panel 24 “service”

SECTION SIX

Service and remembrance are closely linked.

The value of service to others is universal. One of the deepest joys of being human comes from helping someone else, extending a hand, finding yourself in a spontaneous act of kindness.

Ukiah is full of service organizations, non-profits devoted to doing good, and other organizations with a prominent service function. I wondered how to represent service in the mural? Believe it or not, my original idea was to paint a senior lunch! But on July 28, 2018, I was working on my scaffolding when two plumes of smoke began to rise to the east and southeast.

Fires!

These Ranch and River fires became the Mendocino Complex wildfire, at that time the largest in California history! Through the days and weeks, we all wore face masks and I painted in the orange gloom. The town was full of firefighters from all over the state, nation and other countries. Everywhere we went, we thanked them. People wouldn’t let firefighters pay for groceries, drinks and meals. Hundreds of firefighting planes flew over the Conference Center. At some point it dawned on me that the service panel needed to be about our firefighters.

The day I began the fire-fighting subject matter, I turned my attention to the middle ground. I was working from a great photo of an air tanker dropping fire retardant. These are American passenger jetliners repurposed into firefighting planes that can carry up to 12,000 gallons of water or fire retardant and have been in service since 2006.

The aircraft I was painting is owned by 10 Tanker Air Carrier, and the photo was from the Mendocino Complex fire. I scrutinized its details and noticed the plane’s call-sign, 911. It jolted me because the day I was painting was 9/11, the same day that the firefighters in New York faced an unprecedented disaster in 2001, which was very much on my mind.

A fatality that occurred involving dropped retardant that toppled a tree in the Mendocino Complex fire reminds us of the danger these men and women face as they protect people and property. Matthew Burchett was a 42-year-old battalion chief from Utah helping to battle flames downstream of Lake Pillsbury’s Scott Dam. He came to help us and paid the ultimate price.

In the scene below I painted a CalFire truck and firefighters taking a break after grueling hours on the job. This panel was the first in which I used my gallon of orange paint.

In 2020, I painted firefighters in the mural foreground from these photos.

Plus I added another firefighting plane, very close to the back of the CalFire truck. It is #91, one of the smaller planes headquartered in Ukiah, flown by pilot John Butts. (See below)

It is a repurposed 50-year-old Grumman S2F3. (These were the first anti-submarine war planes to enter service with the US Navy during the 1950s.)

Covid-19

In 2020 the global pandemic began and my subject matter needed to expand to include a scene of medical workers treating Covid-19 patients.

In this scene, I painted portrait #100 and #101 in the mural!

Dr. Marvin Trotter has worked in Intensive Care and local Emergency Rooms for decades. He is well known and also well recognized! During the two days painting this scene, I already observed four people recognize him in the mural, even with a mask!

It was very fortunate that AHUV had created a new ER and ICU in 2018. That facility was crucial to the hospital’s Covid response. Read this moving description that focuses on Nick Flynn’s experience caring for patients during the pandemic.

Nick is the nurse in the first photo below (original post here). The next photo is of James, another hospital nurse, who became the 101st portrait in the mural (see below). I think you can recognize him even in all his protective gear.

Notice the two figures looking in through the window. Hospital staff said they were grateful the facility is a one-story building, so every room had a ground-floor window. The loneliness of family not able to visit and hold a loved one’s hand while she breathed her last was one of the saddest things during Covid.

This experience inspired hospital staff to create a Memorial Garden, in which I had the privilege of painting a new mural. See it here and below.

The landscape represents life, framed by birth and death, The path into light suggests the passage after death as spirit leaves the body.

Military service

It was the last day of painting in 2021, Veteran’s Day, on the 11th day of the 11th month, which was when the armistice was signed in the 11th hour, ending World War I. My subject matter, the timing of it unplanned, was military service and I completed the 101st portrait in the mural, that of Stephen C. Brunton, one of twenty-two servicemen from Mendocino County who lost their lives in Vietnam.

My great friend (and former colleague in government and transportation) Phil Dow also served in Vietnam and helped me select who to portray and what their stories meant. Petty Officer Stephen Brunton was assigned to US Navy Forces Vietnam, the “Brown-Water Navy” that delivered troops and supplies on the dangerous jungle rivers of the Mekong Delta. These waterways were the only highways in the region. Brunton was leading a column of river craft when the Alpha boat was fired on by machine guns and rockets. He continued forward; the column reached its destination, but not before this Ukiah boy lost his life.

Brunton stands in his dull green combat fatigues surrounded and above the vibrant greens of the Vietnamese jungle. Delta rivers were flanked by this dense foliage creating a constant danger of ambush. The jungle and river imagery flows down beneath Brunton and curves left where you see his armed lead boat followed by the bigger supply boat.

Journalists and first responders

Adjacent to the military boats and the hospital scene are more familiar illustrations of service, including the work of journalists. Justine Frederiksen is a reporter for the Ukiah Daily Journal and I painted her standing in front of an ambulance reporting on an accident.

A Ukiah policewoman comforts a distraught woman and a member of the Ukiah Valley Fire Department performs resuscitation on a victim. The figure of the policewoman was inspired by Mikayla Paoli, who would regularly walk to work on Church Street.

She told me about her father Derek, a sheriff’s deputy and head of Search and Rescue, who had responded to the horrific Redwood Fire in 2017. He was scarred by the scene of people burned beyond rescue. Mikayla’s caring posture posing as a policewoman conveys the empathy required to serve, but also the emotional trauma that can hit both police and the people they are trying to help.

Ukiah Police and the Mendocino Sheriff’s Department provide law enforcement essential to public safety. Volunteer first responders are also an absolutely crucial part of medical and safety response in our rural area.

Jason Gilman is the Ukiah Valley fireman who posed in uniform for this scene…

…and Phil Dow posed for the man receiving aid.

The subject of the service panel streams over into remembrance.

At the base of the panel lies a serviceman who has perished, a generic figure, not a portrait, portrayed in a World War I military uniform. He represents the ultimate sacrifice, of one’s life, in service to your country. It is exactly on the separation between the two panels that I painted his headstone. On the other side, in the world of the living, a woman kneels at his grave, placing the red poppies of military memorial. She could be his wife, his sister, or the daughter he never knew.

The lives of local family members have been tragically cut short by the pandemic, increasing fires, and of course during military service in conflicts past and present. It is meaningful that the adjoining panel is remembrance.