UW Summer High School Institute

In 1985, I was a high school sophomore, and I was honored to be invited to the very first Summer High School Institute at the University of Wyoming.  I can’t express how wonderful it was.

First of all, I was an emotional wreck.  I had just broken up with my first boyfriend, and, you know, my childhood. At HSI we had small group where we would get together and talk about our emotional lives. It was the first therapy I had in my life, and it probably saved me.

And the amazing classes I took.  It’s three weeks long, and as part of it you take college courses.  I was introduced to N. Scott Momaday and Chinua Achebe and got to experience Numerical Imaginings. And I got FREE BOOKS (which I still have)! 

And my fellow instituters were and still are amazing.  Pete Simpson Jr, Al Simpson’s nephew, was in that class. They all were so smart and amazing.  I haven’t kept in touch with them, but now I wish I would have. This year, we're celebrating the 30th anniversary of HSI.

And now, they invited me back to teach a writers workshop, which I did yesterday.  It was so great! The kids are whip smart and so much fun.  Their creativity oozes out of them, let me tell you! They have bright futures ahead of them.

There were two classes, and I planned three exercises for each but was only able to accomplish two in the hour we had.  First, I took the first couple sentences of some famous books and then they added sentences and passed them to their left and added to other stories. So much fun! Then they interviewed each other and wrote each others’ Life Story on a Postcard, a la Michael Kimball.  The third exercise was going to be writing their own life story in third person as a fairy tale, but we didn’t get to that.

All I can say is: You people who are cynical about the younger generations, you shouldn't be.  This happens every time I work with young people. I realize how amazing and hopeful and positive they are. They were all avid readers and great writers and motivated and wicked smart.

Our future is so bright, I gotta wear shades!

'The Adventures of Opal the Hound Dog'

While we were on vacation in South Carolina last week, I was telling someone about Opal the redbone hound dog in my novel Earth’s Imagined Corners.  You know how it is. In order to make death real in a book, you actually have to kill someone off.  And so, in this case, I had to kill the lovely Opal. 

My daughter heard and was very upset. “You killed the dog?” she said.

I explained that you don’t actually see the dog dead, but the last glimpse you see of her is on top of a house in a great flood as the house rolls over.  So she may not actually be dead. She may have swum to safety.

“Mom, you have to write another book about just Opal,” my daughter said. “She has to swim to safety and have a long life and then meet up with Sara’s cousin at the end.”

And, so, guess what I’m doing? I’m writing a fun children’s book called The Adventures of Opal the Hound Dog.

And so you can get a taste of Opal’s life, here is where we meet Opal.

As Sara and James made their way home, they saw a young girl in a white pinafore walking along dangling two red puppies with big floppy ears from her arms and talking to a man on the street. The man listened to what the girl said but then shook his head and walked off. As Sara and James came by, the girl turned to them and said, “Would you like a puppy? They don’t cost nothing. My papa says he’s going to throw them in the river if I don’t find someone to take them on.” At closer view, the puppies were indeed small but older than Sara had first believed. They were just beginning to lengthen into grown dogs.

As the full day of liberation left Sara with such a good feeling, she did not want to let this pass—it seemed like a good omen—so she said spontaneously, “Of course, we would love to have such fine specimen of a dog. That’s so kind of you to try to save them.” Relief crossed the girl’s face, who said, “Would you take two, then?” Sara considered it but then glanced at James’s face, which was contained but set. James did not want one dog, much less two. “Oh!” Sara said. “James, would a dog be all right?” James did not respond, so she said, “It could be my birthday present. Please? Just one.” He stood for a minute and then relented with a small shake of his head. Sara turned to the girl. “I’m sorry, but we can only take one of them off your hands.” The girl handed over the larger of the two, a female, and Sara took its wriggling mass into her arms. Its skin felt too big for its body, which was warm and solid and alive, and Sara was immediately overcome with a maternal kind of love. “I think I’ll name you Opal,” she said. She turned to James and said, “Opal was my mother’s name.” He nodded, smilingly resigned to the new acquisition. Sara hummed the whole rest of the way home, holding close the alternately limp and wriggling warm body.

Opal filled their little apartment with enthusiastic motion. When first set down, she immediately put her nose to the floor and seemed led by it on a meandering path all through the space. It was as if the nose had a mind of its own and the dog’s body merely followed on a tether. Opal nosed under the bed and behind the stove and put her paws up on the shelves and tried to sniff the dry goods. She made her way over to the bed and tried to leap onto it but made it only halfway before flopping onto her side on the floor. She stood back up and shook herself, undaunted, and continued to sniff about. After a time, even James seemed charmed by her earnest zeal as she nosed his ankles.

This is the last time we see Opal.

But then James heard the strangest sound. It was low and then undulated higher, and he realized that it was the baying of a hound dog. He twisted to look behind him, upstream, and there, canted at an angle, was the roof of a building, the very peak jutting from the water. On the peak stood a wet red dog, baying. It could not be, but it was. Opal stood there straddling the peak, her head facing downstream. She lifted her muzzle once more, and the sound of her baying voice was time-delayed coming over the water. James searched beside her and what little he could see of the roof, but there was no one else. It was a relief, but then it was not. “Opal!” James screamed. “Ooooh-paaall!” The dog turned its head in his direction as the building swept past the tree, not too close, but the dog did not seem to see him, and then her head turned back downstream to what lay in her future. Just then the building rolled in the water, and James lost sight of the dog’s form behind the tipping roof and then the walls that followed. That was the last he saw of her, though he frantically searched the waters nearby. At that, something broke within him, and he began to cry, though the sound of his loud convulsive sobs were drowned out in the roar and his tears mingled with the rain.

And here is the beginning of Opal’s continuing adventures.

Opal the hound dog stood on the peak of the house roof as the flood raged around her. The house swayed and shook underneath her as it swept down the wide expanse of the Missouri River.

She lifted her muzzle and let out a long mournful howl.

Under the overwhelming muddy smell of the flood, Opal could smell other things, like dead bloated cows and freshly felled trees and even, once, a soggy loaf of fresh-baked bread.

Opal had a really good nose.  She was a redbone hound dog, after all, and she could smell a raccoon track ten days gone.  She could tell you if a bird flying by had nestlings and if a person was likely to pat her on the head or swing a boot.

The house lurched underneath her and she was thrown forward into the roiling river.  The water was cold as it hit her and she gasped just as her head sank below a wave. She kicked hard and her back legs connected with something under the water, and so she shot upward and her head broke the surface. She gasped again, welcomed air flooding her lungs.

She kicked and paddled and kicked, and often a wave threatened to bowl her over or an undertow threatened to pull her down.  But she kept going. She knew she couldn’t swim upstream, and downstream kept her in the middle of the maelstrom, and so she swam at a crooked angle until finally, exhausted, she paddled into a quiet sandy eddy.

She pulled her bone-tired body out of the water and, too tired to even shake, she found the curve of a tree root a safe distance from the water. She curled up and slept.

I’m having such fun with it!

Clarissa Dickson’s Wright’s memoir ‘Spilling the Beans’

What do you do on summer vacation?  Beach Read!

I’m just finishing up Clarissa Dickson Wright’s memoir Spilling the Beans.  You know Clarissa, right?  She’s one half of the dynamic duo, along with Jennifer Patterson, of the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies. God, I love that show.

Part of the charm of the show is their outspokenness.  I’m sure people watched just to see what politically incorrect things Clarissa particularly but Jennifer too would say.  They had strong opinions and weren’t afraid to say them.

Clarissa’s memoir is similarly forthright.  Having been raised with an alcoholic and violent father who made everyone’s life a living hell, Clarissa is wedded to the truth ~ much like I am.  Not that I was physically abused at all, but I became painfully aware of the huge gap between what everyone agreed was the truth and what was my truth.  Why did these things not match?  I think that’s why I write realism ~ because what I’m trying to do is tell the truth as I see it.  Representing things with the fantastical is wonderful in its own right, but not what interests me.

But the problem comes when Clarissa’s declarations paint with such a broad brush.  “All alcoholics are this.” She simplifies things a bit too much for my taste on things that I know something about.  If only the world were that simple.  But at the same time, some of these pronouncements have great truth in them and also are very funny and wise.  But it’s hard to put your finger on exactly why they feel offensive at times.  I guess because they reduce people.  It feel very British colonial, which would make sense.  

Yet she's wonderfully understanding and nuanced about her father Arthur, who was such a lost soul and horrible family man yet great doctor. 

Clarissa is a good writer and has such a wonderfully wicked sense of humor.  She always goes for the salacious sex details, and I think a lot of the details she tells are rumors and gossip.  Which makes this memoir a wonderful tell-all, no matter how true it is. She’s not afraid to name drop.  It’s wonder she didn’t get sued. (Maybe she did.)

She goes into great detail about her alcoholism and all the horrible things she did and takes responsibility for it all.  She is genuinely warm and generous and wonderful.  And since I’m an Anglophile I love it, even as I’m hating myself for loving it because in a lot of ways it’s a gossip-rag.  It’s written for a British audience and so I don’t know a lot of the names of people, and she takes for granted that her audience knows, but really you don’t need to know to get the gist of things.

Did you know that Jennifer with Clarissa really did do a 180 on the bike in the Two Fat Ladies? Apparently, Jennifer planned to do it and didn’t tell the producer but told the cameraman to stay on them.  I’m not sure Clarissa knew ahead of time. Later, Jennifer offhandedly said that they would have flipped the bike had it been on gravel.  

Another thing that shocks me is that Clarissa was 48 when the first episodes were shot.  I’m 46.  That feels really weird.

And I’m reminded of the power of story.  A reader makes such a connection with the protagonist of a book that you forgive them everything, even if they are horrid.  When Clarissa was in the depths of her alcoholism, she was pretty horrid to everyone.  And the entitlement that comes with money is hard to put your mind around.  As someone who came from poor background, I find it hard to swallow the amount of pure selfish greed and the waste of a life in the middle there.

But I love her, you know?  She’s so charming and Brit Ish. I hope she’s happy now and with her mom (although as a realist I don’t subscribe to these notions). Bless you, Clarissa.

Thankful

(via)

I’ve been thinking this week about the many things I’m thankful for. One of them is and always has been this: I’m thankful I survived childhood.

Your childhood experience depends very much upon where you grew up and your parents, and being raised on a ranch made my childhood more dangerous than some. Sure, I wasn’t an orphan on the streets of Bombay, but there were lots of things that could have killed any one of us. And the fact that all seven of us survived ~ though there was another sister who died at birth ~ is a miracle.

What immediately leaps to mind is the time my cousins were going to take my two brothers and I repelling. We have never been a safety family. In fact, quite the opposite. You were supposed to stare in the face of danger and laugh. Or at least grit your teeth in a pleasing way. I am and always have been afraid of heights, and I spent the whole trip up there praying fervrently to get out of it. The funny thing was, our car overheated or vapor locked or something, and I did get out of it. If there was ever a moment in my life where I would have become ultra-religious, that was it.

And the two times my one brother got majorly injured. Once, he was climbing some cliffs with a cousin, and the cousin rolled a rock down on top of him that swept his feet out from under him and he fell from the cliff. And the time both brothers were playing around a dragline, and the dragline bucket fell and the one brother pushed the other brother out of the way and got buried under the dragline bucket. My father had to dig the dirt out from his face so he could breathe, and he ended up in a body cast, chest to ankle with a bar between his knees. Which my cousins would hang him from.

Breaking horses. A stick came up under the belly of a green-broke horse that I was riding and I flipped forward, riding the saddle horn, and then back off the horse’s rump. Knocked the wind out of me but I wasn’t otherwise worse for the wear. My other brother was roping on a rainy day and his horse slipped and went down and broke his leg. It was three hours to the hospital, and he gritted his teeth the whole way. Oh, and chasing cows in freak late-spring storms when you’re just in tennis shoes and light jacket and it’s so cold the horses’ breaths are freezing in mustaches on their faces.

One of my sisters had a thing with her hips where as a baby she could sit on the floor and swing her legs all the way around her body. Another kid in the area had to be in a body cast and he died from it, but since my family never goes to the doctor, apparently the condition corrected itself.

We regularly drove trucks without brakes, and there was even a jeep that only turned one way. Driving up to summer pasture was quite a feat. And you’d get stuck in mud or snow 90 miles from anywhere (think the Draggin’ S Ranch Cow Country Cartoons) and have to figure out how to get out. People would push and it’s a miracle no one was run over. I’ve been in pickups that drove into ravines or kicked by horses and lost a wheel that went bounding across the prairie. The bus took us to and from school every day, an hour each way, rain or shine, and it’s a miracle something didn’t happen there.

Childhood diseases. I had pneumonia. I even had this strange disease that gave me circular spot rashes all over my arms and body and took away the tan I’d gotten during the summer and made me look like a reverse leopard. The doctor had no idea what it was. I broke my leg on a motorcycle and burned it on the tailpipe. I broke my collarbone by falling out of the back of a truck. A cousin got nicked by a chainsaw and another cousin got his arm shot off at Thanksgiving while turkey hunting.

I could go on and on. But I won’t. You get the picture.

This year and every year, I am thankful I survived childhood.

Ducks to Water

My kids love to read ~ which of course warms this book lover’s heart.

It wasn’t always so. What I mean is: they didn’t begin reading at 3 years old.  Isn’t it funny how our memories of our reading as children don’t match up with what probably actually happened.

I remember always loving to read. I had an hour bus ride to and from school, and I always read the whole way.  I loved it. But if I think back, I didn’t know how to read when I went to kindergarten.  I remember learning my letters from some big blow-up monster letter characters. The T was particularly wonderful. I remember continuing to learn to read in the first grade, and it wasn’t till the third or fourth grade that my reading took off.

Which is exactly where my kids are.

But the myth. Oh the myth.  We love it so, we falsely remember having always read.  And we forget what a struggle it was at first.  The single biggest contributor to my reading, I think now, is that fact that I had all that time on the bus that I had nothing else to do.  I still would have loved reading, but it wouldn’t have been the same.

What did it for my kids was Harry Potter. We’ve always read before going to bed, and they love that, but it was more of a social thing.  This summer, however, was the Summer of Harry Potter. We read a couple of chapters every night, and they lived for it. Over the course of the summer, we got all the way up to and almost through book 5.  I think ~ and hope ~ that it’ll be one of those things they’ll remember fondly their whole lives. 

But since then, they’ve dived in. They read all the time on their own. The first series that really caught my daughter was the Boxcar Children.  The first that really caught by son was Percy Jackson. And off they go.

I get a warm fuzzy glow when I think about all the lovely reading they have ahead of them!

The Summer of Harry Potter

This is the Summer of Harry Potter. Every night I read a couple chapters aloud to my eight-year-old twins, and we’re on the fifth book.

Both of them ~ but my daughter especially ~ won’t let me get away with missing it. They’ve been watching the clock. “Mom, it’s seven. Let’s go read.” Or “Mom, you didn’t remind us!” Or “Let’s go up early!” This is a biggie because my daughter is usually pretty lackadaisical about time and doing things when we’re supposed to.  I mean, she takes hours-long baths.

But it’s really launched them in their reading.  They had read before ~ my son especially was getting into it. But now they’re both reading a lot on their own. My son will just randomly be found on his bed reading, and my daughter made me stop at the county library to check out Boxcar Children mysteries, her favorite.

They are loving reading and storytelling. My daughter can spin a tale at the dinner table that, finally, we have to say, “Wrap it up, girl!”  My son and I sat around the campfire when we were camping and took turns telling stories we made up on the spot.

They’ll make Harry Potter jokes, and they’ll figure out the plot twists ahead of time, with or without prompting from me.  “Who is going to be this year’s Dark Arts teacher?” is a common refrain. When there’s a particularly vicious plot turn, my daughter says, “I’m going to rip Voldemort’s face off and kick him in the shins!”  When I read a particularly sad part, my voice cracks ~ or stops all together ~ and my son buries his head in a pillow, tears in his eyes.

I love it. I love that they love what I love, you know?

Emotions of the Past

Julia Stephen, VW's mother (via)

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past." ~ Virginia Stephen Woolf

Camping’s So Good for Kids ~ And Moms

Me, Steve, Eli, and Elizabeth

Don’t you just love the fresh mountain air first thing in the morning? The birds urgently tweeting from the trees, the lazy hum of the bugs starting to rise and the swish of the branches as the breeze picks up? The sun through the trees makes everything a vivid living green ~ it always makes me think of “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

We went camping this past weekend and had a blast! We got a new-to-us fifth wheel camper recently and it’s perfect. Much better put together and more spacious than our last Airstream. We drove up on Friday to the mountains west of Laramie and drove around till we found a good spot ~ fairly flat, by a creek, with not anybody around us. We spent the weekend tending the campfire, roasting hot dogs and s’mores, fishing, reading Harry Potter, and generally lazing about. Came home Sunday morning.

What it brought home to me yet again was the value of camping for kids. They learn to shake off bumps and bruises. They’re not in an environment where everything has cushioned rounded corners. They’re out of their comfort zone so they try things they wouldn’t normally. They have boredom time, too, which is very important. And maybe most importantly, they gain confidence in their bodies. This weekend, my eight-year-olds practiced keeping a fire going, walking on logs, and chopping wood with an ax.

It’s easy as a mom to try and protect your kids all the time, but camping is a convenient and safe way to put you out of your comfort zone and let your kids explore a bit.

And then there’s always that WONDERFUL shower you take when you get home!

 

Beauty Seeped Into Your Bones

Have you ever wondered how the landscapes of your childhood influence your art?  Whether its beauty seeped into your bones?

I have the distinct pleasure of stopping by SunnyRoomStudio today with a guest blog ("The Cool of the Evening After the Baking of the Day") specifically about this question.  Daisy, the propietor of this wonderful space, is such a generous and thoughtful person.  She regularly makes my day with her posts and her cheery hellos on Twitter.  She is one of the amazing people who gathers and bolsters all those around her.  I can't thank her enough.

So please stop by and check it out!  Here's a taste: 

 

And so the landscape of my childhood, its beauty and loneliness, is inextricably linked to my art, whether it’s writing or photography or something else. It’s the reason I am an artist. And it’s not just because of the beauty ~ it’s also the deep ambivalence it created in me.

Beauty and Ambivalence

Today I get to visit Lisa's World of Books on the How to Be a Man Virtual Book Tour!  Michigan, here we come! Thank you so much, Lisa and David!

Lone Wolf, southern Montana

This is where I spent my summers when I worked on our dude ranch growing up.  This is near one of our cabins where we would camp all summer and host dudes.  It's in southern Montana near the Crow and Cheyenne Reservation. It's beautiful, but you know how these things are.  The beauty and wonder of it is all tangled up with family and ambivalence. And that's why I'm a writer.

Tornados Are Self-centered

(via)

This morning, on the way to an orthodontist’s appointment in Fort Collins.

“That tornado is self-centered,” my seven-year-old daughter says from the back seat.

 “What, Sweet?” I say.

“That tornado, the one in Oklahoma.  It’s self-centered.”

“Well, I guess it is. That’s a good way to put it.”

A pause, then she says, “It’s because he’s angry and sad.”

“The tornado?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.  “The tornado is angry and sad because he doesn’t have any friends.  And he’s self-centered.”

“Oh.”  So that explains it.

Terrafin, or Feeling Things Intently

My son is absolutely ecstatic with anticipation.  He loves the video game Skylanders, and he’s been waiting for at least 6 months to get the character Terrafin, shown above.  I write this on Tuesday afternoon, and the figurine should be delivered this afternoon.  It allows you to be this character within the game in a world called Skyland, which are islands floating in the air. My son's grandma just flew in today, though, and he has music concert tonight, and so he won’t be able to play with it much today.  He was totally bummed about that.

Do you remember what it was like to anticipate things when you were a kid?  Oh, the agony, the torture!  There’s a great Calvin and Hobbes comic strip series (which you can see here) about this very thing.  Wanting something so bad and having to wait.  Once we ordered it, my son only had to wait two days, though ~ a huge difference from when I was a kid.

I wonder if kids experience these kinds of things more intensely.  We certainly get more patient with age, and we get blunted somehow.  Self-preservation, maybe. 

But I think it would do us good to remember, sometimes, what it’s like to remain that open, to feel things that intently.  Sometimes not, a lot of times it’s too much.  But that’s the state that’s the most alive, the most creative.

Little Patches of Light and Darkness

(via)

I drove my daughter an hour and a half each way this morning for her orthodontist’s appointment.  The interstate was a little icy up on top by the Lincoln Monument (the highest point on the nation’s interstate system), but otherwise it was fine.  A nice but cold sunshiny day.

After my daughter’s appointment, the nice ladies at reception gave her two balloons ~ a yellow and a purple one ~ that were attached to a Twix bar, and they gave her fruit snacks for good measure.  Allie, the one receptionist, is particularly perky and sweet, just like my daughter, and my daughter always gives her a big hug as we leave.

About halfway home as I watched in my rearview mirror, my daughter, who is almost 7, started playing with the balloons.  She was having a conversation with them and telling a story about them and even arguing with them.  I couldn’t hear much because the radio was on, but it was an indepth and complex game she was playing.  Her eyebrows would shoot up and she’d tilt her head and say something very pleasant and then her brow would furrow and she’d shake her head and say something stern and then she’d get mock-angry and banish the balloons to the third seat in the back of the van.  Then she’d bring them back forward and shake the violently and hit them against one another as if they were fighting, and then I would hear her say, “Now, be nice to each other.”  This lasted for almost 45 minutes.

Besides the obvious mirror of what us, her parents, say to her, this got me thinking about interiors.  In some ways, the interior lives of our children are totally open to us.  We mystify them because we can guess what they did wrong and what they are about to do wrong.  That’s because it is written in neon letters on their forwards by their expressions and their body language and what they’ve done before.  They are a little bundle of desires, and you can see them moving from TV to candy to the video game back to dinner.

But there are corners of them we don’t know and never will.  Sometimes ~ like my daughter’s story to herself this morning ~ I have no idea what prompted it and what story she was telling.  The people who are closest to us and whom we think we know so well are riddled with these little patches of light and darkness that we know nothing about.  Your husband or your wife ~ they have a whole inner life that you don’t want to think about.  Could it be they’re thinking of leaving you?  Do they secretly detest you? Or are they simply taking you for granted and you are no longer the center of their thoughts?

And I can imagine that one of the horrible things about kids growing older is that they become estranged from you.  It is out of necessity ~ they have to become their own people ~ but I could see how those portions of light and dark within your kids could expand, until it overtakes them and these little beings whom you love with all your heart are now strangers to you. 

In some ways, life is a series of losses that you grieve forever, but then again the flip side is that it’s a series of wonderful gains too. I guess the trick is to be open ~ despite the fact that there is loss, let yourself love again.  Sure, your kids will grow up one day and move away, but if you don’t have them in the first place, you'll never know them and also there’s a part of you you will never know.

'Faithfully' by Journey

All I have to do is hear the first bit of this song and I'm that aching 13-year-old again, yearning with ever fiber of my being for a soul mate, someone to merge my whole being with.

The West Is Burning

photo by Wayne Karberg

The West is burning.  I don’t know what the statistics are, but there are fires up and down the Rocky Mountains from Montana to Mexico, at least 56 named fires.  We’ve had the smoke for weeks now, but just in the last couple of days, the Squirrel Creek Fire broke out in the mountains west of Laramie and is now at 7,000 acres.  The smoke is so thick it looks like evening is falling or huge rainclouds are blocking out the sun.  Last night, as we stood outside, cinder fell lightly like snow.  The smoke gets in your eyes and your throat and makes you cough.

I remember the Yellowstone fires in 1988.  I was living in northern Wyoming 60 miles away that summer.  The sunsets were gorgeous.  I don’t remember if cinder fell, but I think it did.

I’m tempted here to do my usual rhetorical move, to talk about something bigger than all of us, maybe the mutability of life, how things must be destroyed in order to grow.  But I’m not going to do that.  Instead, I want to think about all those people who are evacuated and/or have lost their homes.  The way I want to think about it is by remembering when our house burned.

It was a Thursday night during the winter of 1978.  The reason I know that is that we were watching our family favorite TV show.  We had one of those old console TVs, and because we were in the middle of nowhere, we only got one fuzzy station (on which Granny Dynamite, when she visited from Iowa, intently watched her “stories”). So we were watching The Fantastic Journey ~ there’s a lot of scifi fans in my family.  My mom was lying with her back to the fire, and I leaned back against her with her belly for a backrest.

The power flashed and the TV cut out.  This is not uncommon.  The power lines were aboveground then, and so it happened every so often.  It would take a day or two for the power company to come out and fix it.  But in this case, my older brother Jim went down into the basement to flip the switches. In doing so, he opened the door to what we called “the Rustic Room,” and smoke came billowing in. Quick investigation showed fire on the ceiling of the kitchen. 

Our gnome-like hired hand Fay was asleep upstairs, so Jim ran upstairs and met him at the top and knocked his glasses clean off.  Fay came downstairs in his red longjohns and continued fighting fire in them for the rest of the night.  Jim investigated upstairs and ended up having to jump off the second-floor roof into the rose bush.  I was told to get out and go to the car, as they were going to take us kids to our aunt and uncle's house.  Since smoke was billowing from the room you go through for the front way, I went out the back.  I was by myself, about 9 years old.  Pitch dark, but I glanced up and I could see the flames coming out a window and I could hear the fire popping and crackling.  Somehow that was the worst part.  It seemed this living breathing thing that cackled and taunted me in its own language.  I went the long way around, past the lilac and through the thistles and bouncing bets.

The firetrucks took a while to make it the 25 miles from Lovell, and then they had to pump from the creek.  People came to help.  But I didn’t see it, of course.  Us kids went stayed overnight elsewhere.  Our house did not burn to the ground, but it might as well have.  It was left a craggy hulk, and everything was ruined by the fire or by smoke or by water damage.  To this day, when I open boxes of memorabilia from my childhood, they smell of smoke.  Yep, I think, that’s the Ranch.

We got by.  We moved a trailer right next to the house to live in.  There weren’t enough bedrooms, so I slept on the couch.  All our stuff was gone, but the very kind people of Lovell took up a collection and gave us clothing and kitchenware and all kinds of stuff. 

How did it affect me?  Well, I actually think I just took it in stride, really.  It was one calamity in a long line of calamities.  Us kids joke that it was a miracle we survived childhood, but now that I am a parent, it is not at all a joke.  Being terrorized by any number of wild and semi-wild animals.  Chasing buffalo as a kid, with no truck or anything nearby to save you except one person with a rifle. Accidents like falling off cliffs, getting run over, hunting accidents where arms are shot off.

But I digress. 

I think I am more affected by it as an adult than I was then.  I get it now, the gravity of losing your home and everything you own.  Your memories.  A security, something you take for granted, will always be shattered, kind of like when the person who is the linchpin of your family passes away. 

We used to know this in our bones.  We were much more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and of each other.  Major shit happened all the time.  People died. Mother Nature took us out.   Just as I like my indoor plumbing, I am not at all romantic about a happier golden age closer to nature.

So I’m sending the best thoughts to all of you who have been evacuated or lost your homes and my heartfelt thanks goes out to those firefighters who step up every day.

The Good in People

Via

My daughter is a hugger, much like I was at that age.  Apparently, my parents had worried about me for my penchant for sitting on strangers’ laps.  I had no filter nor no caution.  So, like me, my daughter loves the attention and just loves people.  My son too, but he’s more cautious.

We’ve been visiting a lot of relatives lately and they’ve been visiting us.  So my daughter and son have been around a lot of cousins.  They’ve just been having a blast.  Some are cousins they’ve known all their lives and some they’re just meeting, but they invariably look forward to meeting them and they miss them long after their gone.  They haven’t seen their cousins Luke and Pa’eta (pronounced “Bod”) from southern Montana for something like three years, but they still ask, “When are Luke and Pa’eta visiting? I miss them.”

And I am continually amazed at the good will of kids.  Sure, sometimes they are selfish and want everything for themselves, but it feels honest, in a strange way.  But more often, they’re generous and kind.  Their cousins Jade and Julia from Oregon are visiting, and my daughter saved the donuts I bought for her after her dentist’s appointment to give to them.  My son quit playing his video game, which he loves, so that his cousins could play.

It really restores my faith in human nature.  I’ve always been an optimist, and as a kid I fervently believed in the good in human nature.  Sure, people did bad things but only because they were forced to.  Then growing up shook this belief.  When I began to think that people might be bad, I wondered what was the point of life, then?  If it was true that people were essentially evil, then why not cap myself and get it over with? 

But now I’ve arrived at the belief that people are essentially self-interested, and it is the job of civilization and our institutions such as governments, religions, and families to urge us to be better people.  And it is our responsibility to try to overcome our baser urges. 

But when I see my son and my daughter being such good people, I’m taken back to a time when I believed, you know?  A more innocent time.  My own personal Garden of Eden.