Saved by Dolphins

No answers then, none now.

There were seven of them: Paul, Niel, Diego, Dale, the two Jims and a Harold, most expert outdoorsmen, nervy, athletic tough guys who might one weekend whip down to Mexico to hunt panther and the next be back home to spear a basking shark, dive for lobster or bag some venison in the close-by hills still thick with deer. All were his friends, but three were especially close fishing and hunting buds, and all of them wanted him--more accurately needed him--to come out with them on an underwater photography expedition. He, after all, had the best underwater camera. “You know how much I’d love to come,” he said most sincerely, but damn--chained as he was to his day-job desk, a deadline looming--he just couldn’t.

Even more aggravating, this was the second time they’d asked (their first try without him and his camera hadn’t gone so well), and they really did need him, his expertise. He’d loved the ocean since surf fishing with his father on the Santa Monica beach as a kid, and this outing was exactly his thing, a mix of the great outdoors, some creativity, a little tech--but hell, his damn desk, five mouths to feed, his job. It was a long time ago but not the sort of long time ago that would ever really get old, ever leave him completely. He remembers the summer day, the usual layer of morning fog that inevitably burned off by afternoon--a Southern California sort of summer day--and of course the phone call two days later:

“Mr. Bottoms? Bud Bottoms?”

“Yes.”

It was someone from the Santa Barbara Coast Guard station, and it seemed they had, well, a body (one of only two of the seven ever to be recovered). And, really, only half a body, the other half consumed by the opportunistic creatures of the sea.

It’s a bit fictive, a movie missing the last reel, because it made no sense then and makes none now. Each man expert at surviving, yet none survived. Four of them had worked for Raytheon, supplier of assorted forms of war-related technologies, and the expedition had had something to do with submarines, and it wasn’t surprising that the suggestion of a Russian sub being involved would surface. A less dramatic theory was that the boat, a WWII landing craft perhaps not as stable as it might have been with its clumsy add-on plywood bow, had run over a cable connecting barges operating in the area, but no one really knew and the craft itself was never recovered.

He was the lone survivor of a disaster that officially had none, and he thought to himself: Why me? Why am I alive and they are not?

It seemed to him that he’d been given this chance for a reason, that he must do something important, meaningful--use his good fortune to make some sort of statement. But what could that be?

It was the summer of 1997 when the last of the “clients” left, many of them lifers who had known no other home for as long as 30 years. This was the institution known as the Camarillo State Hospital, a self-contained community set on more than 600 acres in a valley five miles from the ocean, which the residents could smell when the wind was right but few could visit. It looked then as it did when it opened in 1936, the image of muted serenity with its neatly kept lawns and palm- and sycamore-lined avenues, walled courtyards, stately bell tower, all dressed up in California Spanish red tile and white stucco, looking more the spruce military base or upscale retirement village than the dreaded place the state sent its mad, its retarded, its alcoholics and drug addicts, the violent and the somnolent, all the unhappy castoffs of a society that needed a place to put such people: off by themselves and out of sight.

By its close, Camarillo, sometimes known with a semi-affectionate smirk as the Hotel California, had evolved away from some of its most controversial therapies (electroshock, lobotomies) to more rehabilitative training in shop and computers, art therapy and employment tending the crops and animals in the surrounding fields. In this way its sudden transformation--zappo cracko!!!--into the California State University Channel Islands, which opened in 2002, was not such a great leap. Yet there had to be some lingering sense of its now painted-over former identity, a place where once as many as 7,000 damaged souls had lived.

Not all of the old hospital had been changed. Many buildings, perhaps a quarter of the original, had been left as they were, their hallways silent, their clocks stopped, dusty furniture heaped. In one of the old classrooms a departed instructor had written on a blackboard a little haiku of farewell: “Goodbye clients we’ll miss you!” and “Respect don’t make fun!” Farther down another hand wrote “the Golden Rule” with a heart symbol next to it, and yet another not so optimistic soul had added, bluntly, “Kill me.” Oh, it was very quiet, very still, and faint campus sounds--voices, slammed car doors--seemed to come from far, far away, a different time and a different place. A visitor here was a sort of ghost himself, and wandering down the hallway of that same building he would have come suddenly face to face with brilliant apparitions in the faint light.

Stop here then to take it all in, the images thrown up on these walls those years ago, no doubt for the best of reasons--to cheer up the “clients,” remind them of the splendid world they might one day return to. They are brightly colored human figures, larger than life, not bad really but amateurish all the same, a little distorted, a little too cheerful, too . . . up. They are such icons as Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson, Clint Eastwood in his “Man with No Name” flat hat and, largest of all, Elvis in the middle of a lush green valley, no doubt meant to suggest Hawaii, dream edition (or is it nightmare?). In all, hidden yet still lingering reminders of the oh-so-different life lived here not so long ago.

The university had what is known as an image problem, a need not only to spiff the place up but somehow to create a whole new feel, a new spirit, a kind of fashion makeover combined with an exorcism. (Now and then maintenance workers, holdovers from the hospital days, had heard faint murmurings when no one was there, or had seen spectral something-or-others, another suggestion that the past had not completely gone away.)

One method of putting the past to rest, or more accurately of invoking a different, even earlier past, was to have elders from the local Chumash community offer blessings, which usually involved burning sage in an abalone shell. Yet something more was needed, some sort of talisman, a transformative symbol, something at least a little indigenous and preferably upbeat, like that most agreeable and chummy creature of the sea . . . a bottlenose dolphin. This is what was selected and whose likeness now appears on the many red and silver school pennants flying on many poles around the campus. (No cries yet of “Go Dolphins!” since CSUCI has yet to field its first athletic teams.)

Also in two prominent locations, in front of the science building and over near the campus hub, life-size effigies, leaping upward, hundreds of pounds of thrusting bronze Tursiops truncatus, yet more in a long, long line of such creations by James “Bud” (no one calls him James) Bottoms.

*

The image of dolphins rescuing sailors or carrying humans recurs again and again in myth and folklore. According to Plutarch, for example, a native of the Greek island of Paros once found some fishermen about to kill some dolphins they had caught, and bargained for their release. Some time later, while sailing between Paros and the neighboring island of Naxos, his boat overturned in a storm. Of the crew, he alone survived, rescued by a dolphin that carried him on its back to the nearby shore.

--”Dolphins,” by Chris Catton

*

Squonk, oonk . . . wheet, click-click . . . well, the sounds the bottlenose make, busy communicators all, exchanging with one another or, in a manner of speaking, with themselves, via echolocation, sending signals through the water to bounce off objects they wish to know more about. Other than in the supremely goofy “The Day of the Dolphin,” likely the credit director Mike Nichols would most like to disappear from his resume, none of the big-brained oceangoing mammals have said a single word to humans, and what exactly they are saying to each other remains a matter of speculation. (For example, what were the 15 dolphins sitting on the their tails at the bottom of the ocean discussing, Jacques Cousteau went to his grave wondering. This was an event he witnessed in 1955, unfortunately without his camera.)

Descended from land animals that de-evolved back into the sea, the bottlenose--one of more than 30 species of the family of Delphinidae, suborder odontoceti--have long held a place close to the heart of man. A kind of oceangoing Manimal with such human characteristics as playfulness and a mischievous sense of humor, they are as well among the few mammals that have sex because they enjoy it, not necessarily for procreation. For Bottoms they would become the carrier of the message he wished to bring to the world, the emphatic answer to the question of exactly what he should do with his life.

He got into the dolphin sculpting business in 1983 when the city of Santa Barbara asked its citizens to come up with a design--modern? traditional? something--to fit a tiny plot of land at the foot of Stearns Wharf that had become highly controversial. It was to be a fountain of some sort, and many committees had been formed with many artistically diverse notions, and to end the stalemate the people had been asked (much as Cal State Channel Islands would ask years later) what it was they wanted to represent their city, what sort of totem reflecting a concept, a belief of some all-embracing noncontroversial sort, and it was a Bottoms-created family of dolphins that won the day and was ultimately erected on the site.

In these past 20 years of his calling he has managed to place his leaping, ever-smiling friends in prominent locations up and down the California coast and across the oceans as far as Japan and Ireland, from the two-story-tall monoliths in front of the Long Beach aquarium down to the miniatures sold in galleries. He isn’t the only one creating such things, though he’s certainly the most prolific, the most dedicated, a little like the Rapa Nui erecting their staring great-nosed colossi on the cliffs of Easter Island--he is compelled to do it.

And yes there are voices involved, though not ones that others are likely to hear. At times it seems as though what he is talking about is telepathy, mammal to mammal, but he doesn’t really say that, only suggests it casually with a smile. “Sometimes I’ll be walking along the beach and I’ll be down and ready to quit, and I’ll ask, ‘Should I go on?’ And I’ll get the answer. . . . They’re out there, and they’ll say, ‘No, don’t quit, go on.’” The smile is now a laugh, since he knows and doesn’t care in the least that you don’t believe as he does, yet of course that is always the way with the true believer and the skeptic--one’s a knower and the other keeps asking the questions.

Says Bottoms: “The happiest things in the world are children and bottlenose dolphins. They say joy without saying it. Nothing is closer to my heart.”

An emotional man, generally up and easygoing, fun to be around, with just a little weariness after all the battles, a little melancholy, he remains at 78 vividly in touch with his childhood self, drifting into one of those semi-trances. “I remember being a child, 10 or 11, nailing something or other, like a kid you see at the beach . . . the sun goes up and the sun goes down and the kid doesn’t care, he’s so engrossed in his castle, or whatever.” And he might be describing himself today, busy on many fronts, working out of the rented Spanishy sprawl in the Santa Barbara hills that he has shared for the last 20 years with his second wife, Carole Ann Cole, a Unitarian minister.

Bottoms’ own belief system has a distinct California cast to it, weaving his love for the outdoors (Thoreau his idol) with American Indian rituals and mythology. Add to this his well-honed salesman’s instincts and you have just the right man for the ever-competitive battle in the public sculpting arena. One of his most successful selling tools has been the handy Chumash legend of the Rainbow Bridge. In it the Earth Mother takes pity on her clumsy children, who, while traveling said bridge from Santa Cruz Island to the mainland, lose their footing and fall into the sea. At this point Mom turns them into dolphins, which are thereafter one miracle from being “people.”

Most essentially what he is is a Southern Californian, son of a Brentwood barber who when he cut enough hair for the day to pay the rent would put out the Closed sign and take his two sons fishing. A Southern Californian is someone who, if he lives long enough, will see most of his community touchstones vanish under waves of violent change, and the construction of a sturdy personal philosophy to keep one anchored becomes imperative. Whatever happened--few are asking--to Sonja Henie’s Ice Gardens, the pre-WWII social hub in Westwood where Bottoms, working his first job, met his first wife, affixing skate to foot? An end-of-war Navy radar technician, he lived in GI housing in Santa Barbara while attending the university, that housing--every board, nail and brick--long gone, replaced by the velvet greens and undulating fairways of the municipal golf course. The intention, the need, is to create something that might actually last, something for future anthropologists to mull, as with the Easter Islanders: Who did that and why did they do it?

Bottoms was a mere kid of 32 when his friends went to sea and didn’t come back in a 1960 Santa Barbara (population under 60,000) that did indeed have an Edenic glow. The well-employed breadwinner, father of four, was devoted to his hunter-gatherer role, loved bringing to the family table the fish and lobster he had taken from the sea.

That Santa Barbara, like the current one (population 80,000-plus), was deceptive, its serene surfaces concealing complexities and contradictions. Like Raytheon, where his friends had worked, Bottoms’ own employer, GE’s Tempo division, was involved in many diverse enterprises, not all of them benign. As art director, he was assigned to projects as varied as imagining human life on Mars, a South American population explosion, the floor-to-ceiling computers of the day and early DNA research. Warfare was part of the mix, and as time went on (he worked there 17 years) it became a dominant focus. One of Bottoms’ last assignments had him conjoining the Gerber baby with the picture of an actual infant born with a single eye (this cycloptic mutant meant to suggest the potential result of chemical warfare).

His own interests had by then evolved in other directions. He was active in environmental causes such as GOO! (Get Oil Out!), a group he was instrumental in founding after the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. In a way then he was not unhappy to lose the Tempo job, though unemployment is unemployment and it came at a difficult time. His 25-year marriage had just ended, and in a quintessential good-news bad-news California sort of development there was the burgeoning success of all four sons as actors (spawn of the professional-grade Santa Barbara High School theater program), most especially that of eldest son Timothy, who had just ascended to stardom in a single bound at 19 via Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” as well as Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun.” Money falling from the sky and none of it for Dad, who was put so far into the shade he’d wind up at 51 as caretaker of his star son’s Monterey ranch.

Midlife meltdown in spades. (In this morose state he thought of suicide, thought at least it could be imaginative, creative, flamboyant, i.e., somehow squeezing himself into a gigantic truck tire, setting it on fire and rolling downhill, or, alternately, joining his friends by going out to sea, wrapping himself in anchors and slipping over the side.) What now? Write the movie scripts that no one wants and try some therapy, examine your dreams. Still, his training and work experience had been as a graphic artist, and the move to sculpting wasn’t such a big one. He took City College classes that neatly coincided with the city’s fountain predicament. Bottoms’ first notion, a 16-foot whale’s tail, was deemed a little excessive, and then there was the dream he had of a beautiful woman embracing a dolphin, out of which came the “family of dolphins”--a kind of bottlenose bouquet connected by a central pin--that would win the commission.

Of course Flipper and his marine park brethren had become a popular-culture cliche, the ever-playful entertainers happy to chase the ball, leap through the hoop, nuzzle the delighted child, and there had been much resistance to his dolphins in local art establishment circles, the sort of faint praise that would become familiar. (Of his creations, Jack Reilly, head of the Cal State Channel Islands art department, sniffs as diplomatically as he can muster: “That sort of work has its place.”) But in Santa Barbara the people had spoken.

Discovering the reverence the Chumash and other Indian tribes had for the dolphin was a significant boost, something that suggested a deeper, more historically and culturally resonant reason for Bottoms’ work. Largely a coastal people, occupying the land between what is now Monterey and Malibu, as well as the Channel Islands, the Chumash did have certain theological disagreements with the Gabrielenos to the south, such as the question of whether the Earth rested on the backs of giants (the Gabrielenos) or on the backs of serpents (the Chumash), but both tribes agreed that earthquakes were the result of movements on the part of giants/serpents and both agreed on the sacred protective nature of the dolphin.

For his part, Bottoms never thought of himself as particularly religious, raising his sons in the roomy Unitarian faith. An avowed deist (one who believes in a creator of some sort but not a creator who takes an active interest in human affairs), over time he has adopted aspects of Chumash ritual into his own life, such as the end-of-the-year cleansing the Chumash believe can be achieved by placing images of the previous year on a yucca stick and burning it. A Chumash elder and part-time trumpet player named Victor Sky Eagle Lopez was something of a mentor to him and gave the sculptor, so often bedeviled by opinionated civic authorities, advice he has taken to heart: “Do not listen to barking dogs.” (Except his own, of course, a little guy named Tag who has a lot to say and often says it.)

Adding to such notions a genuine regard for the bottlenose creatures whose image he has spread so far and wide. While in the world of scientific inquiry there is no ultimate agreement on what exactly the dolphin is communicating either to its brethren or to its close human associates, Bottoms himself has no doubt: “The dolphin is in touch with those in need. He’s here to educate us.”

One of the first up-close experiences he had with one was grim, a dead dolphin he saw on the beach after the 1969 oil spill, though there have been many happier encounters, most memorably with a gregarious old-timer named Funghi that wandered into the bay of Dingle in Ireland in 1984 and has yet to leave. Funghi happily pals around with anyone who cares to accompany him, and one of his companions was Bottoms himself, in Ireland vacationing with Carole Ann when they heard of the self-appointed greeter in the bay. Bottoms borrowed a wetsuit and spent a fine afternoon guided by the friendly fellow around his usual haunts: “He took me to the bottom and then brought me up, nuzzling me as we went. He obviously liked human company, and I also noticed his fascination with boats and their propellers, which is probably where he got all his nicks.”

In Dingle the marketer took over and Bottoms successfully convinced the locals of their need for a life-size statue of Funghi at the harbor entrance, which he then provided. His creations have proved eclectic representatives, happy to preside over any number of different needs, civic and personal. One of them holds forth outside a pearl factory in Toba, Japan (one of several Santa Barbara “sister city” projects); others, like the one in Dingle (another sister city), are essentially tourist attractions. Still others have far more sober missions, such as the dolphins that leap today at the end of a park in Port Hueneme. It was some miles off this point that on Jan. 31, 2000, Alaska Airlines flight 261 fell into the sea en route from Puerto Vallarta to Seattle, carrying 88 passengers and crew to their deaths. Stricken family members got together and decided a memorial of some sort was in order, though there was the modern confusion over what exactly should mark such an event. What statement should be made and how to make it?

Many designs were submitted, and it was again a Bottoms dolphin family that won the day, these leaping alongside what looks unsettlingly like a shard of airplane wing but is in fact a gnomon, the centerpiece of a sundial, which each day casts a shadow on the time, 4:22, of the crash. (Eerily, Bottoms says, a mother of one of the young victims was given a roll of film recovered from the sea after the crash and on that roll she would find the last picture of her daughter, sitting atop the dolphin in the fountain he had done years before for Puerto Vallarta.)

The work is arduous, and can often take as much as a year from sculpting the clay model to the complex sequence of sand-casting the molten bronze to trucking the finished piece to its site. Foundries are needed, and a number of assistants. At times, with no such amenities within reach, the entire process must be improbably improvised with whatever is at hand, this especially true of the Puerto Vallarta fountain, which involved the rendering of donated car radiators and water faucets (to get the copper to make the bronze) and, for the 2,000-degree casting process, a surgical tube down which ran the necessary gasoline from a can balanced precariously on the branch of a tree to fuel the molten crucible.

In the end it is not always terribly profitable. One of Bottoms’ more elaborate constructions, the one in Long Beach, wound up, much to his dismay, costing him $10,000. Fortunately, money has never been his No. 1 motivation; as his wife, Carole Ann, says, “His belief has always been that if the work was good, the money would follow.” Still, there has been a profitable adjunct in the gallery-size models, sold in Florida and Hawaii and in the two Santa Barbara galleries operated by his son Joseph, one-time star of the daytime soap “Santa Barbara.”

Interestingly, as Dad continues with his sculpting career, his sons’ acting careers have tended to level off, though both Timothy and Sam appear regularly in TV and film. Meanwhile the youngest of the brothers, Benjamin, now 45, pursues the most eclectic path, working as a full-time caretaker on Santa Rosa Island and coming to Santa Barbara for local theater gigs. Benjamin and Joseph remain close to their father (there had been a long estrangement with the other two over the divorce), and it is Benjamin who offers the most thoughtful comment on his father’s life and times: “He told me once what he did was 80% marketing and 20% creativity, but I also believe he has had a genuine spiritual awakening. It’s not something we talk about, but I’ve observed it from outside. He found his path and has stayed on it.”

The latest unveiling in the Bottoms oeuvre was out at the end of the Santa Barbara breakwater in the middle of June 2005. This another of the memorials, a testament to loss, instigated by the sister of a kayaker who five years ago set out from the harbor on a stormy December afternoon and was never seen again.

It is a memorial for those lost at sea, with a generous reach meant to commemorate the many others who’ve vanished in the nearby ocean, among them divers who were victims of shark attacks, and a couple who disappeared off their pleasure boat several years ago. The memorial consists of two benches made in the shape of whales’ tails, which face a large boulder out of which emerges a bottlenose dolphin, grinning as ever, eager to communicate . . . what? Well, you decide.

Among the lost as well, the seven men whose disappearance prompted Bud Bottoms to ask: What am I supposed to do now? Herewith, again, the answer.