Jason Travers used to comb the shore of Lowman Beach Park in West Seattle for sea glass. Now his ashes are to be scattered here. Travers was among those who died in the Capitol Hill shootings March 25. His family has invited me to the ceremony.
It’s hard to get to know a person after he’s dead, but it’s worth a try.
The deceased are entitled to unqualified praise. From Mother Theresa to Genghis Khan, they’re all remembered as “gentle” and “kind” and “loving.” For survivors, maybe it’s easier to handle the round edges of generalities. Specifics are sharp.
But each of the people here holds clues to the real person that Jason was. His father, James Travers, tells me how his son’s first rock concert was the Clash, playing London Calling. Jason was four years old and slept through it, while his father spent much of the show caring for the stranger next to him who’d cheered so hard he hurt himself. James has a beard, as Jason had recently worn. James is affable, a storyteller. And he’s inquisitive, as people at the ceremony also say of Jason. Since he arrived from New York last week, James has met friends of his son who tell him how much like Jason he is.
“That’s a wonderful compliment,” James says.
Jason’s mother, Judy, looks exhausted, barely strong enough to lift the cigarette to her lips. She moves slowly, resting her head on the shoulder of her ex-husband or whichever one of Jason’s friends is closest. “He called me last Friday from the beach out here,” says Judy, looking toward the coast. “He was in such good spirits.”
There are about 40 friends at the ceremony. Most don’t want to speak to a reporter—they’ve been deluged by e-mails and phone calls from media (admittedly some of these came from The Stranger). So I hang back; besides, I can think of no good questions to ask.
We all walk methodically out to the shore. It’s bright and cloudless but there’s a chilly sea breeze. One friend, B. C. Murdock, claims to be an ordained minister (of the “Universal Life Ministries,” he tells me later) and he carries out two wooden poles, connected by a string from which Tibetan prayer flags are dangling. Yelling above the surf, Murdock directs the others to pile rocks around the stakes. “Put thoughts into the rocks as you put them there,” he says. “We want it to withstand the tide.”
It’s an informal ceremony. Jason’s family and friends huddle against the wind. One woman is wearing all black except for a pink cowboy hat and pink boots. The last person to wear them, she says, was Jason, who danced around a living room in this ensemble a few days before his death.
Someone else remembers how when Jason had jury duty he tugged nervously at his beard, placing each plucked hair neatly into a bag he carried with him. All funerals should have anecdotes like this.
A young man with an unruly beard of his own says, “One thing that stands out to me is that he never ever had anything bad to say about anyone.”
“I met him when I was 14 and he was 22,” says another young woman. “He never treated me as a kid but as an equal and as someone whose views were worth hearing.”
No one mentions punctuality—this was an imperfect aspect of Jason’s character—but they remember how he used the Socratic method to challenge other peoples’ notion of time. He took a “subjective” view on that matter, they say.
So Jason would not have been bothered by the attendees’ tardiness in scattering his ashes—it was supposed to happen during his favorite minute of the day, 4:20 p.m., but it’s already nearing 5:00.
Jason enjoyed marijuana. The last bowl he smoked was with Kyle Huff, at 2112 East Republican Street. Of all the ironies in this story, none is harder to accept than Huff’s choosing this group of people to murder. He was a stranger to them; yet they invited him to their home, shared their sofa and beer keg and pot stash. “Jason,” says his mother, “helped everyone from a stray cat to a stray human.”
To meet his friends, one can imagine how they might have absorbed into their circle a wayward soul like Huff. They all seem to have the same absence of guile. “We’re a bunch of outcasts,” explains Jen Kercher, a friend who along with her partner, Amy Cline, is hosting today’s gathering.
Like his friends, Jason rebelled against the alienating sense that he existed outside some objective definition of coolness. They’d all ganged up against that feeling, routed it. They might have helped Huff do the same.
It’s clear, though, that Huff had already disengaged so completely that he couldn’t have recognized potential friends. He had stockpiled guns and “enough caps for all you fools,” as he put it that terrible morning.
Had an audience encountered irony like this in a film it would be rejected as disgusting, excessive—and for those reasons too obviously fictional. The unsettling thing about March 25 is that we can’t reject it. It happened.
But there’s no sense of rage this afternoon at the beach. Jason’s father even asks everyone to keep the Huffs in their thoughts “because that family must feel pain, too.” He opens a plastic container the size of a salt shaker and there’s a plume of ash, followed by a short, sad round of applause.
The ashes that aren’t scattered on Lowman Beach will be distributed among other locations Jason adored: His friends in California get their share, some will land at Snoqualmie Falls, some in Albany, NY, where he went to high school, in Costa Rica where he spent a memorable vacation with friends, and at Bruce Lee’s grave on Capitol Hill, a short walk from the blue house where Jason was murdered. Kung fu movies were another passion of Jason’s—the only one, as best I can tell, that contained any hint of violence.