Cynthia Riggs - The Case of the Curious Codes

 

 

Well, I was born on Martha's Vineyard, and coming here tonight, I got lost. [audience laughter] I had to ask someone where Union Chapel is. I come from a long line of Vineyarder’s and I'm descended from both the settling families, both the Athens and the Mayhew’s. Well, I spent many years off island working as a boat captain and then I returned to the Vineyard and I came to live with my mother, who lived in West Tisbury. Dionis Coffin Riggs, a poet. She and I opened a bed and breakfast catering to poets and writers. And that was kind of where I came from. After her death, when she was almost 99-- I think some of you probably knew my mother.

 

After her death, I was kind of at loose ends and a bed and breakfast guest suggested that I go back to school and get a degree in creative writing. So, I filled out an application form and they accepted me and somebody told me I ought to write murder mysteries [chuckle] and two years later, my first murder mystery was published by St. Martin's Press. I've now had 10 published, and the 11th, I think is on Kindle, and I'm working on the 12th right now. Well, my first book was published when I was 70. [cheers and applause] I love this audience. [laughter] There's hope for all of you. [audience laughter] 

 

Well, about six months ago, a mystery came into my life that was something that was totally unexpected. I had thought about a guy that I'd met many years before. His name just popped into my mind. And so, I looked him up on Google and I couldn't find him, so I sort of forgot about it. Well, two weeks later I got a package from him. Now, it was his name, and when I googled it, I got it like I'd spelled it wrong, but the return address was a latitude and longitude. [audience laughter] I opened the package and inside was an archival envelope that had a whole bunch of old dried-up yellowed paper towels in it. And the paper towels were all covered with scrawled out cryptograms. Also, in this package there was a little note, also with a more modern cryptogram. Well, I had no idea what this was all about.

 

So, I looked at some of the messages on these paper towels and it all came back to me. When I was 18 years old, I was a marine geology major at a college in Ohio, of course. [laughter] My college managed to find me a college job lasting for four months in San Diego working for Scripps Oceanographic Institution, sorting plankton as a research project. Now, I was just thrilled. I'd never been out west before. I was working in a real laboratory. I was 18. Most 18-year-olds are clueless. I was particularly clueless. [audience chuckle] Now, my coworkers were a bunch of guys who had been working sorting plankton for much too long. [audience laughter] They were bored. And if you could imagine it, they were rather bright. So, they came up with some wonderful, practical jokes, I guess you can call it like nailing my lab drawers shut.  And I had no idea how to handle this. All these little practical jokes that we're playing or talking in codes that I didn't understand.

 

But there was one guy in the lab. He was an elderly man. He was 28. [audience laughter] He started defending me against my tormentors. So I started out-- my dad had been in the army and he'd introduced me to cryptograms. So, I just loved the idea of these secret messages. So, I wrote these secret messages as cryptograms to Howie on these paper towels. Now, he kept on for 62 years. [audience aww] Well, I have a group of young women in my Wednesday Writer’s Group. And I said to them, “What do you think of all this?” And they said, “They're all young women.” They all said, “You've got to get in touch with this guy. You just have to. This is wonderful.” And so, I thought about it and I thought, well how am I going to get in touch with him? This was latitude and longitude. [audience laughter] 

 

So, I googled it. I found [chuckles] that there was sort of a circle right around Baja California, the coast. Now, I knew that Howie had a dental degree, so that was kind of a clue. I figured, okay, there was a golf resort somewhere within that latitude and longitude. So, I called this golf resort on their tollfree number and I said, “Was there a doctor A registered there?” No, there wasn't. Then I figured, okay, that circle could include the coast of Baja California. So, I figured, “Aha, he's on a cruise ship.” So, I found a cruise ship tracking site on Google. [audience laughter] This is all true. [laughs] There were no cruise ships in the area at that time. So, then I was sure I had it. He had a private yacht. He was a retired dentist after all. [audience laughter] 

 

By the way, I'm sorry, sort of diverting from this, but I happened to be writing a book called Bloodroot, which is based on murder in a dentist's office. [audience laughter] I figured the captain had come up to Dr. A and said, “Dr. A, sir, this is your latitude and longitude,” but that was kind of a dead end. The next thing I figured, “Okay, I'll go to the California Dental Association.” And I found him. I found him and I found the address. Now, he'd been a public service, public health dentist for one of the counties in California, which sort of shot the idea of the yacht. [audience laughter]

 

So, I went back to my Wednesday writers. I have a representative group of Wednesday writers here. And I said, “Now what?” And they said, “You've got to get in touch with this guy. You just have to.” Well, I figured I could write him maybe a sort of a noncommittal note. So, I did that and. I said, “Well, I just got that packet that you sent and I decoded the message and that was it.” [audience laughter] Now, the Wednesday writers, in the meantime, had formed a cheering section and it was going something like this. “This is every woman's fantasy. [audience laughter] This man has spent a lifetime loving you and searching for you.” [audience laughter] Now, you need to know a little something about my background. I wasn't totally off on men, but I was a little uncomfortable because I'd been married for 25 years to a very brilliant but a very abusive husband and married him after we were divorced for 35 years, he stalked me for 20. So, I was not comfortable opening any doors to any kind of intimacy and these paper towels. [laughter] The things that lead to intimacy. [audience laughter] 

 

Well, I sent this letter off to what might or might not have been a current address. And by golly, I got a letter back, or it was a postcard back. And it said, “Nicer than nice to hear from you. So, I knew I had the address right. The next thing I did was to send him a book of poetry that-- I had a daughter who died about five years ago, and this was a book of her poetry and I sent it to him and he wrote back and he said, “I had a son who died the same time your daughter died, about the same age.” And as you can imagine, this broke down a lot of barriers in a hurry. If you think of the worst thing that can happen to parents is to have a child die and to have two of us sort of sharing this painful experience. 

 

So, we started corresponding and we started having-- finding out these coincidences that happened. It wasn't just me writing the Bloodroot and it wasn't just the kid’s deaths, but it was the manganese nodules. [audience laughter] Now, since I'm speaking to a group that is near the oceanographic, probably many of you know what manganese nodules are, but most people don't. [audience laughter] They're sort of knobby little lumps of black gray looking mineral deposits that are found only in the deep sea. A few museums have these manganese nodules and very, very few individuals have manganese nodules. And Howie happened to have one that came from the Marianas Trench, which is the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean and he sent it to me.

 

Well, I just happened to have been on Antarctic research cruise. [audience laughter] I had a small sack full of manganese nodules. [audience laughter] I sent him four. [audience laughter] I made sure they were smaller than his. [audience laughter] The next thing Howie sent me-- by the way, at this time the young woman in the West Tisbury Post Office got involved in this romance. [audience laughter] She would say as she gave me a package, another letter from your boyfriend. [audience laughter] The next thing he sent me was a CD of a piece of music that his son had composed called Cactus on Mars. Well, my son in law, who's a geophysicist, was evaluating research proposals for Mars. [audience laughter] This has been going on and on and on. Now at this point the Wednesday writers stepped in again and said, “You have to go see this guy.” 

 

I had no intention of going to see him, but you have no idea what these women are like. [audience laughter] You can talk to two of them afterwards, they're representative. So, I have a ticket to California on my desk. [cheers and applause] Now Howie found out that I'm an avid gardener. So, he sent me seven seed packages. Now one was hollyhocks, H for Howie and one was catnip C for Cynthia. And in between he had leeks, okra, vinca, eggplant and spinach. [audience laughter] This is a real romance. [laughter] So, I'm going out to see him. But now here comes a question, when I appear, is he going to have in his mind this 18-year-old that he fell in love with? I mean, I'm 81 now and he's 90. And I asked the Wednesday writers, “Well, what can you do?” And they said, “Oh, plenty.” [audience laughter]

 

One of the things that Howie has meant to me, he's actually changed my life. I had been pretty much closed up, but what he did was he gave me some very gentle warmth. He also introduced me to a calm love that I'd never thought of before. He also introduced me to a sweet passion. You'd be surprised at what you can do in letters and codes. But most of all the thing that's really affected me a lot is he gave me back a sense of great self-worth. And with that, I hope you all can find a Howie or his equivalent.