My dad, Mike, and his father, Ancel, used to take horseback trips up Mt. Rainier. They slept in a canvas tent, threw rocks into Mystic Lake, and once watched from a distance as an avalanche crashed down the cliffs of Willis Wall. His mom, Ruth, had curly hair and wide, round hips. She sewed pillow cases out of old flour sacks and baked red velvet cake. She grew a garden and canned green beans.
He camped with his parents in their small Apache tent trailer. Sometimes they traveled to high, cold places. Sometimes snow fell at night, while inside the gas lantern hissed and glowed. Wrapped in a sleeping bag with a Hardy Boys novel, my dad was happy. I mean, so safe and happy and whole.
Some of this might be wrong. I wasn’t there. I can’t tell you exactly how life was for my dad when he was a boy. I can tell you that his childhood memories glow like that gas lantern. They are golden with rubies. They levitate. They hum.
Here’s what happened: Ruth died. That’s when the lantern ran out of gas, and that warm, comforting light succumbed to the cold that had always been pushing at the walls and creeping through the cracks.
Ancel, overcome with grief, sold every square inch of their land for nearly nothing and moved with my dad into a little trailer. He didn’t hold onto a few acres to one day give his only son. He threw it all away.
Here’s a summary of how things went after that: He went to college and met my mother. They both dropped out of school to get married, had four children (I was the first) and eventually, for a number of complicated reasons, got divorced. Well, I should say that my mother left him. During the same time Ancel dide. Dad went a little crazy with sadness, and was fired soon after from his job as a heavy equipment mechanics instructor at the local community college. Eventually he got married again, had a fifth child and divorced again.
Over the years he was fired from a string of low-paying jobs and lived in a series of dreary, cluttered duplexes, apartments and houses. He held onto objects that reminded him of better days. Empty paint cans, stacks of newspapers and hard-boiled egg slicers. There were wrenches, old boxes of nuts and bolts and a motorcycle parked in the living room with pizza boxes and banana peels balanced on the seat. Somewhere beneath it all, tragically lost and reeking with decay, was a dish of rotten broccoli. He rented storage units and filled them with stuff, and all the time he fantasized about leaving it behind.
He always longed for a feeling of coziness in a world that too often left him feeling exposed and uncared for. Since I can remember he talked of building a tiny, one-room log cabin deep in the forest, or converting an old school bus into a miniature home. His plans always included a prominent wood stove where he could build a “roaring fire.” It would be cold outside, but he would have hot chocolate and bed socks. He would be warm and protected.
Eventually Dad found himself hopelessly unemployed along with thousands of others in a failing economy. He lost his house and rented a little upstairs bedroom, which he named “the nook,” in his ex-wife’s home. It smelled like dust and cat urine and cigarette smoke. The place was dark and mean, and he sunk in up to his neck there. He watched television, ate chocolate chip cookies and breakfast sausage for a couple of years until, at nearly 400 pounds, he was unable to do most work. “It is decidedly difficult for me to tie my own shoes,” he told me. He lost a few teeth and a little more hair.
When his unemployment money dried up and the ex-wife threatened to throw him out, he used his last bit of savings to go to truck driving school. He had worked for years fixing big trucks, and knew perfectly well how to drive them. He aced the course, but just before graduating and taking the job that had been offered him he rear-ended a PT Cruiser in his own beat-up car. This dented his insurance record enough to disqualify him from every truck driving job in the universe. He was uninsurable, and therefore unemployable. At this point, frankly, things were looking grim.
Months and months passed. He asked himself and he asked me, “What happened to me? I used to be successful, respected. I had a big family and a good house. How has this happened? ” He started wondering if he could qualify for disability so that he wouldn’t end up homeless. He said “People say you’re supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but what if you’re too depressed and tweaked out even to stand at all?”
It was a full year before a recruiter from a big trucking company called to offer him a job. He didn’t believe her. He said, “No, no, you don’t want me. Take another look at my record.” But she did want him. After a year with no accidents his record had cleared. At age 58 he rode a bus down to California for orientation, completed months of training during which he lived in a truck with a stranger, and finally received his own Freightliner ’09 Century with a Detroit diesel engine and a sleeper cab.
I took my two little girls to a truck stop outside of
Spokane, Washington a couple of months ago to see him as he passed through.
He is slimmer now and smiling, and conducts himself with a sense of confidence and well being that wasn’t there before.
We gave him a bag filled with home-cooked dinner, hard-boiled eggs and vegetables from our garden.
He took us out to see his truck.
As we were getting ready to leave, he told a story.
“I always leave these big curtains open so I have a view from my bed.
I travel through some pretty darn scenic territory.
One night I was down in
New Mexico when this storm blew in out of nowhere.
The rain was coming down in torrents and then it started to hail so hard it sounded like chunks of metal were falling from the sky.
The wind was rocking this thing back and forth and howling outside and I was in here with the heat cranked and I had a book with my little reading light on and, man, it was cozy.
Oh, let me tell you.
That’s the best feeling.”
