STANWOOD — People here who saw a young Joshua Safran holed up at the Stanwood Library could not have imagined what his childhood had been like or what he eventually would achieve.
Now a 39-year-old lawyer, Safran hopes these people will attend his book talk on June 25 in Stanwood.
Safran’s pro bono work to free a victim of domestic violence from prison was the subject of the award-winning documentary film “Crime After Crime.” The story of how he got to that point is recounted in his memoir “Free Spirit: Growing Up on the Road and Off the Grid.”
The book, from which he will read Thursday, recounts his mother’s well-intentioned search for a utopian commune, an effort that gradually disintegrated into an unstable life for herself and Joshua, especially after she married a violent alcoholic.
Safran found peace at the library.
He writes, “The Stanwood Library opened its doors to me without question. The patient librarians didn’t care about my frayed clothes and never questioned my determination to spend every waking hour under their roof. Mercifully warm and clean, the library was a shelter from the rain and the echoes of my mother screaming in the night.”
Joshua and his mother Claudia Reed moved around after leaving the San Francisco Bay area, where his mother had settled into a counter-culture lifestyle as a young woman.
“I was about 9 years old and we were basically still hitchhiking around the West living in tents and looking for a shelter through the storm,” Safran said by phone earlier this month. “My mother heard about Skagit County, a seemingly rural but conscientious community where we would meet all these amazing people.”
They ended up living in an ice cream truck and later in a cabin above Clear Lake. That’s where they fell in with an El Salvadoran refugee, an alcoholic man who had several run-ins with the local police. To keep him from being deported, Reed married him and they moved to Camano Island. There they took up residence in a forest, sleeping on cardboard-covered pallets taken from Thrifty Foods.
Safran, who previously had no formal education, decided he wanted to go to Stanwood Middle School.
“It was if I was an alien discovering America,” Safran said. “There I was covered in pine sap, spiders in my hair, patched-up paisley pants. Some of the kids beat the crap out of me because they didn’t know what to do with me.”
Teacher Rosalie King (“a real angel”) offered to stay after school to help Joshua get up to grade level, especially in math. She suggested they phone his mother with the proposal.
“But we had no phone, no address, no running water, no electricity. I couldn’t stay after school. I had to ride the bus because we had no car.”
When Josh, his mother and stepfather moved to a rundown apartment in west Stanwood, Safran walked to school, took King up on her tutoring offer and spent a lot of time at the public library.
“Every hour I was not in school, I took literal and intellectual shelter in that library. The librarians helped me find books as I discovered my Jewish identity. For me, the library was my Jerusalem.”
At school, he found good friends in people such as Joseph Marti and Dorothy Galbreath, whose father John Galbreath was a language arts teacher at the school.
“Mr. Galbreath handled me well,” Safran said. “By this time, my stepfather had stopped beating my mother and had shifted his violence to me. I was acting up and including a lot of violence in my papers at school. John did not censor me or get me in trouble. He just told me to keep writing.”
Finally, his mother made the break from her violent husband. She and Joshua joined a community on Walker Valley Road in Skagit County. It was what Reed had been looking for.
“I did not want to leave Stanwood schools, because that would concede defeat,” Safran said. “We began commuting to Stanwood and John Dean gave my mom a job with the Stanwood Camano News.”
At Stanwood High School, Safran ran track, participated in drama and simultaneously studied at Skagit Valley College. With the help of his teachers, he earned a full-ride scholarship to Oberlin College. He spent his junior year in Israel and then another 14 months in Galilee involved in Torah study.
“But I knew I had to go back to help my mother.”
At the University of California Law School at Berkley, Safran met his wife, and then was hired right out of school by a big corporate law firm. That led to his pro bono work and the filming of the documentary “Crime After Crime,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the film he talks about his own experiences going from being a survivor of domestic violence to an advocate for victims.
Claudia Reed now lives near Safran and his family in the Bay Area.
“For many years I resented my mother and all the deprivation we experienced. Everything she was about seemed wrong to me,” he said. “But when I got to college, I realized that many of those rich kids couldn’t do anything for themselves. I had confidence and I had that sense that if everyone likes something, then it’s my obligation to disagree. My mother instilled in me a tremendous sense of empathy, a real sense of service and her strange optimism.
“It all worked out all right.”
Gale Fiege: 425-339-3427; gfiege@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @galefiege.
Book reading
Stanwood High School alum Joshua Safran will read from his book “Free Spirit: Growing Up on the Road and Off the Grid” at 7 p.m. June 25 at the Stanwood Camano Community Resource Center, 9612 271st St. NW. Following his talk, a reception and book signing is scheduled across the street at the Stanwood Library. Snow Goose Books will have copies of the memoir for sale.
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