The Stars

If you look at the media reports of the Oakland Police Department funeral for Mark Dunakin, John Hege, Erv Romans, and Dan Sakai you'll get a glimpse of the grief. From the replaying of speeches and eulogies, you'll get a summary of their life purpose. But what you'll miss, if you weren't in that arena, like I was with 19,000 plus police officers , is the meaning of the stars.

Sitting up on the second deck of a darkened amphitheatre full of men in women dressed mostly in dark blue you couldn't help but notice the twinkling of their stars. I've never really thought about why most police departments use the shape of a star as the symbol of authority. But as the agony of the speakers voices leaned over the arena, the stars would twinkle back. Light levels, for an instant would strengthen, and in that second it looked like the stars from the heavens had come to gather their four fallen comrades.

Most of our relationships with the police come after we decide we need to be someplace fast. The person behind the star almost always asks us "to slow down." In that moment , having lost a round of cop and mouse we don't think much of the star. Three people I've met in life, that I long admired, eventually put that star on their chest. Two worked with me at a summer camp, one was a naturalist who married a friend. Their motivations for serving all varied, but they all had some common characteristics. They were open minded, willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and they care deeply for their fellow human beings.

Most sacred of our covenants is: "Thou shalt not kill." We give police dominion over us to enforce that covenant. To protect them from those that would break all of our covenants, we give them the symbol of Heaven: the star. It's our way of reassuring them, that we will protect "them" above all others. It's our shield, our power, our magic, and it usually works.

Now, one of my three friends has fallen. His twinkle has gone out, our star didn't stop the bullet. --And last Friday, all of our other stars came to cry from the pain.

Today, they are back on the streets, renewing the covenant. But now, when I see those stars, I'm never going to look at them the same again.

Remembering Mark Dunakin

What follows is a piece I wrote for the Arrowpoint, a publication of the Order of the Arrow Lodge, Achewon Nimat, San Francisco Bay Area Council Boy Scouts of America. I go into a little BSA lingo here. So get out your Google Page if you need definitions.
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For those of us involved in Scouting since the early 1980's, the passing of Sergeant Mark Dunakin of the Oakland Police Department on March 21st was like the loss of a brother. I suppose I could spell out the particulars: he was a member of Troop 943 in Pleasanton California, he entered the Order of the Arrow in May of 1983, he received his Brotherhood in May of 1984. In 1986, he was awarded the Eagle Scout rank. He served on Camp Royaneh's staff from 1984-86 and on Wente Scout Reservation's off and on from 1987-90. But those fact's won't give you the essence of Mark. If the creed of the Order of the Arrow is to be a "Brotherhood of Honor Campers", then to understand that creed, and to get beyond the uniforms, the awards, the ceremonies, the sashes and to understand what Mark meant to camping, as we knew him, you have to understand the camp experience with Mark.

A fixture of Camp Royaneh and Wente Scout Reservation in the 1980's, Mark worked in the Diamond and Risin' W corrals at both camps. There are many men and women of the greater Bay Area , that as a boys and girls, took their first horse ride with Mark Dunakin ----and what "rides" they could be.

As someone who saddled up for many a clip clop through the back country of Wente Scout Reservation I can tell you "the ride" wasn't taking place so much on the back of a horse as in the mind and word antics of Mark Dunakin. It was a bit like trekking through the trees with Disney's version of "The Jungle Book's" Baloo the bear. It wasn't so much the sway of the horses, the silhouette of fake cowboys in the sunset as it was the impromptu theater of yarns that would come from Mark's mouth. None of the trees grew naturally. "That crooked tree was planted by Crooked Dan, a lumberjack in these parts. No matter how he combed his hair, it never came out straight. So when he planted trees after logging, he bent a lot of them, so he'd have company." The performances changed every trail ride. There were at least three or four new plot lines a day for crooked trees. The campers ate it up.

Like Baloo, Mark was big, tall and broad, three times the size of the average Scout he was guiding, not the kind of friend you expect to meet in the woods. But as he rode along each summer he taught the scouts a little about the meaning of life, friendship, and trust. Ed Clunies-Ross told me one of his first memories of Mark was one day in the corral when a horse had caught his hoof in the wire mesh of the corral fence. If you have been around horses enough, you know in that sort of situation, they panic, and the situation get's dangerous. While Mark and another corral staff member handled the horse, Ed was sent to the tack room to get a pair of wire cutters. As Ed said in his e-mail to me, "This says a lot about Mark, he didn't begrudge having to have a ten-year-old in tow and actually put trust in me in a stressful moment. In my mind he was always one of the big guys I looked up to."

After Mark started his career in Law Enforcement members of the camp staff's and Scout troops would occasionally run into him in Oakland. He was the same old Mark, married and with a family now, but just as gentle a disposition as ever. Conversations would move to Scouting and the influence it had on his life. A few stories about how a few fake robberies and some warrior ambushes that went awry on the trail always got exchanged. But everyone that met him, relayed the same story back to me: he loved being a Oakland police officer. As I saw him on TV over the years discussing his job you could tell, he liked public service, and he kept the" Mark" sense of humor about it. I encourage you all to Google up some videos online and watch them yourselves. His understated "give everyone the benefit of the doubt" personality is there. I can't really tell you where Mark got his love of service. I suspect some of it was from Scouting, I suspect some was from a father who spent a career teaching all of us who worked at his camp's, you can do a hard job and still have fun at it.

In Scouting we all go to our meetings, we say our oaths and recite our motto's. In the week after March 21st, when I was writing this, the last lines of the Obligation of the Order of the Arrow came to mind: "The preservation of cheerful spirit, in the midst of weighty responsibilities, and the unselfish service and devotion to the welfare of others. " Twenty years ago, my friends, Mark and I stood in the light of candles or campfires and uttered those words a hundred times as we held up the Sign of Scouting. But as I wrote this, it occurred to me, on that Saturday afternoon, when Mark Dunakin was stolen away from us: he wasn't uttering those words, he wasn't thinking them, he was living them.

He will be sorely missed.

Mark Dunakin

Every so often a single event, will make you stop and reflect. So it is with the passing of Mark Dunakin, Sergeant for the Oakland California Police Department. He was killed in a random act of circumstance that happens on occasion with people that choose to take on the burden of enforcing societies' laws.

At work on Monday, somebody is going to make the mistake of asking if I was close with Mark. I'll have to admit, it's been since 1993 since I really talked to him. We parted and went our own ways in life as people do when they grow up. The reason life had brought us together had expired, we no longer could afford to work at a summer camp . But all of us that have ever worked at that camp have a sense of family. You see it went we get together to drink a beer, to watch each other's kids get cranky because they need a nap, or just to cook a dinner together and think about where the world is taking us.

Even though that Mark had gone on to do things beyond our little summer camp, we all followed him. We all took note when he was on T.V. speaking for the Oakland Police. We all kept apprised of what he was up too. --And I have to admit, every time I saw an Oakland PD cruiser or motorcycle, I looked to see if Mark was the one driving. It's those little acts, the "Have you news of Mark" moments, that remind us that once bound by common powerful experience the tie forever remains.

When I think of Mark, I think of a 18 year old running the corral at the camp where I was program director. He would stop me on the trail with some crazy new stunt he had to get more kids to ride horses. I was always pretty sure, my boss , the offseason insurance broker would and part time summer camp director, would nix these slightly risky but exciting endeavors. He cited the possibility of high injury rates. But both Mark and I had an ace in the hole. Mark's dad, Dave Dunakin, the Director of Camping for the San Francisco Bay Area Council Boy Scouts of America. -And Dave had given us both a directive: "Make the camp sizzle." We may have taken liberty with that phrase a few times. Our camp director, on an almost daily basis, would haul Mark and I into his office to discuss our "activities." But we were on a religious mission to take a faulting summer camp and breath "Sizzle" into it. Whether we succeed or not is a discussion we are still having around campfires and dinner tables twenty five years later. I suspect the consensus is: "We did."

But in the web of that experience, one penetrating thing is true, the Dunakin family was the anchor point we all started from. It was Dave Dunakin that hired us, treated us like his own kids, an guided us through one of the major experiences of our early lives. We grew up with Mark like he was one of our brothers. To us, summer camp was the home our whole family reunited at each year. Whether we worked at Camp Royaneh or Wente Scout Reservation the Dunakins were part of our family. We were there for their successes and for their learning experiences. and for the things all families endure. Those common experiences , the Dunakins enabled, cemented lifelong friendships for all us. Twenty five years after the Dunakin's entered my life all of my closest friends, the ones that call me at 11:30 at night to chat, that asked me to be in their weddings or at their children's Christenings came to me through my meeting the Dunakin family. --And when we get together the meeting rarely goes by where a Dunakin story isn't told.

We are all, like the Police Department of Oakland, collectively wounded beyond words to describe.