Escape To Anywhere Else. Robert Rippberger

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      ESCAPE TO ANYWHERE ELSE

      BY ROBERT RIPPBERGER

      Berkeley, California

      Copyright © 2014 by Robert Rippberger

      [Paperback]

      ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-268-0

      ISBN 10: 1-58790-268-0

      Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014931413

      [E-book]

      ISBN 13: 978-1-58790-269-7

      ISBN 10: 1-58790-269-9

      All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

      Printed in the United States of America. First Printing, 2014

      Edited by Tanya Grove at BookMatters

      Regent Press

      Berkeley, CA 94705

       www.RegentPress.net

      THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY FAMILY.

      foreword

      I met Robert Rippberger while I was developing my grandfather’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, into a feature film. He was an admirer of my grandfather, Ernest Hemingway. Before we met, I did a little digging and found that Robert is a very talented young man—he wrote and directed a feature film when he was sixteen and was also highly prolific in making documentaries with truly fascinating people like William H. Draper, Roberto Unger, and Jane Goodall.

      I have to admit that when he picked me up at the San Jose Airport for our first meeting, I didn’t think he looked much older than sixteen, even though he was twenty-three. Of course one’s age does not necessarily indicate one’s grasp of life. I was reminded of being nominated for an Oscar at eighteen and my grandfather writing The Sun Also Rises at age twenty-six in less than six months.

      During that hour-long ride in Robert’s beat-up car, I asked him why he liked my grandfather, writing, and film. He was captivating in his knowledge of the arts and had an innate understanding of the process of creating and capturing. I was, to say the least, intrigued.

      In a funny way, he reminds me of what my grandfather must have been like in his early 20s—passionate, sharp, and full of drive. My grandfather longed for LIFE in capital letters and moved to Paris to experience more of it. Robert too has put himself in the middle of a world of life changers. He continuously and effortlessly engages with people who are making a difference.

      Robert has lived through a lot in a short time. Just as so many good writers allow their lives to be their guides, whether pointedly or metaphorically, so too has Robert taken from his personal experience and masterfully combined that with what he has discovered in the lives of others. Some people seem to come into the world with an ability to see things in their purest form, even when the reality is harsh. I can feel through Robert’s writing that his compassion for inner pain—and compassion for the journey through that pain—is profound.

      Escape to Anywhere Else is about loyalty between siblings and the deep bonds of a brother and sister who can only know their own lives through the eyes of the other. They go from negotiating horrifying parental abuse to accepting it to trying to reconcile with it to realizing that they might be able to escape it and quite possibly find freedom from it. It is not without huge sacrifice and fear that they venture beyond what they had always believed to be normal. They see that religion often has little to do with belief, spirituality, or even God. Sadly these kids become adults long before their time.

      Though my circumstances cannot begin to compare to the characters in this book, there is a universal feeling of how family can be a place of grand illusion. Where crazy lives is where the characters in Escape to Anywhere Else have been nurtured and loved. Robert creates the prison where there is no escape until the main characters, Ivey and Louie, can understand their circumstances. They cannot move toward freedom without letting go of their illusion of family. Again, my own life is not a mirror of this terrifying world, but the clarity of circumstance that had to occur was identical and is a universal eye opener that everyone can relate to.

      I am part of a family of genius and tragedy. I have spent a lifetime trying to figure out how to negotiate my genetics and my heritage. My family is brilliant and crazy. Generations have self-medicated in order to get out of pain, sometimes resorting to suicide. Many of my relatives felt trapped inside their own existence.

      Robert captures that feeling of imprisonment, and it’s chilling. His gritty concise sentences (ah, where have I seen that before?) express the feelings of isolation and separation that children feel even if they can’t quite comprehend their bar-less prison.

      Writing with an edginess that keeps you turning the pages anxiously, Robert reminds us of how intense childhood can be when you have to survive it instead of thrive in its safe embrace. I could barely put Escape to Anywhere Else down until the journey came to an end, and I found myself living with the scenes between reads. The world in this book is often dark, but beyond the horrifying experiences there is a future, and light shines through.

      I look forward to watching this book’s success unfold and of course am waiting to see where Robert Rippberger will take me next.

       ~ Mariel Hemingway

       A byproduct of being at the top of the food chain

       is that people prey on each other,

       to one degree or another,

       at every social level.

      prologue—driving through

      I saw the dew bead to the grass a thousand times. The sun rose, only to sink again over the ceaseless cornfields like the last grain in an hourglass. There were no families close by, no friends to play with, never any excitement.

      If you’ve ever taken a road trip through Kansas and gotten lost, you probably saw our house. Remember the one surrounded by nothing but miles of corn, where the land is so barren and underdeveloped the state has to give it away? Sure you remember. You probably wondered what kind of people would live in such a place, and then you saw me. Sitting on the porch, staring toward the road, begging to be rescued—never thinking the day would come.

      My name is Ivey Jane Schooler, but when I was seventeen, living with my parents and brother, Louie, it was Ivey Jane Doede. Dad plowed the infertile soil while Mom took care of the dilapidated house. It was simpler than the simple life. People drove by and guessed we were Amish, not only because we lived in the middle of nowhere but because we (and when I use the word “we” I really mean my parents, but that’s what happens when you’re seventeen and living at home) didn’t believe in radios, phones, televisions, computers, school dances, or revealing pictures of boys. Growing up, Louie and I quipped, “Possessions other people require are what the Doede children desire.”

      It was an unstable house with an unstable roof just waiting for the lightest breeze to help it to the ground. Paint hung in sheets from the walls, fire ants scaled the wood paneling like a red Niagara Falls flowing in reverse, and overgrown trees and bushes enveloped us like a cocoon. Yet this last facet had a purpose. As my parents said, it was to blanket us from the outside world. In the coming months Louie and I would discover it was for a different reason entirely, to keep the outside world from seeing in, to safeguard secrets kept behind chained doors.

      Contents

       Chapter One

       Chapter