Back in Bishop

Last night when the fleas started to ride the wind into the van I had shut the side door and rolled up the windows. I still got some air from the two screened windows, but it was pretty warm inside. Nonetheless, I was tired enough, and I slept, hot and sweaty. It cooled in the night but only a little, and by dawn I still didn’t need a shirt….

I drove a few miles down to Hawthorne (pop. 3500) at the lower end of the Walker Lake, an ugly town with numerous buildings boarded up and for sale.  At a gas station, I found the squeegee reservoirs by the pump bone dry, and all the paper towel dispensers were empty.

I only had about a hundred miles to go to Bishop, south through brown, bare mountains and a few nearly dead mining towns…. I climbed to Montgomery Pass, in view of Boundary Peak, the highest in Nevada (13,141’), and dropped down into California and the Owens Valley…. It was only ten in the morning, but the heat out under the sun was already impressive, nineties and heading for triple digits….

A few miles east of town I stopped at Laws Railroad Museum and Historical Site. The town of Laws was established in 1880, the terminus of the first railway built into the Owens Valley; the line that ran south from Carson City, and followed much of my morning’s drive. The train that plied the route was known as the Slim Princess, no one seems to know why; in 1960 the line was shut down, and that was that, time for a museum.

I dutifully visited the general store, the print shop, the doctor’s and dentist’s offices, the school house, the wagon barn and the blacksmith shop…. In the Pioneer Building, I paused to examine a two-headed lamb in a glass case; a small plaque read, “Siamese Lambs: These twin lambs were born dead on the Ed Matlock Ranch north of Bishop in February 1938”…. 

Outside, I clambered up on the train engine, but I didn’t ring the bell, there had been enough of that by other visitors throughout my time on the grounds…. The “Bottle House” was devoted solely to collections of brown and green and blue bottles, the exhibits the lifetime work of three local couples whose hobby was culling the middens of abandoned mining towns…. The Ranch House was best, furnished as Richie and Tweed Conway had had it in the 1950s, the kitchen table set and ready; under a framed photograph of their son, who looked rakish in his fresh uniform, I learned that he had died in World War II, at the age of twenty....

After a coffee shop afternoon down in Bishop, I called Heleen and she told me to come up to the house. She and Tom greeted me warmly, as if it was only natural that I was back and would be staying in their guest bedroom again so soon.

We ate dinner out on the back patio after the sun had gone down—a great salad, fancy pasta, wine. Another couple had been invited, Bill and Georgeann. Georgeann was quiet through most of the meal, working on making a bracelet when she wasn’t eating. Bill dominated, loud and jokey and entertaining, a raconteur who everyone else seemed happy to defer to. He was in his 60s, white-haired with a white moustache, and he and Heleen seemed particularly close; he teased her about various events in the past, and she laughed hard and tried to give back what she got. He talked about his recent motorcycle trip in the Northwest, about trekking in the Dolomites, and about the local hiking and cycling. He’s retired, and apparently keeps busy. This week he’s been getting up in the small hours to watch Wimbledon matches live (he and Heleen used to play tennis regularly)…. He grew up in the Bay area, went off to Vietnam in the late 60s, came back and came up to the eastern Sierras to climb…. He considered how he could stay and make a living, then trained to become an x-ray technician, and then worked at the Bishop hospital for thirty-five years.

He and Georgeann had been together only four or five years. She’s the head of personnel at the hospital. Later, Heleen said Bill has had a number of relationships over the decades…. “It’s a small community,” she said, “so it can be kind’ve tough after a break-up. But I think he gets along with his exes.”

When prompted, I talked a little of my coming hike. But I was tired, maybe a little distracted by my plans, and mostly I sat and listened to Bill tell stories. Also, their long history of friendship easily trumped my very brief one, and I saw no reason to compete.... By eleven the wine was finished and Bill had run down, and he and Georgeann said good night, and I went off to bed soon after….

Tomorrow I set off again, a lighter pack on my back.

A warm afternoon in Winnemucca

At the Humboldt County Museum, in Winnemucca, a woman came out of a small office and stood in the doorway. She pointed to a guest register, and I put down my name while she told me a bit about the exhibits. A red dot from a laser pointer was flashing over the register as I wrote, but I didn’t think about it consciously, as I was listening to the woman. But when I had finished, and the woman had returned to her office, I heard a short laugh and looked up. Two kids were hanging over a second-floor balcony smiling down at me, and one was holding the laser pointer.

They were both blonde, a boy about nine and his sister, a couple years older. I expressed my admiration for the joke, and asked if they were visiting the museum too.  “Our mom works here,” the boy said. “She made us come with her.”

They both came down and followed me through the first floor exhibits, as I examined several old cars and numerous timber industry tools. The girl drifted into the office, and after a moment I heard the woman say, “I’m not going to put up with your crap, kiddo. That’s not something I’m prepared to do.” For some reason I didn’t think that the woman was the mother mentioned earlier.

I went upstairs alone, and when I came back down the boy claimed me again. “Did you like the guns?” he asked, referring to a glass case of rifles and pistols.

“Yes,” I said, “but I was more impressed with that cigar lighter.” It was the size of a small lamp and dated from the late nineteenth century. My preference confused the boy; he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about, though the lighter was in the case adjacent to the guns.

“Do they shoot fire, do you think?” he said.

“The lighter? Yes, you would trip the lever and fire would come out and you would light your cigar.” I bent over, holding an imaginary cigar to my lips, as if demonstrating.

The boy said, “No, the guns.”

I said, maybe but I didn’t know for sure. I asked his name and he said, “Robbie.” He stood beside me as I perused more cases, but he didn’t bother to look. He’d seen it all before, I suppose. He asked if I’d been in the schoolhouse, a separate building, and I said, no, and we went outside together. But the schoolhouse was locked. A rather subpar museum, as county museums go. Robbie and I shook hands when we parted.

I had reached Winnemucca at lunch time, after a four and half hour drive south from Boise, through the Owyhee Mountains in southeastern Oregon, down into Nevada and along the Santa Rosa Range. The temperature had cracked ninety by the time I came to Winnemucca, and I drove around town for some time looking for a park before giving up and going to the museum….

I also visited the Buckaroo Hall of Fame, in the town’s seedy Convention Center, a collection of photographs and saddles of local cowboys of merit. Members include Santy Jaca, Jiggs Catterson, and Albert Skidaddle.  As a bonus, two men in cowboy hats, clearly buckaroos themselves, were also examining the exhibit; the younger, a teenager, wore a number on the back of his western shirt, indicating he was participating in the rodeo that’s in town…. There was also a belt buckle collection on the opposite side of the big open room, and the winnings of a local big game hunter on another—several dozen heads of ungulates from around the world. The sportsman did have a lion too, which was snarling and about to take down a gazelle…. Across the street I made a stop in a junk store, where an elderly woman wearing a substantial amount of make-up talked loudly on the phone about her upcoming chemotherapy appointment. “Jerry wants me to tell them to let me wear one of those mask things, but I don’t think I’m going to.”

After I’d taken in the Winnemucca highlights, I drove east out of town, a half dozen miles up a dirt road to Water Canyon, a narrow defile grown with stands of cottonwoods. The slopes of the mountains above, part of the Sonoma Range, were grassy, up to rocky outcroppings at the ridge tops. I found a shady spot beside one of the BLM campsites and parked and put up the table in back and opened the side door and wrote for a bit….

The early evening didn’t offer much respite from the heat, but at five I went on, west on I-80, then south on US 95 to Fallon, easily the most appealing of the Nevada towns. Fallon, population 7500, occupies the middle of a broad valley, and is surrounded by green alfalfa fields…. I should have camped at the fairgrounds, in the shade of big cottonwood trees alongside one of the resident RVs. But I still had an hour of daylight, which I used as a bad excuse to go on….

Just at dark I came to Walker Lake, a large reservoir in a wide desert valley. No greenery to soften or cool the land. Too far south, or too low in elevation, or just a hot spot. But for one reason or another, the true summer desert. 

As a result, the campground I’d picked out on the map did not meet my expectations of comfortable shade and succor. It was below the road, between the foot of the mountains and the shore of the lake, in the empty midst of the broad open slope between. A desolate, gravelly expanse dotted with a few half-dead creosote bushes. There were no sites, just a few moribund fire rings scattered along a faint dirt road; a cement block outhouse stood alone, the only item above knee-height and inside was a scene grim enough to match the surroundings….. Rather uninviting, but the light was gone and I was tired….

The temperature seemed significantly higher than in Fallon, probably up near one hundred, and a hot wind rushed down off the mountain buffeting the side of the van…. I opened the side door and sat in back, shirtless, and read for a time, listening to a Triple A ball game from Reno, as the arid wind rushed about the inside of the van.

Jackpot

When I woke I had something akin to a hangover, though I’d only had one beer the night before. I suppose I inhaled a bit too much in the way of smoke bomb effluent, floating cinders, and the abundant byproducts of fireworks explosions.

Mike was already up and making a natural fire while Kristen and Rylee sat in fold-up chairs by the fire ring, watching him; both were still in their pajamas. The morning had started cool but was warming fast, headed for the nineties again. I went to a pile of dead pine limbs and broke up some more branches, so Mike would have fuel when he needed it. He said, “I love cooking on the fire.”

When he had some coals, he put a fold up grate over the fire, a giant iron pan on the grate, two packages of bacon in the pan. When the bacon was cooked, he made a single fried egg for his daughter, then a large batch of scrambled eggs for the rest of us. We sat around the fire pit and ate off paper plates. For a follow-up, Rylee had a left-over piece of pizza, heated up in foil on the fire.

I would’ve liked to stay, but I had to get back to town and undertake a long list of last-day-in-Boise tasks….

In the evening, I went out to the rehab center to see Grandpa, riding the bike one last time. A temperature of 96 held steady, though it was seven o’clock.

Grandpa and I talked about my drive down to Bishop. He knows the route well, having driven it dozens of times between 1956, when he moved the family to Long Beach, and 1984, when her retired and returned to Idaho. They rarely—maybe never—went on any other vacation.

He struggled to remember place names, the major towns along the way, lakes and rivers, the numbers of the highways…. The towns of Hawthorne and Fallon, in Nevada, were most significant, because they would usually spend the night at one or the other, or maybe have dinner before driving into the night, anxious to get north to home.

After some effort, he came up with “Hawthorne,” then the word “casino,” both necessary to an anecdote he wanted to tell. He described the layout of one of the bigger casinos in town: “See, when you walked in the door, you could go right”—he gestured—“into the casino, or you could go left”—another gesture—“into the restaurant.” He pronounces the last word “rest-rint” (An aside: today is the 100^th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth; in recordings, I’ve found that Guthrie, who came from Oklahoma, and Grandpa, who grew up in Nebraska, have a similar accent).

“It was me and Mom, and Grandma Scott, and Rosemary and Kelly, who were just kids. Kids weren’t allowed in the casino. When we came through that door I said, I’m just going to step in her for a moment, and I went into the casino, while the rest of them went the other way…. I moved into this…sort of back part…a little secluded…and I played one of the…what do you call them, the things with the arms and the cherries?” I correctly suggested slot machine. “Yeah, that was it. Well, I got a … it paid out the first time, a pretty good amount too….”

After a few minutes he hit another significant jackpot. And he was hitting small ones too, making money. “One of those attendants came over… and she tried to turn off the machine. But I wouldn’t let her…. They’re not allowed to do that as long as you keep playing the machine…. Well, I was really on to something.” He laughed. “And I’d never really won much doing that sort of thing….”

But it didn’t last; family intervened (in unfortunate combo with what struck me as excessively slavish devotion to the house rules). “Grandma Scott came over to the edge of the casino floor, and she had Kelly by the hand…. He had to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom was across the casino, and she wanted me to take him…. See, he wasn’t allowed in there…. I was trying to wave her off, ‘cause I had that machine and I couldn’t leave it…. But he had to go, I suppose, and finally I went to take him…. And the moment I walked away…the very moment…that attendant came over and turned the machine around to the wall.” He shook his head at the lost opportunity….

The television was on, and while he spoke the film She’s Out of My League was finishing. Then E! News started, devoting the first ten minutes to the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes story. “You know,” Grandpa said, shifting topics, “on Sundays we would go driving up into Hollywood…. It was real nice in there.” This would have been in the late 50s, maybe later too.

“What was that young fella’s name, he died, in a car crash maybe….” I figured it was James Dean, but it seems better to let him work out these efforts at recall, if he can. “He was with Rock Hudson and … Taylor…. He was bitter over some…acreage, but then he hits it rich, in oil…. Giant, that was it.” He told me more of the plot, then, the set-up complete, he described how on one of their Sunday drives in the Hollywood hills they had come to “this sort of conjunction. We was coming one way”—he drew a line in the air—“and the other road was coming from this direction. To this conjunction. And this was a rural road, though partly oiled. Anyway, you could see some dust coming from that other direction, and then a car coming like a battle, like a bat out of hell.” The car came to a skidding stop at the junction. “It was an open car, and it was him, that Dean fella…. He took off again before we had a chance to speak.”

Grandpa regularly spotted celebrities in L.A., most often at either the airport or Disneyland. He wasn’t interested in autographs, but he did feel it socially appropriate to stop them for a chat. For example, he buttonholed Ed McMahon at the airport in 1973, Tony Curtis a decade earlier on the curb in front of Grumman’s Chinese Theater (Grandpa pulled up next to him and stopped and had a conversation through the passenger’s window’ “maybe he was getting his feet in the cement there, I don’t know”). He told me about meeting Lawrence Welk’s lead singer (who was eating a hamburger at Disneyland) and having a talk with his trumpet player too, on another occasion…. The Welk band members got him onto big band shows in L.A. during the war, when he saw Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller, and lots more, though he could remember no other names….

When he had played out his celebrity anecdotes, I said I had to go, and that I’d be back in a month. “Well, I hope I won’t still be in here,” he said. The staff this week says two more weeks, but they’ve said that before. “I don’t know why it’s taking so long,” he said, discouraged.  He’d had an appointment with the surgeon earlier in the day, and the doctor was satisfied with his progress, though it’s been slow. Grandpa is less complaisant.

On the way home I stopped at the Sonic for one more half-priced medium milkshake. The same  dark-haired girl brings it out each time, on rollerblades, her face sweaty from moving about among the cars with food and ice cream orders. We hadn’t spoken before, beyond the necessaries, but I felt compelled to tell her I was leaving town. She said, “You should have got a large!” I told her I’d had the same thought right after I finished ordering.

Crouch, Idaho, 4th of July

In the afternoon I drove north in the company of hordes of other vehicles, up into the mountains, through Horseshoe Bend and along the Payette River, which was crowded too, with red and yellow and blue rafts. At Banks I turned east and followed the Middle Fork of the Payette into Garden Valley, a small  and handsome valley flanked with rounded hills of conifers and sage. Ranch country in the past, now given over mostly to vacation homes.

In 1979, when the ranches were still holding on, Mike’s grandfather (my cousin Kristen’s husband Mike), bought an acre on the river, far up the valley, about seven miles past the town of Crouch. There had been talk of building a dam and filling the valley with a reservoir. A developer even built a golf course up on the side of the valley and called it Terrace Lake, but the dam never happened and today the golf course doesn’t live up to its name.

Eventually Mike’s grandfather built an A-frame shack, and for forty years the family has spent summer weekends on the river, and sometimes they come up in winter too and bring snowmobiles. The shack is untenable now, partially destroyed by a flood some half dozen years ago, but worn down too by time and entropy. The family brings up a small trailer each summer, mows a portion of the rough grass in amongst the lodgepole pines and bushes, then puts up a canopy by the porch of the shack, where they keep coolers and cooking supplies and a stereo. There’s electricity, a fire pit too, but the septic system is currently inoperative. Mike plans to dig it up by hand this summer. The place is raggedy and ramshackle and pretty, and it’s easy to see how one could get attached.

Later, others bought pieces of land around them, and now their parcel is in a neighborhood of a dozen fancy houses, most with huge garages bigger than the companion houses (for RVs, boats, ATVs, trucks, etc.). The grounds of the houses are well manicured, with green close-cut lawns and bits of yard statuary. Mike’s family mows the waist high wild grasses on their plot once or twice a summer, some of it…. People stop by regularly and offer to buy the land, but the answer is no. Kristen said, “We’re the white trash; the neighbors don’t like us, but we have the best spot.” She and Mike and Rylee come up often, and someday they hope to build another house on the land.

I fit my van in between a pair of trees to take advantage of the shade. Rosemary and uncle Mike had already arrived pulling her trailer. Mike’s truck and Shaun’s car were parked off to one side…. The afternoon was hot again, ninety or so. Rylee and Shaun were playing with water guns by the river, and then Shaun jumped off the small bridge that crosses just upstream, though the depth isn’t more than four feet. I got out in the water and stood waist deep in the middle of the fast stream, just able to hold my position. The river was cold but just short of painful….

Around five we all piled into Mike’s truck and drove down the valley to Crouch, a small westerny town, with a general store catering to locals but most of the rest of the businesses—shops and restaurants housed in wood, false-fronted buildings—are for visitors. The town was crowded for the evening’s Fourth of July Festivities, which started with a parade but which was really about a self-service fireworks free-for-all….

The parade was short, a few women on horses, the county commissioner in an open Mercedes, the local governmental entities such as the police in their vehicles, with passengers throwing handfuls of candy out the windows. But water was the theme and star of the parade. A couple buses from rafting companies passed, crowded on top with young people who doused the crowd with water guns and water balloons. This is tradition, and many of the spectators had brought their own water weaponry for fighting back…. Last came a large fire truck, with a firefighter on top wielding one of the big hoses. The water was too powerful to train directly on the crowd, so he shot it up into the air, and thick waterfalls rained down on the street and the people….Such water profligacy was limited to just a portion of the parade route on the edge of town (assuming, I suppose, that not everyone wanted to get wet through), and all the kids went pelting down the street for the water truck, including Shaun with Rylee by the hand…. When the water show ended, and with it the parade, the small town was full of dripping kids and teenagers….

We ate dinner on the deck of one of the restaurants, and before long the real show started. Crouch blocks off the street in the main part of town, a stretch only about a block long with a sort of bay of pavement midway. This street space is given over to setting off fireworks; almost everyone in the crowd of a thousand or so was both participant and spectator. People set up their lawn chairs along the verge of this space, and pulled fireworks from kids’ wagons, from big cardboard boxes, from backpacks and bags. Some moved out into the middle of the street to set off an item, but others went out just a few feet, and sometimes a ground piece would come spinning into the crowd and everyone would scatter, laughing. A constant stream of amblers moved along the edges, sometimes dodging packs of firecrackers and “flowers” and bottle rockets and cones, and all sorts of other fireworks the names of which I do not know.

The unorganized show started slow, a couple hours before dark, and early on many of those setting up and setting off the fireworks were children, usually but not always aided by an adult. In the early part of the evening Shaun and Rylee worked together, but she wasn’t allowed to stray far from the edge. We were situated in the bay, the widest part of the arena, just up the street from a closed, one-pump gas station. I guess they shut everything off, but I don’t know.

The air filled with the smell of gunpowder, and white smoke drifted about. The occasional smoke bomb, orange or purple, would more fully obscure the staging ground.

A stand just behind us was selling one dollar cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and next to the beer was a bandstand occupied by a group of post-sixty men playing rock and country standards. But the whistling and sputtering and explosions of the fireworks, as well as the cheers of the crowd, mostly drowned them out. And periodically a loud boom would rent the air, coming from somewhere behind the buildings across the street. The second time, uncle Mike said, “That’s enough of that.” But the sonic concussions were repeated every fifteen minutes or so, each time making me and most of the crowd duck and flinch. “Mortar!” Shaun yelled in my ringing ear.

A group of uniformed men from the local sheriff’s office hung about in a cluster across the street, but they apparently condoned any and all sort of fireworks practice. Myself, I thought it bad form when a person would shoot a roman candle on a level across at the crowd on the opposite side, but maybe these were accidental firings (“Keep your arm up!” was a common refrain). Rylee had a small, lit roman candle in each hand when someone spoke to her from behind; she turned and the candles turned and with her, and lowered as she lost focus, and a ten-year-old boy just barely danced out of the way of a shooting green ball of fire. A man exclaimed, with great admiration, “whoa, dude, that was so Matrix.” Encouraged, the boy re-enacted his move several times.

After the sun set the pace quickened. At any one moment at least a dozen people were out on the staging ground along the street, more coming and going, and fireworks overlapped, and sometimes those lighting a fuse got caught up in the shooting sparks of another firework.  There was always something to look at, fireworks big and small exploding, some on the ground, some shooting up head high, some spinning in a green glow and bouncing off the power lines, some sailing far into the twilight sky and exploding…. A mesmerizing scene.

As full dark fell, the crowd grew thicker and older and rowdier. Some people on the edge would light hand-held items and throw them out indiscriminately, apparently blind to the person kneeling down to light something, and whom the flung piece would come to a rest and explode beside.  I was on the front line, and I disapproved of the people who would throw things over my shoulder. Sensing movement, I turned around just in time to see a young woman in a sun dress take three running steps and throw something…but it slipped out of her hand and suddenly white sparks were dancing all about her feet and a bit about mine too.

A young unshaven man  in a ball cap, standing beside me, put a bottle rocket in his mouth and moved as if to light it. A girl stepped up close to him and said forcefully, “No!” He took it out of his mouth, pausing, but his male friends egged him on, and he put it back in his mouth and lit it. Luckily, it shot off as it’s supposed to, rather than blowing up in his face; but the sparks from ignition sprayed into his left eye and he bent over with his hands over his face. But no real damage, it turned out. An older man in the crowd stepped over to him and said, “Don’t do that again.” This incident convinced me to move back into the second tier of the crowd, with a line of bodies to protect me. Well, that and a mis-explosion a few minutes before that had peppered my forehead with fiery pellets—from something that was supposed to go up but went sideways instead. After that I put on sunglasses.  Also a hat. Cinders were floating down out of the sky with a disturbing regularity.

Shaun and Mike began to work in earnest, a determined team, putting out the large fireworks they had purchased. They were fearless, striding out into the middle, crushing under their feet the spent cardboard tubes and cartridges… and after lighting their fuses dashing back through the smoke, zigzagging as other fireworks would suddenly ignite in their path…. It seemed miraculous that they could arrive back to safety each time unscathed….

A group of men and women in their twenties suddenly arrived, after dark, carrying big packs, and one could tell right off that they were serious. Five of the men took large boxes, each about two feet square, and placed them in a circle out amongst the rubble and detritus of the night’s prior fireworks. These  were bigger than any before, and we would get them all at once…. The men squatted down in unison and lit their fuses, then ran for the edge of the crowd. After an anticipatory moment, great balls of orange fire began to shoot from each box, screaming hundreds of feet up and exploding in splashy patterns, filling the sky over the town. All necks were craned and people shouted and cheered with pleasure as the colored light shone and flashed on their faces….

The fireworks went on and on, the supply seemingly limitless…. Up and down the street, people lit fuses, jumped away, stood and watched what they had set off…. Rosemary said, over and over, “I’ve never seen anything like this…. This is amazing.” Mike said that this is pretty much how it is every year in Crouch on the Fourth of July.

It was still going on when we trudged up the hill out of town to where Mike had parked the truck. After four uninterrupted hours my eyes were burning from all the smoke, and my lungs ached, and my ears were ringing. I stopped and turned around every time something big went off back behind us in town, not wanting to miss anything, but tired too and ready for to get back to camp and fall into bed….

The trouble with re-caps

Grandpa was in the therapy room when I arrived, on the bicycle with ten minutes of his twenty minute session still to complete. I pulled up a stool and sat down, but he didn’t notice me at first; he doesn’t seem to have very good peripheral vision, and his hearing is such that he doesn’t immediately detect the small sounds of another’s presence. I scooted up into view and he stopped pedaling to talk, but after a moment he started moving again. He kept pausing when he talked, and I was nervous that the therapist would come over and say something. Not a reprimand but some sort of gentle encouragement that would embarrass us both….

When he was finished, the therapist brought over a new type of walker (new to him), one with four wheels instead of two. She convinced him to take a walk outside; I returned to his room and sat reading a book. I don’t like to compete with the therapists for his attention, plus I have to socialize with them. Grandpa inevitably names my hometown and profession, and then they want to tell me how they are horrible writers, and what can I say to that, an admission I have heard far too many times….

They were gone much longer than I expected, and when they finally came into the room, the therapist said, “Well, thanks, Pat, for that trip down memory lane.” She leaned over, bent towards him as she spoke, a form of body language common among the staff when dealing with the elderly residents. He introduced me to her, and she told me her name was Melissa. She had a blonde bob, a wedding ring on her finger, and after Grandpa stated my key identifying characteristics she went for geography over job. “I’m from South Dakota,” she told me, and I asked where, and she said I probably wouldn’t know it, but I was up for the challenge, and she was wrong: Milbank, in the northeastern corner of the state, yes, I’ve been there. Though I admit it runs together in my mind with a number of other large small towns in eastern South Dakota.

“I was back there for my high school reunion,” she said, “last year, and I was surprised at the accents, you know, they all sound like that movie Fargo.” She doesn’t think she has it anymore. “But sometimes my husband will make fun of me, especially when I say ‘about.’” She laughed, and I smiled, and Grandpa said, “Well, you have to be from somewhere.”  Yes, I thought, good point.

Melissa repeated her “memory lane” line before she left, and apparently Grandpa was warmed up. “I spoke to your mother this morning,” he said. Recounting that conversation, which was about her coming to visit, got him talking about schedules, and that led eventually to him asking when I started teaching again, and that brought him to when he had first started school. “You know,” he said, “I didn’t start until I was seven.” The topic progression wasn’t rapid, but it was sure and inevitable: all roads lead back to his youth, to the 1920s and 1930s.

“Mom had kept me out of school, there was some sort of sickness, I think it was whooping cough” (he pronounced “whooping” without the “w”).  But in the fall of 1927 he was allowed to begin. “That school was at the Catholic church, which was on the other side of town from our house. This was in Greeley…. That first day I wasn’t in any rush, I sort of took my time getting there… dawdled, you might say…. And when I got there I finally went in, and all the kids were in the room and there was Chuck was sitting right in the middle at a desk.” He laughed; Chuck was his brother and two years younger. “Mom couldn’t keep him at home, he’d thrown a fit and said he was going. So she brought him, and the nun said, that’s okay, he can stay.” Grandpa laughed again. “So Chuck and I had the same first day of school.”

But Chuck didn’t stick. He soon discovered school wasn’t as fun as exciting as he’d been led to expect. “Course, I was older than all those kids. After a few months the nun said, you can go on up, and  I was jumped a grade.” A few years later he was promoted another grade, and then he was with kids his own age.  “I graduated high school in 1938,” he said. “But Chuck, he never did finish, or at least not till after the war. Same with Jimmy” (another brother). They both joined the military, or were called up, during their senior years. Chuck was a medic in Europe, mostly Italy, I think, and the story is he left with brown hair and came back with white. Jimmy was sent to the South Pacific.

Chuck sailed from Portland, on a big troop ship. “We drove over there to see him off,” Grandpa said. “Mom and me, and Jeanette” (his sister). I wondered about that drive, both coming and going, what they had all been thinking, especially his mother, Liz. But Grandpa didn’t say anything about that. Instead he told how when they got back, he’d been leaving the house in New Plymouth to walk to the store where he worked, just a few blocks away, when he noticed what looked like something on one of the back tires. It was the tube showing through the worn tread. “I don’t know how we got home,” he said.

“I had bought a pair of tires for that car, just before they started the rationing.” He shook his head. “I should’ve bought four…. I don’t know why I didn’t.” The regret remains palpable in his voice, seventy years later. “Once they was rationing you could only get those recaps. But they weren’t much good. They tended to fall apart….” He went on to tell about getting a set of tires re-capped down in Boise—“that Firestone place is still there, over on Fairview”—but they over-heated them in the process, or something like that, and the tires failed after only a hundred miles. He’s had a poor opinion of both re-caps and Firestone ever since.

I left soon after his dinner came. I gave him an awkward hug as he sat in his wheelchair, then put a hand on his frail and bony shoulder. He told me to “Be careful,” then said it again as I walked out through the door of the room.

Jennie Lake

The path rose steadily, five miles and 2100’ up to Jennie Lake. A small and noisy and beautiful stream, Bear Creek, ran along the bottom of the narrow valley, down to my right, shaded by lodgepole pine and douglas fir and choked with deadfalls. The morning was cool and sunny, a relief after the ninety degree heat of Boise, sixty miles to the south. The air was sweet with the smell of the conifers.

I had come up into the mountains to try out another backpack, one Jenifer had sent me from home. It’s smaller and lighter, plus I had culled gear and switched to a lighter sleeping back and cut back on the amount of food…. The weight of the pack was 28 pounds, and the hiking experience heading uphill was significantly different than when I  left Kennedy Meadows carrying 47 pounds….

But the pack wasn’t a perfect fit…. I had the waist belt cinched in as far as it would go, and I needed a little more. I spent much of the hike scheming how I would send it back and exchange the large for a medium; I considered all the different ways I might get a new pack back within a couple days….

Jennie Lake was small and pretty, at the foot of Wolf Mountain, a rocky eminence scattered with patches of snow. The biggest patch, a wide chute of snow, fed the tiny stream that ran down into the lake. Around the lake more mounds of snow lay in the shade of the pines and spruce and fir trees. A western tanager, orange and yellow, appeared in one of the trees just a few feet from me. The hike to Jennie is apparently popular, and there were several well-used campsites around the lake, but I saw no one on my Monday outing.

I took my rest at one of the sites, on the far side of the lake by the inlet stream. Four medium-sized trout swam over the riffle at the mouth of the stream and hid themselves under a shady cut in the embankment…. Packless, I walked up to the snowfield. The snow was littered with broken spruce bows, evidence of winter avalanches. The ground where the snow had recently melted was still torn and muddy, but a bit of greenery was beginning to intervene…. 

Back at the campsite, I sat in the sun and read a few pages of Far From the Madding Crowd, then tried out the water filter I’d bought at REI earlier in the week. It’s the same sort as Swiss Army used to treat a liter of water for me at Death Canyon Creek a couple weeks ago. It worked well. I gave the stove a go, too, since it hadn’t worked the last time I tried, and here also I experienced success. I made a cup of tea and sat down on a log and returned to Hardy, till I had finished the first half of the book. The second half waits in one of the re-supply boxes….

I felt satisfied with the hike and my gear, and I felt optimistic about returning to California and the Sierras and the Pacific Crest Trail…. I’m thinking about leaving Boise on Friday, hopefully leaving the van at Heleen and Tom’s near Bishop (I have to write and ask), then taking to the trail on Sunday…. That’s a tentative plan, but then my plans have changed and changed again over the last month….

Craftsman

In the morning I gave up my usual walk and instead mowed Grandpa’s lawn, using Rosemary’s electric mower and three long power cords. The grass was thick and tall, and it took me four hours. Each bit had to be gone over twice, and much moving of power cords was involved.

For the past two weeks, there have been nearly daily discussions about the yard (the man who last mowed hadn’t return numerous phone calls). Mike and Rosemary fretted, Grandpa fretted, but no one could agree on a solution….

In the evening, at Rosemary’s, we had an impromptu meeting about what to do about the lawn going forward. The electric mower didn’t seem a long-term solution. Rosemary had talked with Grandpa earlier in the day. “He said to go out and buy a new push mower, a gas one,” she told us. There’s a rider mower in the lower garage, but it’s in pieces, as he’d been the midst of a repair the week he fell and broke his hip. I suggested we call Sears (the rider mower is a Craftsman) and have someone come out and fix it. Mike said he could take care of that.

Rosemary said, “But Dad thinks he’s going to fix it himself when he gets home. He wants me to get a railing put up on those steps down to the garage. He told me to call the guy who did the railing in the bathroom, but he can’t remember his name…. It’s probably written down on some scrap of paper somewhere in the house…. But I told him, you’re not going to be able to work on the mower. I told him, you’re not going to be doing that sort of work at least till next summer. And I didn’t say it, but probably never.”

This last took us off on whether he could live at the house alone, as he would like but which doesn’t seem possible, and what are the other options…. But we came back to the mowing, which oddly seems the most pressing of all the challenges facing Grandpa and the family, and for which, like all the others, there seems no easy solution….

The possibility of getting a neighbor kid involved was considered, but such a kid is only theoretical; a lawn service company was an option, but Grandpa wouldn’t pay what they would charge. A new mower seemed silly, I said, bringing us back to the starting point. Why not just spend that money getting the rider mower repaired.

“The thing is,” Rosemary said, “it’s not just a matter getting it fixed. He doesn’t think anyone else is capable of operating the mower.” She laughed, frustrated. “He thinks only he can do it, but even if that was true, and it’s not of course, he’s not going to be able to do anything like that this summer.”

So he doesn’t trust anyone else to do something only he, he thinks, knows how to do properly, but the task is something he no longer can do…. Stalemate.

Kristen, Rosemary’s daughter, said, “Just get it fixed and do the mowing, and don’t even tell him.” Rosemary and Mike just shook their heads and smiled humorlessly.

“First,” Rosemary said, “he has to pay for it. I can’t sign checks for him. Second, you won’t have to deal with him….”

After dinner—cheeseburger pie, a lovely casserole—I went to see Grandpa at the rehab center. Before I  left, Rosemary said, “See if you can talk him into getting the rider mower fixed. Give it a try.”

I’ve been reluctant to take on such responsibility, but I did try, sort of. I told him I had done the mowing, and he shook his head at the thought of the electric mower. I said, “maybe we could get someone out to fix that rider mower in the garage….” But he countered with the same arguments against, saying no one else knew what to do with it, that he’d take care of the job himself, and it would only take an hour or so for him to get it back together….

I didn’t argue. In the end, he’s not going to get what he wants, but I don’t want to be the one to tell him.