.The Keeper: Remembering a Father Who Almost Wasn’t Mine

Last December, my father died. And as my family arranges his memorial—an event set to be larger and more emotional than any of our weddings—I’m brought up short by the realization that his life might never have included any of us. 

I am the adopted child of a formerly incarcerated man. And if my father had faced the conditions in California prisons today, I would not have had a father at all.

All I will ever see inside prisons are people who need help, so they can get back home to build sets for their kids’ dance performances, coach pee-wee soccer, build a beautiful house in a forest and live a good life. That’s my father’s story, and my own.

When he was incarcerated in the 1960s, the state of California had different, more rehabilitative policies, and he got some of the help he needed. According to the National Library of Medicine (NLM), “The 1966 Narcotic Addiction Rehabilitation Act (NARA) authorized the civil commitment of narcotic addicts, and federal assistance to state and local governments to develop a local system of drug treatment programs.”

Furthermore, states the NLM, “The NARA legislation imposed the following contract requirements on treatment centers: (1) thrice-a-week counseling sessions; (2) weekly urine tests; (3) restorative dental services; (4) psychological consultations and vocational training; and (5) the treatment modalities of drug-free outpatient, therapeutic community, and methadone maintenance.” 

My dad, using some of these supports, changed his life. He did not support the use of methadone, and was too insubordinate to make use of those psych consults, but worked with NARA in various capacities. Without it—under the conditions that currently exist—he probably would have remained in prison.

All incarcerated people deserve support and rehabilitation. My father never needed prison; he needed help. That’s only one reason I can’t accept the dangerous situation in prisons today, but it’s the one that chills me. 

A 2010 paper from the NLM states: “At 1-, 3-, and 6-month follow-up, patients who received methadone plus counseling were significantly less likely to use heroin or engage in criminal activity than those who received only counseling. The potential exists for immediate adoption of methadone maintenance for incarcerated persons with opioid addictions, but most prison systems have not been receptive to this approach.” Mom says Dad wasn’t “receptive” to it either, but the point is, it was there. 

Compared to the mid-1960s, the state of California’s approach to incarcerated people today is to punish them, keep them as long as possible behind bars and to deny them almost any help. This is true of drug offenders, but it’s also true of everyone else.

I see him, the other him, unhelped, in photos of people in prison, and I mean precisely. Dad never “looked like” anything other than someone who had done hard time; this is how he wanted it. His three earrings, long hair, large beard, tattoos and leather vest caused him problems. This was especially true the time he was officially dismissed from coaching youth soccer, at a meeting he came home from with a look on his face I had never seen. To this day, no one will tell me exactly what words were said at that meeting, but I had to go to high school with kids whose parents had said them. 

Other times, it was only that men spontaneously tried to fight him. He didn’t mind this so much. Those men needed to know what it was like to step up to a real-life badass. They found out he explained to them he wasn’t going to fight them right then, because he didn’t feel like it, and he was busy having a family. And he did this while still frightening them. 

In spite of this type of interaction, Dad never changed the way he looked and didn’t explain his choice to anyone. So he always had that look about him. As a result, I reflexively feel warmth and trust in people who look intense, an impulse that has served me well.

But if Peter Swanhuyser maintained his tough-guy looks, he had changed everything else about himself: He relaxed with friends, he laughed aloud, he had nice clothes to wear at festive events, and he drove his family to the coast on Sundays. None of that happens in prison.

I also see the other path, the other Peter Swanhuyser, in people living rough, people whose bad times separate them from their families and friends. He could easily have been among them his whole life. I recognize him in their gravelly voices and hard eyes, in their swagger that says, “I can hurt you quick.” My dad had those. 

And let me be clear: He had been a person who made really bad choices, and who hurt people. He was far worse than, for example, the “no angel” public-opinion conviction that made nice people think it was OK for officer Darren Wilson to kill Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014.

Yes, I don’t remember learning what “an addict” was, because I just always knew. Yes, there were drugs in my childhood home. Yes, the hate that people had for him was sometimes directed at me and hurt me.

But now look at that guy again, the bad guy. And try to realize: In 1977, my mother picked me up from the first day of first grade at Harmony School in Occidental. When we got home, my dad was waiting for me, kneeling down, with open arms. “Hey. How’s my big first-grader?” he bellowed, swooping me up in his strong arms. It seemed like an important celebration. I was proud of myself. Peter Swanhuyser continued to show up for my brother, my mother and me for the next 48 years. 

Through the years, he built houses from the ground up, got his contractor’s license and founded Oasis Construction, when he’d come home covered in sawdust, exhausted. On weekends, my parents forged a partnership with the normal-looking nextdoor neighbors to create an informal co-op farmstead, with a giant vegetable garden, a chicken coop, pig pen, steer pasture and roaming geese, plus all the trucks, compost piles, weed whackers and post-hole diggers a farm requires. Those neighbors may have recoiled from our hippie appearance at first, but they became our weed-pulling, dirt-smeared compadres. 

It was hard work, but Dad loved it. He swore at the old machinery we often had to use, but he was fascinated and gratified to put his hands in the soil, and learn what would grow.

Graduations, performances, soccer games, summer camping trips with our arms out the windows and The Eagles on the tape deck. Sunday drives to see the ocean, Easter egg hunts, massive Christmases with trees we cut in our own forest, when he loved to “play Santa” and hand out gifts, sitting cross-legged under the tree. 

Birthday parties, family outings to the annual Occidental Volunteer Fire Department barbecue in Union Hotel Grove, dropping us off at Harmony School on misty West County mornings after a trip to the Land House bakery for one of their legendary bear claw pastries. It was all pretty normal paterfamilias behavior, as much nostalgia as I have for it all now, in the wake of his death.

All this is to say: Look at someone who has been labeled human garbage. Look at what one despises about them, their scary tattoos, their lawless behavior, their arrogant hatred of normal people. And now try to realize—anyone can come back from it. I know they can, because it is the only life I know, the whole life I know.

Some people would have put him behind bars and tossed the key. But not me.

Donations in Peter Swanhuyser’s memory are welcome at the Last Mile, thelastmile.org, ‘a team of social innovators who are breaking the cycle of incarceration with technical education and training that champions students’ success after their release.’