventures with him. And, of course, it reminds me of my own mortality.

At the same time, I’m grateful for the many good times we shared, and I’m particularly grateful that one of those was recent, when I stayed overnight with David in his beautiful new home less than a month before he died. It was like many other visits we shared for over 40 years – talking about all kinds of topics far into the night, and then resuming the conversation over a leisurely breakfast on the patio in the morning sun. It brought back lots of good memories of other similar times together –on backpacking trips in the Sierra, in grad student apartments on the east coast, at his old bungalow next door on Pope Street, and in cabins at Ice Lakes (now Serene Lakes) after a day of cross-country skiing.

David and I shared a deep love and passion for the outdoors, and for in-depth conversations about our many shared interests, from nature to politics, science, music, and mutual friends. One of the qualities that made David a good friend was that we listened deeply to one another and were genuinely interested in one another’s lives. I will miss that a lot, as I’m sure will many of his other friends.

David was a great story-teller. I wish I could recount some of the highlights of our shared adventures as well as he could have done so. But I’ll try to at least summarize some that stand out in my memory.

When we were both grad students in modern American History – David with George Mowry at UCLA and then Chapel Hill and I with C. Vann Woodward at Yale -- I loved talking with David about history, teaching, research, and writing. David realized more quickly than I did that university teaching didn’t suit his personality. It took me a few more years to learn that, and talking with David was one of the things that eventually helped me realize it.

During the ten years I lived on the east coast, I came back to California every summer – to see old friends like David and to spend time in the Sierra mountains. One summer I camped for several weeks on Illilouette Creek, near Glacier Point in Yosemite, and friends came up to join me at different times during my stay.  David, Rick Seifert, and Carl Van Meter joined me for a backpacking loop trip in the South Boundary country. On other Sierra trips David introduced me to the Desolation Wilderness lake country west of Lake Tahoe and the Mott Lake area just off the John Muir Trail near Lake Edison. We returned to Mott Lake on a number of trips – the last one of which included Nan about ten years ago.

David and I both loved to hike cross-county – off the regular trials --which is much easier to do in the Sierra than almost any other mountain range. We also loved climbing to high points to be able to view the surrounding country. I had some fear of heights when there was a lot of exposure, but I usually overcame that by following David. We also both went through a phase of trying to outdo one another with preparing gourmet backpacking meals – which I heard carried over into some of the more sumptuous meals David was responsible for on river trips.

I also returned to California during Christmas holidays, and I think it was on one of those trips that I first went cross country skiing with David in the 1970’s - – mainly in the area around Norden and Donner Pass. I had just learned how to cross-country ski on the east coast and both of us were novices. I improved only gradually, but David soon decided to become more expert and practiced telemark turns on the downhill runs at Sugar Bowl. 

We loved to ski off-trail in the days before Royal Gorge took over the area – skiing down into the American Canyon via the unimproved Gorge Trail, and side-stepping up to Crow’s Nest and then careening downhill trying to avoid the trees and rocks. One time I remember David doing quite a remarkable face-plant after becoming inadvertently airborne off a snow-covered boulder hummock.

Another memorable adventure was climbing Mt. Shasta, which David did several times. I think he and I climbed Shasta together a couple of times in the 1970’s – once when we had to turn back on account of weather, and another time when David made it to the top but I had to turn back short of the summit due to altitude sickness. The episode that stands out from those Shasta trips, however, is when the emergency relief valve on David’s Prius stove blew while we were camping on the snow. The fountain of fire that ensued looked like a flame-thrower. Fortunately, neither of us was injured either from the stove or from sliding down the ice on our return trip.

On another trip near Clouds Rest and Half Dome in Yosemite, my wife Kathy and I recall David coming back to camp after dinner around twilight, and reporting excitedly about a bear he had seen teaching her cubs how to search for cords tied to trees that had been used to hoist a food bag up out of the bears’ reach. It wasn’t long before wilderness campers had to have bear-proof containers because putting food bags up over branches no longer worked. The bears had gotten too smart for us.

Eventually David discovered the Sierra Club White Water Section and that started his long-term love affair with rivers, which became more to his taste as backpacking became more challenging for his knees. My wife Kathy (who had run a number of rivers with a former boyfriend) and I joined David for at least one Klamath River trip, but we wished we could have done more river trips with him.

When I returned permanently to the San Francisco Bay Area in the fall of 1974, David was one of the first friends I started getting together with on a regular basis. We used to meet at the Sacred Grounds café near the University of San Francisco, where David was going to law school at night while working with Jeff Ferguson in Palo Alto doing carpentry during the day to pay for tuition, food, and the mortgage on a small bungalow on Pope Street that he had bought with financial help from his mother. We talked about changing careers, strong mothers, the agonies of love (I went through a divorce later that year and David was still recovering from a long relationship that had recently ended), the challenges of psycho-therapy, American politics, world affairs, and a host of other topics.

I could always count on David for stimulating intellectual conversation that wasn’t just being clever or one-upping others. He wanted to know what I thought, and to explore ideas together. He was fascinated by the law, and the intellectual challenges it presented. He had not yet decided on a legal speciality when he decided to go to law school, so it was fun to see his interest and expertise in estate planning emerge and grow over the years, and eventually to see him recognized as one of the “Super Lawyers” in California.

During the past decade or so, David and I got together every few months with a group of our friends from Beta Chi and Stanford. I think it was David who first referred to us as the “Old Boys.”  David, Jeff Ferguson, Paul Strasburg, Pete Reid and Armin were regulars. Ed Clark and Rick Seifert joined us when they ventured down from Portland. We began meeting at a family Afghan restaurant in Freemont named “Maria’s Pizza,” and relocated to the Salang Pass when Maria’s closed. After David’s trips to China helped him develop a more sophisticated taste for food from that part of the world, we sometimes branched out and met at one of Chinese restaurants in Millbrae that feature fresh seafood.

Occasionally we included wives and significant others, but usually it was just the “Old Boys.” One exception was for several trips to see plays and enjoy one another’s company in Ashland, Oregon, where John and Leah Frohnmeyer joined us at least once or twice, and I once had the pleasure of flying up and back from Oakland with David.

When David did things, he seldom went half-way. He didn’t just become a run of the mill estate lawyer – he became one of the best in the business. He learned to fly, got his pilot’s license, and learned all kinds of stuff about flying. He practiced telemark turns until he could descend downhill ski slopes. His river rafting skills led to participating with some of the premier river runners in the world on fabulous trips – such as Pete Winn’s three pioneering descents of the upper Mekong River in China. And when he finally decided to build a new home, it became an architectural masterpiece.

David loved going to Strawberry every year to hear music in the outdoors with friends. He loved flying to Telluride every Memorial Day weekend for the mountain film festival. He loved savouring delicious food, good scotch and fine wines.

There were several other aspects of David’s life that I only heard about from him – his work with Ginetta Sagan and the Aurora Foundation, his clandestine trip with Sue Porter taking cash to members of Solidarity in Poland, his many years of service for the YMCA and getting a new Y built in East Palo Alto. I hope others will flesh out those stories in more detail.

Perhaps one of the reasons David was determined to live life so fully is because, as he shared with me around the time that he turned fifty, he thought he might not live past that decade. His father had died of a heart attack when he was in his early fifties, and his older sister had died of a heart attack in her forties. But David was elated later in his fifties to have his doctors tell him that his heart seemed to be a good shape and that he was not necessarily destined for death at such an early age. In fact, he lived to be 70.

For all his high-powered accomplishments, David remained a very humble, modest, unpretentious person – sensitive to others, soft-spoken, and low key. He also was a very private person in many ways. While outwardly gregarious, I think he found it difficult to share his deepest feelings and emotions – even with close friends.

Perhaps that emotional reserve, coupled with his health concerns, may help explain why David did not marry until he was sixty.  

I’m grateful to have been David’s friend and shared the joy of his intellectual companionship, emotional support, and outdoor adventures for many years.  I will cherish those memories and continued to be inspired by David’s passionate love of life, nature, and civic engagement for the rest of my life.

John McCarthy

 

 

 

 

I count myself among those of you who considered David a very special, valued friend. Without brothers, David was that to me, a trusted person one could always turn to and learn from. My first river trip, extensive back pack trips in the Sierras, and cross country skiing to bring in the New Year, all were ideas of David's. And then there was the call, as I was sitting at my desk in a high rise in Portland, Oregon, grappling with my first law job in 1986:  "Do you want to go with me to smuggle money into Poland to help the Solidarity movement?" I only hesitated a minute before saying yes and I still have the letter I wrote my 9-year old son as I was leaving on that trip in case I did not return. That adventure was a real one, including David's taking a new sleep tablet on the plane over (I now suspect it was ambien) which I had trouble rousing him from over the next several days-- and he was the only one who knew the plan!
Luckily, I did visit him last summer in his new house, he was so justifiably proud of it,  and we were in close enough touch that we were planning on having lunch when I was in the Bay Area on August 2. The shock and loss when I heard of his death still strike me frequently and I am sorry I will not be able to join you to celebrate all he meant to so many of us. I hope the celebration brings you peace with the loss, the peace I will seek as I walk in the woods, kayak on rivers, ski under a full moon. How much I wish we could meet again.

I am bewildered and filled with emotion at the news of David’s death.  I saw him last in the spring, when I stayed at his house during a brief visit from my home in Denver to the west coast.  We spent an evening in deep conversation, followed by a leisurely breakfast with more of the same.  I returned home again and he vanished.  I feel the need to record my sharpest memories of David before they, too, vanish or become warped by time and aging, so I’m grateful to this forum for giving me a place to do so.

I didn’t know David well at Stanford.  We spent a brief quarter together at the Beta Chi house, and then I left.  I remember him in his Navy ROTC uniform, which certainly made him stand out in that crowd. I remember the stories of his abalone diving with Thorn Smith, which seemed an almost mythical accomplishment to me.  I don’t remember much else. 

 We reconnected again about twenty years ago when a small number of men from that Stanford group still living in the Bay Area began to gather periodically under the rubric of the “Old Boys.”  The regulars included David, Peter Reid, Jeff Ferguson, John McCarthy, and Armin Rosencranz.  Rick Seifert joined us on occasion when he came down from Oregon, John Morton when he came up from Southern California, and, as I remember, Ed Clark and Jim Arthur as well.

 Through the Old Boys, I renewed my acquaintance with David.  I was drawn, like so many others, to his quiet strength, humor, generosity, and basic simplicity.  I admired his intelligence and down-to-earth practicality so much that I hired him as my lawyer.  In that role and as a valued friend, he guided me through several major personal transitions over the next twenty years.

 We also discovered that we had some serious interests in common.  His passion for running rivers meshed with mine for saving them from “development,” and I roped him into engagement with International Rivers, an NGO on whose board I served.  David helped us envision a new legal entity to support IR’s long-term growth and did all the legal work to set it up for us. 

 We were both attracted to the pleasures and frustrations of the nonprofit world.  He took great satisfaction in helping to establish and support the East Palo Alto YMCA.  (He tried, unsuccessfully, to get me to join the Y—I held out against all forms of physical discipline until I later moved to Denver and joined the Y there.)  He was also especially proud, rightly so, of helping Ginetta Sagan, the famed human rights activist, set up her Aurora Fund.  David became one of Ms. Sagan’s closest advisors until her death in 2000. 

 David wasn’t much for accumulating possessions.  The one he was most devoted to was the new house he built in Menlo Park, a marvel of light and openness, with gorgeous wood walls and cabinets, a flying bridge over the kitchen, and matching stone floors from the inside to the outside patio.  (True to his basic nature, there wasn’t a whole lot in it that would qualify as actual furniture.)  Prior to the home, his heart was given to his magnificent little Honda roadster, which he bought “almost new” and kept in the same condition ever after.  He loved driving it around Menlo Park in a lower gear, listening to the high pitch of the fine engine that sounded like a sewing machine about to go into orbit.

 David had a harder time giving his heart for very long to a woman, however.  My wife recalls him saying that, because his father died at a young age (53 or thereabouts, and of a heart attack, I think), he was reluctant to marry and start a family.  He finally got around to the marrying part at the age of 60, surprising all his friends by wedding a brilliant, beautiful and adventurous woman, Ma Nan, whom he met on one of his early expeditions to China as part of the first group to run the headwaters of the Mekong River down to the point where, sadly, dams were being built.  Nan was a scientist the Chinese government assigned to “guide” (read “keep an eye on”) this group of foreigners in sensitive territory. Nan moved to Menlo Park and, with David’s encouragement, began a whole new career in patent law.  Though the marriage did not last, David remained caring and supportive of Nan until the end.

 I’m glad we spent that last evening and morning as we did.  We had dinner at the Sultana Restaurant in Menlo Park, where the Turkish owners knew him well and jumped to give him the best window table.  He was loyal and warm to them, as with all his friends, evoking the same in response. We talked about love and loss, about what a mess the world seems to be in and the need to keep doing the best we can in our chosen little workshops, about future plans, about the San Juan River and the Mekong, about many small things that truly matter.  Then we went home, sampled a few of his favorite brands of scotch, and carried on the conversation until late.  Neither of us had any suspicion it would be our last evening together, but it was a fine one—as good as I could have wished.

 Within the hour that I learned of David’s death, I received news that the19-year-old son of a colleague had also died of sudden cardiac arrest.  He was a budding artist and musician, sweet natured and full of promise, the apple of his parents’ eye.  Both losses are tragic beyond measure; both leave huge holes in those who loved them.  But at least David got to make his mark on the world, and a valuable and lasting mark it was.  At least he lived long enough to know who he was, to feel his passions, to pursue them as far as he could, and to take real pleasure in the life he was given.  His was a life well and fully lived, and we are all the better for it.

 

Paul Strasburg

Dave and Lorraine used to visit us in Morro Bay, and Dave came to live with us and dive with me some time in 1972-73.
I think this was after the Chapel Hill inconclusive History PhD attempt to which he gave extensive effort - fueled in part by a desire to avoid the draft.  -- An aside, Dave was required to travel from N. Carolina to New York City to have a draft physical on the last day they could possibly nail him (age 27?). The doctor discovered a football knee evidenced only on that day, and he was free!  Ultimately unconvinced by academia, he had changed career objectives. -- In Morro Bay we bought a hot rod Radon Craft diving boat together, and made some amazing trips.

One time we drove all the way from Morro Bay to L.A., stayed with some of his relatives. It was a flat day, rare speed. Then we went to Santa Catalina. Next day to San Clemente Island, home to feral goats and the U.S. Navy. We were boarded first night by Underwater Demolition Team divers practicing - younger than us.  Big scare, big laugh.  Listened to huge naval rifle shells roaring overhead from a cruiser offshore, falling on a nearby target range.  Back to Catalina. Landed at remote Cat Harbor.  Exhausted, I staggered down a rickety dock and around a huge stand of sawgrass only to be charged by a snorting buffalo.  Imagine.  Dave wouldn't believe me, had to go look for himself - to my delight.  He was lucky the beast wouldn't
run on the dock.  Apparently a Hollywood outfit filmed a Western there on Wrigley Ranch in the 1930's, left the beasts, which flourished.  Something like that.  Divers used to shoot goats off the cliffs there, retrieve them from the sea.  We found a dead cow on the bottom off Santa Cruz, covered with sea urchins. I am reminded that on our very first day out of Morro Bay Jeff Ferguson and I encountered a flotilla of big Steller sea lion pups (3 1/2 feet long) with their heads torn off. Rings of blubber, ragged cuts.  Killer whales, peg teeth.

Another time Dave and I went to San Nicholas Island, 90 miles out.  Very deep diving, but not as deep as the guys from San Diego who shot heroin and jumped to 200 - 300 feet.  Reportedly. Nicholas fiercely protected Navy territory, endless sonic cables out in the Pacific to detect Russian subs.  Many detected off Vandenburg during the Cuban missile crisis.  At Vandenburg (Point Arguello) you could experience missile launches off the cliffs above - cut the sound with a chainsaw. Get hit by white sharks or rolled by sneaker waves (others achieved these, not us).

To his credit Dave took to diving like a fish to water.  Never complained about danger or discomfort, appreciated the wild beauty and magic of it all. Especially under water. He was a natural athlete.  We had big stainless kelp knives on our stern drives, he managed to cut a sizeable blue shark in half on a solo run. There was some moaning about that.

At the same time he was going through an Acute Liberal phase and was given to recurring unsolicited speculation on the injustice of it all.  Like your mother-in-law.  Rafted up for breakfast with other divers in Cuyler's Harbor on San Miguel Island he once observed that bacon had the least protein and highest cholesterol of any breakfast meat and should be avoided
like sin. As he ate his bacon. The other divers - floating felons all - were going to throttle him then and there.  Were it not for my timely though momentarily reluctant intervention I would not be leaving these fond memories about Dave.