He fainted. My boxing champ, team captain, never run away from a fight father had no memory of his first training jump. The moment he descended from the massive C-47, he blacked out, from fear and shock at the jumpmaster’s barked command to exit.  Consciousness didn’t return until he landed with a thud on the red clay drop zone at Fort Benning, Georgia. Dutch had never in his young life been in an airplane and would have preferred to enjoy is maiden flight. He was afraid, but – he jumped.

After successfully completing the arduous physical training and required number of practice jumps, 20 year old Dutch Schultz became a member of the elite 82^nd Airborne, an achievement which influenced his view of life and his subsequent fathering methods. According to dad, wearing shiny airborne wings meant you were special – intelligent, excellent physical condition, motivated and individualistic. Those paratrooper wings also symbolized a young man who was a risk taker, arrogant and not too fond of following the rules. My dad had the above traits in abundance. This unique mix played a significant role in his postwar successes and unfortunately too often in his failures.  It wasn’t until later in my adulthood that I realized that my father’s identity as a paratrooper and his war experiences created a template for both his life and mine.  

Jean-Michel walked me all over the island, showing me places my father would have seen and explaining that it would not have been unusual or surprising if my father had hired his father, Jean, as a guide around the island and to take him to the best small islands for duck hunting.  He took me around the 365 tiny islands in Jolie Brise, his canot chausiais, or boat of Chausey, especially adapted to the dangerous navigational conditions of the archipelago.  When the tide was in, Jean-Michel wound in and around the tiny islands in serpentine fashion, Jolie Brise skimming over the menacing rocks beneath the surface of the sea within my arm’s reach.  I realized that one would have to have grown up on this island to know how to avoid the treacherous rocks and guide someone through the archipelago, as Jean-Michel was doing for me.  As his father, Jean, did for my father, Joe.  Only the naming of each island and the cries of the seabirds that must have sounded exactly the same sixty-two years before, broke the silence. It felt like we had stepped back in time.  

A new round of emails began, more difficult this time because my French is limited.  I emailed a dozen sources that somehow seemed connected to the Isle of Chausey- webmasters, tourism bureaus and media sources in the prefecture of Manche, the closest place on the mainland to where Chausey was situated.  I received responses immediately, interested and polite but nothing definitive or encouraging.  Several weeks after this flurry of emails I received an email from one of the contacts by the name of Hervé Hillard saying:

Sorry for this late answer, but I first thought your mail was some sort of a joke.  

When my dad enlisted in the army he was 29 years of age- older than most of the boys who were signing up for service and barely out of their teens.  My dad had been married for almost 6 years and there were no children.  Perhaps he had some sense by that time that there were to be no children forthcoming from his union with my mother.  Maybe he had wanted to adopt a child years before he adopted me.  It made sense.

There were no names or locations written on the back of the three photographs that the boy was in.  On one photograph, however, there was a notation. There was a picture of my father and the boy and written in my father’s hand on the back was “Me and that French kid and my gun on the Island before going duck hunting.  The spot we are standing in is covered with water when tide is in”.  With that piece of cryptic information I asked myself, where exactly should I start?

Being adopted is something I don’t often forget about.  It goes in and out of my consciousness, like a sporadic radio signal on a Sunday night driving down some rural road.  Even when there is no music or talk coming in, I am still aware of the static of white noise filtering through the speakers, somehow comforting and disquieting at the same time.  The idea of adoption looms large in the life of an adoptee, even when so much time passes that you are the parent of adult children, coloring everything in one’s life, imperceptibly most of the time, like a cloud passing across the sun.  You know that somehow the light has changed but don’t stop to think of the reasons why.  So when my 95 year old aunt, doyenne of the family, casually mentioned to me over dinner one night that my father, her brother, dead 6 years at that time, had wanted to adopt a child he met in France during his service in World War II, I put down my fork and listened.