Editor's Notebooks 1991-2002: Growing up in Wyoming

Sacrificing an aspen to Apollo
     I was 11 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and I figured that plenty of people would be living there by now in pressurized trailer parks. I wasn’t especially interested in going myself, but thought that with so many leaving to colonize the solar system it might be possible to buy a tropical island for cheap where I’d write novels, practice medicine and go snorkeling a lot. I also was pretty sure I’d win the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end apartheid in South Africa.
     Everyone had big ideas then and it was a fun time to be a kid, more fun than it is now, I suspect. What do 11-year-olds aspire to these days, anyway? Getting rich has always been a popular goal and surely remains so. But aside from that, there doesn’t really seem to be any over-arching theme for dreams. It’s sort of sad and I hope I’m wrong, because far-fetched fantasies ought to be a birth-right for every child.
     I’m pretty sure, too, that my world back then was far safer than the world 11-year-olds know now, or at least is certainly seemed that way. A day after the moon landing, my best friend Cale and I were down on the river bank a thousand yards from my family’s house, thoroughly caught up in the excitement of what had happened. To commemorate the occasion we carved a message in the bark of a tree, something like “Yesterday, July 20, 1969 humans first landed on the moon - JCC MSW.” (It’d be fun to go back and find the tree except that we undoubtedly killed it.)
     Cale, always a bit of a prankster, joked around and said the word “help” in little more than a conversational tone of voice and about two minutes later my worry-wart dad came crashing through the brush to rescue us from the savage bear or whatever it was that had us. He was mad at us and perhaps just a little disappointed to find his heroics unneeded. Aggravating as his attention could sometimes become, it was a comfort knowing I had a dad within hearing distance if I ever really needed help. There are too many kids today who don’t have anything like that and whose troubles are much more real.
     It seems to me that the dreams and well-being of children are one of the best measures of the health of society. America is still a good place to live and there are still plenty of things to be hopeful about here. But on this little old world there are too many places without hope and even in our nation there is a poverty of dreams. Could it be that the millions we spent on the moon missions were a small price to pay for a sense of direction?



Dad and ducks
     My dad was an enthusiastic duck hunter and we boys loved going out with him, though in truth he wasn’t that great a shot. For him and for us, it was more a matter of spending time together in his old brown Ford F-250, driving down gravel roads listening to football games on poor AM stations.
     It always seemed that he ought to be better with a shotgun than he was. After all, he won fistfuls of ribbons on the Army rifle team. But boy, it sometimes appeared he was missing ducks on purpose. And you know, come to think of it, maybe that’s what he was up to. Didn’t want to clean the darn things, or just tired of blood sport.
     Before I was born, dad and his brother Giles, a dentist up in Seattle, used to hunt big game together until one day when dad’s soft heart broke over wounded deer. He never would hunt four-legged creatures after a day when he looked deep into a deer’s dying eyes. His compassion or queasiness or whatever you want to call it may have slowly extended itself to cover ducks and geese, as mine now has.
     Or maybe he just couldn’t ever quite master coming on things sideways. When hunting ducks on the fly, you have to aim for where the duck’s going to be, not where he is. But dad was direct man — some of his opponents in court and elsewhere thought he was too direct — and it may have been foreign to his nature to lead a target.
     Why ever it was, he’d go a whole season sometimes and only bag three or four ducks, and those he’d end up giving away to an old retired doctor we liked.
     Water cold as frozen liquid air seeped through our boot seams and wicked into wool socks. It was a pure sort of pain, the kind of experience that will wake you clear up, as alive as alive can be. To remind myself of those crystalline days I have only to run a finger around the rim of my ears, where frostbite has tattooed a trail of tiny scars.
     We walked all crouched over in high grass that had been dried and frozen to the point of shattering as if made from brittle tubes of old chemist’s glass. Near the water, black muck too smelly to freeze would ooze up over our boots as we broke through a crust of thickly frosted ice.
     I vividly remember the odor of that oxygenless mud mingling with the sharp acid sting of cordite as we sprang to our feet blazing away at innocent birds. About nine times out of ten, the whole flock would lunge to the left or right and fly on as little ruffled as if we had been firing on them with tennis rackets.
     To be honest, it was a thrill to see a duck tumble out of the sky after a shot. There’s something satisfying about a successful hunt, a sort of elementary feeling that, worse comes to worse, you can feed yourself and your family. Or maybe it’s just the simple satisfaction of being able to hit something, like shooting at a tin plate at the carnival midway and winning an ugly stuffed animal for your girlfriend. Or maybe, again, there’s some small hidden place in us that capers at destruction.
     Killing holds no nostalgia for me but I miss hunting, especially hunting with my dad in what already seems like a distant time. I dream of his pipe smoke still lofting around us as we stomp our feet on a frozen shore, waiting for wild ducks.



The Netty
     My grandparents’ outhouse was a strange kind of shrine, slouched back in a secluded corner of the yard next to a Russian olive tree. It was feet away from an irrigation ditch and was probably illegal as all get-out even ten or fifteen years ago. Nowadays, of course, a person can be hung and then shot for having an outhouse. (Well, that may be a little bit of an exaggeration.)
     It was strangely mysterious, all wrapped around with ivy vines. Its well-weathered wooden door had a peculiar beauty, with colored lichens brightly splashed like finger paint across its convoluted, deeply wrinkled grain.
     Part of its mystery may have come from the fact that it was not a place you wanted to get too close to on a hot summer day, for reasons best left to the imagination.
     Apart from its most obvious function, grandpa and grandma used it to store a small portion of their summer gardening tools and supplies, as it was conveniently near their acre of vegetables, flour beds and fruit trees. That pile of weird, nameless adult stuff made the “netty” a powerfully interesting place for little boys.
     Among the things stashed there were old-fashioned grass shears, the kind cast and forged from a single piece of iron that operated like the spring-grip wrist exercisers favored by high school athletes. Thinking of them brings back the sweet aroma of fresh-cut grass and memories of daddy-longleg spiders scurrying away from foundations and fence bottoms. The blades made a whistling, metallic murmur as they made the sweat and grass fly freely. How much more satisfying that sound was than the harsh insect whine of the electric string trimmers we use today.
     All this came back to mind last weekend when at a garage sale in Westport I came upon a pair of old grass shears, a little rusty but otherwise functional, at a bargain basement price of two bucks. They’ll come in handy this summer as I begin to assert some small measure of control over my unruly yard, where the moles and the dandelions play.
     And what the heck is a “netty,” anyway? It’s what my grandparents always called their outhouse, and I don’t know why, unless maybe that was the word for it back in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Battle or one of the other English towns where my family is from.
     For my part, though, as a child I always half figured that the word must have come from some by-gone time when they strung nets below the hole to keep little boys from falling in or perhaps to keep spiders from crawling out. In either case, a net often would have been a great aid to my peace of mind.



Television isn’t what it used to be, thank goodness
     We had one TV station when I was a kid, and boy, was it a sad operation! I’d pay a hundred dollars cash for a videotape of their 5 o’clock news programs, which appeared to be produced in somebody’s kitchen, with backdrops drawn with crayons and on-air “talent” apparently recruited from the junior class at the local high school.
     Years spent watching that station probably produced my long-term distaste for television, which led to my not even owning a TV set for years before and after moving here to southwest Washington. But then my mom went and bought me a used J.C. Penney’s TV and my downhill slide into video addiction began.
     My house came with a big old satellite dish and receiver. Unfortunately, someone had fiddled with it years ago and about the only channels it picks up are devoted to home shopping and TV evangelists, which in my view amount to one and the same thing.
     I went out weekend before last and bought a new DIRECTV satellite unit and now have, I guess, something in excess of 100 channels from which to choose. Maybe it’ll seem as quaint and obsolete 20 years from now as that little one-horse station I grew up with, but for now I’m pretty blown away by the sophistication of the whole thing.
     For one thing, all the pictures and sound are crystal-clear, unlike KCOW or whatever my childhood station was called, which looked like it was being broadcast from the moon during a snowstorm. For another, it comes with its own electronic program guide. For another, it allows you to order recent movies directly from home.
     One of its chief disadvantages (aside from cost, which is kind of painful), is that most of the network channels originate in the eastern time zone, meaning prime time shows come on three hours earlier than we’re accustomed to here and there’s no regional or local news.
     The DIRECTV company currently is investigating which new channels to add, and let’s hope they provide more network options, perhaps including stations from Seattle and Portland, and more from the mountain time zone which would give a 7 to 10 p.m. prime time for all us “country folk” for whom 11 p.m. often seems too late to stay up.
     This time of year it doesn’t take much will power to turn off the set and instead spend the time reading or watching the sunset, but come January I’m going to be mighty happy to have this new satellite link with the outside world. Despite all the doom and gloom that some people love spout, in many ways this is sure an amazing time to be alive.



Crossing the bridge
     It’s funny how some little thing can set a dozen unrelated memories rippling across your mind, crossing and overlapping from a lifetime of commonplace experiences.
     Going across the Interstate Bridge in Portland last Tuesday, hard sunshine pierced through the steel girders like a strobe light and suddenly I was back on the Indian reservation where I spent my early boyhood, closing my eyes against the sun flashing from between tall rows of Chinese elms as my parents’ car crunched down the country road leading to the Episcopalian mission.
     Stretched like a cat in the backseat, I remember summer warmth, a gentle dust and a flashing blood-red light seen through clinched eyelids. I remember my mother’s irritation at whomever planted the elms, trash trees that grow quickly but die nearly as fast, leaving scraggly skeletons.
     From there my mind bounces back a few more years, to my baptism in that same mission. I remember the comfortable, dusky darkness of the place, with its gruesomely uncomfortable pews made from hand-peeled lodgepole pines. Of my baptism day, I recall only the water, it’s cool touch on my head.
     My godfather Frank Rauzi, one dad’s old Army buddies, bought a $50 Savings Bond in my name to mark the occasion. Forgotten, it grew slowly as a stalagmite in my parents’ dresser drawer until in my 20s I cashed it to buy food for a long backpacking trip with my brother in the high mountains.
     And from there, my mind splashes back to drives along country roads with my dad, who would have been 84 last Wednesday, if tobacco hadn’t chopped a dozen good years off his life. I remember my rambunctious joy at being pulled down a frozen road on my new Christmas sled, tied behind his old green and white Jeep, steering the runners around patches of bare gravel, dizzy with pleasure at going so fast. (My dad, a worrier, probably was speeding along at about four miles an hour.)
     My grandparents’ house was hot as a boiler room from Grandma Bell’s old wood and gas cookstove after my wild adventure on the sled, filled with the smells of turkey and gravy and damp grandkids. Grandpa told tales from the Colorado coal fields, of dynamite suspended from swaying scaffolds and of New York Yankees who made so little from baseball they spent off-seasons underground, swinging picks instead of hickory bats.
     Mom was famous for her dinner rolls, which grandma positively relished, bathing them in cheap margarine (butter was an extravagant luxury) and raspberry jam — the seeds always got stuck in her dentures but she loved it nonetheless. She was a dear woman.
     These memories are a present I give myself this Christmas season, a present I was given by a loving family and a kind world. I wish everyone a holiday season filled with memories to ripple around inside and enrich all your years.



Country roads
     Grandma and Grandpa Bell’s idea of a good time, a truly top-flight experience on which to invest a summer afternoon, was to drive deliberately around looking at “pretty farms.” They referred to these dirt-road explorations as “going up Mike’s and down Jake’s.” Who the heck Mike and Jake were, God only knew. Slow-witted guys who liked to irritate kids was my guess at the time.
     My grandparents’ affection for country roads and long conversations eventually grew on me to the point where today I see open pastures and well-tended fences as indications of a basically healthy world. Driving around with old folks looking at other people’s places is a goofy pastime, but I’d trade another five minutes with grandpa and grandma in their faded blue Jeep pickup for a lifetime of watching imaginary lives on TV, with its pumped-up starlets and car chases.
     Although I live on a lovely country lane, my two acres will never qualify as a pretty farm even if I do someday follow through on a threat to buy some chickens. But I occasionally like to flatter myself by imagining my grandparents driving slowly by, turning their heads and saying “My, what a difference Matt’s made in that place!”
     Other family and roads came to mind this spring as my girlfriend Donna and I went garage-saling in what little remains of “the country” in southwestern King County. From the waters of Puget Sound up to the ordinary snow line up on the Cascade foothills, there soon won’t be anywhere without a whole mess of houses. It’s kind of amazing, especially when I think back to how it all looked less than 20 years ago.
     Red-wing blackbirds, cattails, rusty barbwire and gangly alders populate my imagination as I remember the road out to Longacres, where Uncle Frank initiated me into the secrets of horse racing during the steamy 1980 season. Western Washington’s old thoroughbred track may be my ultimate “pretty farm,” a storybook place of gardens, shady tables, and whitewashed posts and rails.
     With his cigarette smoke, raspy laugh and well-thumbed racing form, Uncle Frank was (and is) a prime example of old-fashioned good character, an elderly grocer with brittle bones but strong opinions. His and Aunt Lucille’s house above Elliott Bay in West Seattle will always feel like a home and sanctuary to me. Frank would come from there and I from Gig Harbor on race days to meet at South Center and drive that still-pastoral road out to the track, where he inevitably made money and I, just as inevitably, lost it.
     All this came back a couple weeks ago as Donna and I accepted an invitation to visit Emerald Downs, the new track that opened last year to replace Longacres, which fell victim to Boeing’s need for more office space. Near a former farm now occupied by the Super Mall of the Northwest, Emerald Downs needs about 40 years of patina before it can really aspire to anything like the grand sense of tradition engendered by its predecessor. If Longacres was a horsy Fenway Park, Emerald Downs is like the Kingdome — clean, modern and convenient, but with all the charm of a well-maintained Laundromat. (But oh what a view there is of Mt. Rainier from Emerald Downs — it’s worth the three-dollar admission just to sit in the grandstand and drink up the scenery.)
     Never much of a gambler (or at least not a successful one), it’s the mud and the animals that appeal to me most about racetracks. Sweet grass and horse sweat — more boyhood memories, this time of our damned old half-wild nag, galloping hell for leather with me and my little brother not enjoying it a bit. But of all the ways anyone has been able to think of to separate fools from their money, horse racing is the one that feels most sincere. Not necessarily honest, mind you, but sincere — it has a feeling of reality and participation. This is totally at odds with Las Vegas, for instance, where the goal seems to be to make people feel as though they’re in a dream, where the money they’re losing isn’t real. It’s hard to imagine any horse racing track remaining financially viable in this modern world where too many people prefer their pleasures pasteurized. Maybe that’s what Emerald Downs is trying for, a processed experience comfortable to city dwellers.
     Grandpa used to assert that most people lack a crucial connection to our world, although he’d never put it as pretentiously as that. What he’d say is that people nowadays don’t know that hamburger comes from cows — they think it just appears like magic in a back room of the supermarket, where it’s wrapped in clear plastic and delivered to the meat counter. Grandpa knew the importance of reality, of knowing where you are in the world, of how we rely on our neighbors and how they rely on us. Enjoying a pretty farm isn’t simply about taking comfort in the company of family, it’s about respecting the hard work of others. The real world of good grass, horse sweat and country roads is still alive here in our corner of the country. Take a drive and see it for yourselves.



Pete and Pluma
     Pluma Facinelli is a six-foot woman of 96 who’s now outlived by 15 years the last of her seven husbands, Pete. She’s a beautiful lady who made me polenta as a boy under the distinctly mistaken impression I like that ill-begotten corn muck, but I love her anyway.
     Pete Facinelli was a World War I veteran and a hard-rock miner, which, as all miners know, is the very toughest and most ingenious kind of man. He and my equally strong and short Grandpa Bell (height is not a sought-after attribute underground) used to sit nursing their nasty old Roi-Tan cigars all afternoon, sharing stories with we kids about the rowdy days in the gold and coal mining camps of the West.
     Pete and Pluma were a constellation in my life from very earliest times, a paradigm of successful life. No, they didn’t have a lot of money or go on cruises or, so far as I know, ever visit a foreign country after Pete stepped back off the ship in 1918. But they lived snug and warm as plump old badgers in their den.
     On Saturday nights up into their 80s they’d climb into their vast black Chevy and slowly motor to a local supper club. When the band started up at 9 they’d take to the floor, dancing close with Pete’s face planted squarely in the midst of Pluma’s ample bosom. On Sunday they’d join my family at our sprawling frontier gold mine, The Duncan, in the high borderland between the mountains and desert.
     There, we’d all sit around a big table of rough-cut boards and eat Grandma’s good home-raised fried chicken, Pluma’s vegetables from the garden, a Jell-O salad, Mom’s fresh-baked rolls and pie for dessert. The adults might have a Miller High-Life, kept icy cold in the artesian spring that ran just outside the cookhouse door. We laughed and talked, then walked in the hills or gathered firewood before reading and napping till dusk.
***
     The past that we experience as kids always is a little (or a lot) more idyllic than it probably really was for the adults living at the time, with their concerns about bills, ills and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But even taking rose-colored glasses into account, I think those were exceptionally good times and that Pete and Pluma truly were a shining example of how to live.
     They surrounded themselves with people they loved, ate fresh food out of their garden in season and canned shelves full of food for winter, and dealt with cruel indignities of failing health with good humor and tenacity. They talked, they danced and I have a crazy notion that they may even have made love.
     They didn’t need a book to tell them how to live but in these modern days when younger people are so often cut off from good examples, many of us can stand to learn that old age doesn’t have to be feared.
     Old age should be a time to celebrate life’s accomplishments while still looking forward to tomorrow. Clearly, many people like Pete and Pluma manage great lives in their older years, and never before has old age been so full of possibility and promise.
     Pete and my Grandpa used to sometimes say on their bad days that “Getting old is hell,” but they had more good days than bad ones. They lived well into their 80s and died doing what they wanted to do. What more can you ask?



Christmas tree
     The snow was so deep my daddy lopped the top eight feet off a 30-foot lodgepole pine and we used it for a Christmas tree.
     The cold was so deep tears froze on the edges of eyes like slush on a windshield. The cold was so strong the aromas of pine and sage coalesced into transparent aerosol curtains wavering in the air: Walking across a windswept clearing, there would be a total absence of scent for five minutes and then a sudden rush of compressed sensation, as if a beautiful woman wearing subtle perfume just hurried past on a garden path.
     And then nothing again, nothing that is but black ridges of rock, swirling snow, the encircling mountains, the noise of labored breathing, the whistle of wind and a low squawk made by compacting profoundly frozen snow underfoot, a sound reminiscent of the subliminal groans a glacier makes as it so slowly and monstrously slips down a steep valley.
     There were two wintertime temperatures in my little mountain cabin: Tomb-like chill and furnace hot. The only heat source was an ancient but well-preserved Great Majestic wood-burning range. After trudging across snowdrifts and digging down to reach the front door, the first priority was jump-starting a fire with lamp oil and pinecones. Within half an hour, off came the coats. Within two hours, you could grow palm trees and baby snakes, but comfortably settled on hot chocolate made from snow-melt water.
     I look back and think how lucky I was to have a little place of my own in the mountains of my childhood and adolescence, a refuge for throwing myself against the wilderness, shooting .22s at beer cans, and hiding Playboys. It was nothing but a tarpaper shack set six feet back from a gravel road, a humble miner’s home from a long-gone gold rush. But when you’re 15, privacy is more precious than a palace.     
When we were both in our 20s, my younger brother Andy and I came home from college for the holidays and drove the 35 twisting miles up to the cabin to go skiing for a couple days and see our reclusive but kind cousin Bob, who never has relinquished his teen-age need for lots and lots of space.
     With the simple-minded arrogance of youth, we didn’t so much as listen to a weather forecast before going up. And of all the many blizzards I’ve seen, the one that blew up that Dec. 23rd was maybe most memorable.
     Gulf coast people who ignore evacuation notices and sit out hurricanes talk long afterward of passing some marker in the night when the roaring horror going on around them stopped being interesting and exciting and started being scary. I’m just dumb enough, in a way, that I’m close to incapable of physical fright. It’s not courage; just an absence, kind of like how I imagine it might be like to be colorblind or deaf. It’s made for an interesting life, but also gotten me into plenty of tight spots — balancing on a teetering pile of scree below Aconcagua, flirting with pretty girls in a black after-hours joint in Denver. Like I said: dumb, not brave.
     But that December night in the mountains, I believe I was scared.
     My god, how it screamed, and it was nearly dark at noon that day as snow hurled past at 80 miles an hour. The old Majestic drew so fast it glowed, burning wood quick as we could shove it in. It was a mean drunk sort of a storm, the kind that sucker punches strangers out of an unthinking need to see blood.
     But the roof stayed on and the wind died at dawn on Christmas eve. We wallowed out through the crusted snow to my little car and navigated around drifts as far as the highway, only to have to turn around when it proved impassable. After thawing at the old Atlantic City Mercantile, we finally managed with help to make it to the guard shack of a still-operating iron mine, where hours later highway crews cleared the road, getting us home for Christmas.     My own little girl Elizabeth is popping with joy at this, the first Christmas she may remember. Though only two-and-a-half, she has an astonishing memory and is hard at work on the English language. (She hurt her hand in a Portland hotel elevator two months ago, but reminds us each day that she, undaunted, again wants to “Ride the alligator.”)
     Much to her mom’s dismay, she’s eating ornaments off the tree, which I must admit that in these softer times I bought at Rite-Aid in Warrenton instead of following my dad’s rugged example.
     Basking in this week’s splendid, inexplicable, supernatural Christmas-time sun on the Northwest coast, I’m oh-so glad those blizzardy days are just a nostalgic recollection.
     But I’ll always miss that little tarpaper cabin.



Ditch
     Startled into an inopportune jump by our passage, a grasshopper struggled for life on the water’s surface — kicking, kicking, kicking — around in a circle forever.
     Vivid tufts of thick green pasture grass slid by a foot to our left, a foot to our right, as we drifted down a deep, steep-sided irrigation ditch, the drone and clank of a hay baler wafting through the July air. Our often-patched inner tubes had great goiter-like swellings where the rubber had weakened. We were cranky, not particularly having fun, but what are 8-year-old boys going to do in midsummer in the middle of nowhere?
     Carl Corbett was my friend that afternoon inner-tubing in a cool, muddy ditch, and I think he’s been dead 30 years of some forlorn congenital disease. “Friend” might be overstating our relationship, as he was a little mean; now I understand why — I’m all for shielding children from knowledge of mortality, especially their own.
     Carl and his brother and their dad lived in a rundown three-room cowboy shack near us just inside the eastern edge of the Wind River Indian Reservation, on the ramparts of one of the West’s most spectacular mountain ranges. Too bad you can’t eat scenery. I realize now the Corbetts probably were quite poor, and it must have been a hell of thing to raise two boys, one ailing, on the income of a ranch hand.
     Their yard was ringed by alfalfa. The air was sweet and filled with bees. I remember stings, and sheets of beeswax impressed with delicate octagons, which were placed into thin wood boxes to serve as foundations for honeycombs.
     What a very strange thing it is to die young, to be forgotten, and to have your life discussed in a newspaper a thousand miles from your grave, to be thought about by strangers. Somewhere maybe Carl’s ghost stirs.     We’re having our wills done next week, overdue, motivated by a precious little girl who comes up behind me and hugging my leg says, “Daddy, you’re the best.” It kinda melts my big leathery heart. She is such a true little person, a strong and dynamic human being though only three feet tall. I adore her and I guess the feeling’s mutual.
     But if I died today, or if her Mama did, the strange perversities of human memory would likely mean Elizabeth would grow into adulthood with little or no recollection of us. All those hugs forgotten.
     Artifacts of her daddy, speaking across time: That’s what these columns about my family would become if I died. Insurance.
     Our wills will, we hope, guarantee Elizabeth’s physical well-being if we die. She’ll have loving caregivers, money and family heirlooms. But when you get down to it, memories are the only really important things any of us possess, and our ownership of them is so fleeting.
     I never had much affection for the man, but I feel a great pity and sense of loss that President Reagan should be in the straits he is. Like him or not, he participated in some of the world’s greatest events and now he can’t remember his own name. At the end of his life, he is like an orphaned child, adrift from the past and most what made him who he was, already a ghost.     My cousin Mary was in her 20s when I was a kid, her exotic beauty a bequest from her Inuit mother, from whom she also brought a taste for blubber which led her to eat the paraffin wax off the tops of home-canned jam.
     A vivacious and mischievous young woman, my seriousness was a challenge to her and she was always looking for ways to get a rise out of me, most notably by tricking me onto the scariest amusement park rides. There is an old park in Denver with a famous wooden roller-coaster where she succeeded in imprinting me with memories I hope I’ll have till I die, of screams and rushing wind and hair-pin corners and wild relief as it coasted to a stop.
     I detected some of Mary’s personality in my little 3-year-old daughter as she lured me aboard the Octopus at the Long Beach Fun Rides on Memorial Day. She squealed in pure delight as the bucket bucked and swirled in an arch through space, as her old man gripped her tight.
     God willing, her ride on the Octopus with Daddy will be part of an unbroken web of memory connecting who she is with who she will become, a soaring and fearless spirit throughout her long and rich life.



Politics, our family sport
     Politics may be a dirty word to some people, but in my family and for many of our friends when I was growing up, it was pretty much our chief recreational interest. Sitting around my grandparents’ dining table, we talked about congressmen and pending legislation like I imagine other families must talk about basketball stars and Monday Night Football.
     This isn’t to suggest that it wasn’t (or isn’t) a deadly serious and emotion-fraught subject. Mom was sitting in a restaurant once and overheard two men discussing how much they’d like to murder her brother, my uncle Tom Bell, a newspaper publisher who had the temerity to condemn landowners who poisoned and shot eagles.
     Another time, my granduncle George — a hard-line Republican — stormed into my father’s law office and announced he was “going to kill that S.O.B.,” ironically insulting his own parentage, since the S.O.B. he was referring to was his own brother — my grandfather, Lafe Bell, a lifelong member of the United Mine Workers and a true Democrat.
     Though Grandpa and his father before him had loyalties born in the hot, rough caldron of the American Labor Movement, he had a distinctly gentlemanly contempt for those who put politics ahead of good sense and good manners. “There are Republicans,” he used to say, “who if Jesus Christ was a Democrat running against a yellow dog, would vote for the yellow dog.” But he truly admired some very conservative Republicans, despite their politics, based on their honesty and humanity.
***
     I recall he wasn’t overly fond of our congressman, Dick Cheney, who as a then-young member of the U.S. House was more of a right-wing flame-thrower than the statesman he came to seem later in his legislative career and as U.S. defense secretary. Grandpa distrusted ideologues, and Cheney’s views were — and presumably still are — pretty far beyond the American mainstream in some ways.
     For all of that, Cheney is a pleasant and often impressive guy. It’s one of the advantages of Wyoming, with only about half a million people scattered around nearly 100,000 square miles of wind-swept land, that you get to know your congressional representative and senators very well. As a young political reporter for the state’s largest newspaper, I often interviewed Cheney.
     Like Al Gore, with whom I also rubbed shoulders — literally — Cheney is very fast on his intellectual feet. (Gore sidled up to me at a political rally, quizzed me about local politics and then incorporated what I told him in his speech, thus managing to sound well informed about Wyoming while flattering the only reporter in the room. I saw through it, but was slightly charmed anyway.)
     To his credit, Cheney isn’t much for sugar-coating things. His views solidly against reproductive rights for women are far outside the West’s libertarian tradition, but he always stuck to them anyway. I kind of liked him for his lack of guile, but found him a little short on humanity. Interviewing him was like going to a good dentist: You could be pretty sure he wouldn’t hurt you much, but there was no getting around the fact that he was going to poke some nerves.     People who insist on putting a rigid ideological agenda ahead of sound judgment and basic human values are in danger of dragging our nation down into the gutter. Cheney’s not exactly in that category, but he’s got some good friends who are.
     At the same time, there’s no denying that some news people contribute to our nation’s thin political skin. Our old family friend, former U.S. Senate Republican Whip Al Simpson, used to condemn the “gotcha” strategies of some reporters. During my brief foray into professional politics, he came up to me at a political function and dug his big bony elbow into my side, saying “How’s it feel to be on the other side?”
     That considered, I’ve got to conclude by saying I admire Cheney for running for vice president, for putting himself out there. It’s a mean business. I’m glad someone’s willing. I’m not.



Pluma dies
     There’s a woman named Pluma Facinelli I wish my little daughter could have known. She was my grandmother’s best friend, having been born a few months after Grandma near the turn of the last century in the same tiny village in the Wyoming mountains. Pluma died Dec. 1.
     Pluma died! These are words I can’t imagine writing. She was so strong, so full of life that her death is beyond consideration. It’s like saying the sky died, or there’ll never be another morning. If Pluma can die, then death really must not be an end, since nothing could ever stop her.
     Her innate ability to be tough without compromising her indelible humanity pretty much set my standards about what women can be, about what human beings can be. She especially deserves to be a model for girls, as she ignored obstacles of gender to live a rich and full life both in partnership with four different husbands, and on her own.
     I suppose that in a sense she was limited by her circumstances and the age in which she lived: Despite her intelligence, energy and outgoing personality, hers was a time when women were far more constrained than now in what they could aspire to be. For many years, she worked as a cook at the state home for the mentally retarded, whereas today she quite reasonably could run the place. What the heck: She could have been governor.
     But perhaps the lasting lesson of Pluma’s life is that it’s perfectly OK to be a cook. It’s OK not to have a lot of money. It’s OK to drive the same monumental old black sedan for 40 years. In fact, it’s all a lot better than OK. Lived with gusto and joy, an ordinary life can be a rich celebration.
     Obituaries don’t usually tell us much of true importance about a person, but Pluma’s is an exception. Here are some excerpts I want you to see:
     “She worked as hard as a man and could handle a team and run a buckrake better than most men.”
     I don’t think I ever saw her handle a team of horses or drive a tractor, but I remember very distinctly her mastery of the soil and every other element of the natural world. Her garden was legendary. To a little boy, it seemed vast, like something transported from the Old World. In it, delicious vegetables thrived in a harsh climate, maybe an analogy for Pluma herself.
     Many women today would bridle at the phrase “worked hard as a man,” but back in Pluma’s prime, decades before my birth, she held her own on ranches and in mining camps that would break most modern men and women in a week. In this, she was helped by her stature, well over 6 feet and still well-muscled into her 80s. But her strength came mostly from inside. There were many hard things in her life, but prevailing was an ingrained habit.
     Also from her obituary: “She married Pete Facinelli on April 24, 1950 ... They loved to dance and there was not a shindig in the area they did not attend.”
     I can’t think of Pluma without Pete, her last husband, over whom she towered by probably half a foot. He was a clever Italian hard-rock miner, my grandfather’s best friend, and fellow smoker of awful Roi-Tan cigars. He and Pluma used to dance till the wee hours, twirling around the floor with Pete’s kind grizzled face just about bosom-high.
     After he died in 1978, my brother Andy and I were out at Pluma’s small acreage getting yard chores caught up. Without a moment’s warning or preparation, she fried us up a full-scale chicken dinner for lunch, regaled us with stories and caring questions about our vapid youthful lives, and eventually sent us on our way — content and well loved.
     Really seeing people, hearing them, understanding them, helping them without standing in their way — these are gifts Pluma gave to everyone, and it was her ability to give these things that made her strong and kept her alive for 98 years.
     When she grows up, I hope my little kid can be all this and be governor, too. But if she ever has to choose between success as society defines it, and success as Pluma lived it, I pray she’ll pick Pluma’s way.
     In the end, it’s clear Pluma’s best recipe was life itself — a complex stew of conversation and solitude, hard work and dancing, laughter and mourning, mistakes and triumphs. We should all be so lucky. I think we can be, if we choose.



Meat
     Bum lambs are the sweetest little animals, it’s no wonder they’re the biblical symbol of innocence.
     Back in about 1967, Grandpa and Grandma Bell adopted three motherless newborn lambs, feeding them from a galvanized steel bucket with a rubber nipple poking out near the bottom. My, they were hungry, sucking down gallons of formula like fuzzy white vacuum pumps, and then galloping around brimful of play.
     Farms like my grandparents’ 40-acre spread once were fairly common in America. They already had retired from owning small ranches by the time I arrived on the scene, and their farming activities were devoted primarily to producing meat and vegetables for themselves, plus memorable Sunday dinners for kids and grandkids.
     Buried in that last sentence about the pastoral country life is the great paradox of farming: Real affection for animals doesn’t alter the fact they are destined to become meat, not pets. Even for old folks with decades of experience in animal husbandry — maybe even because of all that experience — it was hard sometimes to keep distance from something as joyful as spring lambs. One day the lambs were cavorting and the next they were in the old chest freezer out on the porch. I think the year they had three was the last time Grandpa and Grandma kept lambs.
     Poultry was another source of protein on the Bell farm, and also lots of humor and drama. Geese, chickens, turkeys and even Guinea fowl all contributed to the farm’s diversity. Again, they weren’t pets, and even pampered old laying hens ended up in the stewpot at some point. But Grandma fretted over them, speculated about their health and personalities, and structured a valuable part of her life around keeping them comfortable and away from marauding skunks and coyotes.
     The meanest creature I ever knew was one of Grandma’s turkeys — territorial as any guard dog — that used to keep me penned in the yard when I was 3. He ultimately made the huge mistake of bloodying Grandma’s leg, and was running headless across the farmyard by nightfall. His final revenge was being too damned tough to eat.
     All these birds and animals enriched our lives in ways funny and profound. They lived well, but died at the hands of my tender-hearted grandparents. This was difficult, yet pragmatic and appropriate. It resulted in homegrown food we knew and trusted.
     For most Americans, this model is as foreign as turning raw cotton balls into underwear or making fire with iron and flint. Even someone with my regressive notions wouldn’t suggest trying to go back to it altogether. But it is both practical and deeply necessary for us all to begin taking much more responsibility for what we eat.
     I just devoured one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, “Fast Food America,” by Eric Schlosser. This surprise bestseller outlines in stark terms the appalling true costs of a McDonald’s hamburger and other fast food, backing it up with 54 pages of detailed footnotes.
     According to Schlosser, restaurant chains and massive corporate agri-businesses have sucked all the humanity, compassion and taste out of food that is heavily processed and promoted to children and adults through cozy marketing partnerships with Disney and others. In a relentless drive for profits, these companies give no quarter to consumers, workers, animals or the environment.
     The farm and ranch way of life my grandparents practiced, with its traditions of respect for livestock and devotion to wholesome quality, is being ground up and stomped into the blood-soaked mud.
     It’s the kind of book that had me reading shocking passages out loud to my wife, and resolving to never eat another cheeseburger unless I’ve personally known the cow it’s made from.
     Schlosser’s most important underlying point, though, is that even if we can’t get our food from Grandpa’s farm, we should vote with our wallets and insist these corporations give us fresh, safe, tasty food — without abusing humans to do it.
     We aren’t cattle, and we must stop allowing ourselves to be treated like we are.



The Cases
     In my mind’s eye, George Case will always be eight feet tall. But he didn’t have NBA scouts lurking in his bushes: He only looked that tall to a 4-year-old, elevated on the platform behind his small-town pharmacist’s counter.
     Until Aunt Lucille took me into the grand old Bon Marché in downtown Seattle when I was 11, Case’s Drug Store at the corner of Third and Main in Lander, Wyo., was my peak experience of retail merchandising. Its towering racks of “jackalope” postcards, penny candy and shelves of “you break it-you buy it” gifts were — as far as I knew — completely representative of everything available for sale in the entire world. (For the uninitiated, a jackalope is a jack rabbit with antelope horns. Are they real? Only the taxidermist knows for sure.)
     If you wanted Tootsie Rolls or Butterscotch Lifesavers — and boy did I ever — you were in fine shape at Case’s Drugs. They even had fancy boxes of chocolate, though the only time I can remember my parents buying one was when four black-suited Japanese businessmen had dinner at our house, resembling nothing so much as a pod of orcas and knowing just about as much English. I liked them; they left the chocolates for me.
     I wish I had a recording of George Case’s voice. He sounded like he looked, a bald guy who favored tartans, and in his fifties you could sense his genes would carry him well along into his eighties. He had a solid legitimacy to him, sort of an unboastful intelligence that was just there, not clamoring for attention or much caring about people’s reaction.
     Marybeth, his wife, was the flamingo to George’s stork. I never saw her wearing a feather boa, but she was the kind of woman who could have carried it off in style. Energy was her middle name. Originally a school teacher, I suppose you’d call her a housewife by the time I arrived on the scene, getting up to boy stuff with her youngest son Cale. But thinking of Marybeth merely as a stay-at-home mom would be like living in Gotham City and thinking of Bruce Wayne as only a dilettante. Roaring around in her old Rambler, she held her family and hundreds of close connections together with the strength of 10.
     It was unspeakably shocking when Marybeth, much younger than George, died without warning. Maybe even more than my Dad’s death, hers shook me to the realization you really can be here today, gone tomorrow.
     Marybeth packed a lot into her time, but generally, more and more of us are awful spendthrifts with our lives. Where hers was rich in helping others, I often fear the only quality I have in abundance is selfishness. Where my parents made a box of chocolates a memorable treat, I’ve cheapened the experience — and gotten fat along the way — by buying them whenever I want. Looking back, I’m beginning to see frugality and economy make life richer.
     We have too much, and yet we don’t have enough. The great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski recently said in an interview “Except for the happy 20 percent of humanity in Europe and the United States and parts of Asia, the life of the average human being on our planet is very difficult and very harsh. For me this is the most important thing we are facing in the 21st century.”
     We Americans are as easily distracted as toddlers, and I don’t have much hope we’re suddenly going to begin caring about what goes on in Africa or Latin America. But this really is about us, not them. We will have better lives if we quit wasting so damned much of everything, including our brains, spirits and precious time.
     Why in heaven’s name do we prefer watching “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” to playing with our kids and talking to our neighbors? Why do so many of us drink ourselves into oblivion or take drugs when the world is a miracle waiting to be discovered? You can’t even call something a “drug store” anymore: We’ve corrupted its meaning beyond our parents’ imagination.
     George and Marybeth Case didn’t have time to be bored. We don’t either; we just don’t realize it.



Sourdough
     She knew her peanut butter cookies were one of my favorites and made sure I got two dozen every Christmas of boyhood until she was a very old lady and I was a very old boy. But she was mostly famous for sourdough pancakes.
     Generosity flowed through Mary Ellen Carpenter like playfulness courses through a newborn colt. A pioneer ranch woman, her gentle spirit often manifested itself in the kind of simple meals brought to perfection from the back of a roundup chuckwagon.
     In scientific terms, sourdough is a “symbiosis between yeast and lactobacilli.” In terms you and I can chew on, it’s a unique microscopic community that can live virtually forever if conditions are right. Mrs. Carpenter’s sourdough was from an unbroken line that came west on the Oregon Trail. It made mighty fine pancakes.
     One incredibly early morning of my eighth year, Dad and I drove out to the Carpenter ranch in our old Jeep and Mrs. Carpenter made me dollar-pancakes on the cookstove. Along with my grandmother’s roast beef and my mother’s rolls, those pancakes are a taste that will flash through my mind as I die.
     Then her husband Bud, my Dad and I made our way into Wyoming’s Red Desert. Out in a labyrinthine orange and ochre-colored area appropriately called the Honeycombs, I saw my first wild horse galloping full out across a nearly naked valley floor shimmering with heat mirages. Sinewy and muscular as a marathoner, his unkempt black mane flowing a good two feet behind a never-haltered neck, the herd’s lead stallion was gathering his harem with the swiftness of a summer storm.
     Their elemental grace, complete disdain for human beings and ability to disappear in a trace make them as close as I will ever come to seeing intelligent alien life.     Grace, and its absence, have been much on my mind — grace in a spiritual sense, of life lived openly, mercifully and unselfishly. Mary Ellen Carpenter had it. And I’ve been blessed, as I hope you all have, with knowing many others. My mother’s parents, Lafe and Hilda Bell. Cliff and Martha Hansen. Oysterville’s Edith Olson and Virginia Holway. Pete and Pluma Facinelli. My wife’s Aunt Doreen. Over the years, I’ve written about most of these people, but only now realize it is grace that binds together these poor miners, senators, school teachers, grandmothers.
     Maybe age needn’t be a prerequisite of grace, but most of these people are or were quite elderly when I encountered them, the fires of ego and ambition somehow partially sated. They are alike in treating each person respectfully; alike in their ability to take everyone seriously except themselves.
     Chances are much diminished for us to enjoy the company of such people and their unspoken lessons of grace. Instead of respected elders, most of what we learn today comes from the rude vacuum of TV, the empty platitudes of youth culture.
     I’ve witnessed some appalling behavior in the past week — a grandmother humiliating her granddaughter for not sitting straight in a restaurant; an angry father jerking his small daughters out of the car in which he had left them alone in a grocery store parking lot.
     You know what upsets me most? That I didn’t have the guts or gumption to stop at that little girl’s table and give her a smile and some of my daughter’s stickers; that I didn’t get in that dad’s face and tell him I took his license number and he was never, ever again to leave his little kids alone like that.
     Grace isn’t a hands-off, neutral, always feel-good proposition.
     My Uncle Tom Bell is hard in the middle of a profound form of grace, providing hospice care to his lifelong wife, my Aunt Tommie. An historian who recently also was named conservationist of the year by the National Wildlife Federation, he’s lived a life of compassion for others and political combat on behalf of the earth. It must be awful tough watching your wife die, but then he’s an awfully tough guy. It truly is grace that gives him and Tommie strength. I admire them more than I can say for their duty and devotion here at the end.
     I don’t have much grace yet. But as I make my daughter’s dollar-pancakes with rainbow cake sprinkles each morning, as I plot how she might someday see her own wild horses, as I try in minor ways to be a better husband, I think I see occasional glimmers of grace off in the distance, like a desert mirage.
     I aim to get there someday.



Small town murder
     Solving a small town murder usually is slick and quick: Look for the drunken boyfriend watching TV in the next room, or the hung-over acquaintance who left the bar with the victim the night before. With minor changes in ingredients — sex or meth instead of booze, a screwed up drug deal instead of a family fight — the end results look and feel much the same about nine-tenths of the time.
     Maybe small town folks are more shocked by a killing than city people, but just a little. Considering underemployment, boredom, intoxication, lots of firearms and fouled-up family histories, every town has a few murders quietly simmering on the stove, just waiting to bubble over. Everyone knows it. Kind of surprising they don’t pop more often.
     But once in a while, there’s one that goes wildly beyond these chemical-induced mistakes, a murder that lands on the covers of the lurid true-crime magazines you used to see displayed in pawnshops next to the cheap shotguns, the unreliable ones you wouldn’t even buy to commit suicide.
     We had one of these murders when I was growing up. Not one but two cute high school girls disappeared one night, vanishing without a trace. Police had their suspicions, but it was the 1960s and without bodies who could say they hadn’t hitched a ride to Haight Ashbury?
     This was back in the days when parents, at least mine, shielded kids from this kind of thing better than we do now, so my recollection is a little fuzzy. But I think fall drifted into the deep snows of winter and things were thawing up again before my aunt, leading a volunteer youth litter crew near home, found the first remains in the ditch.
     What was left of the second girl was discovered a ways down the road, and the town was catapulted into denial, dismay and anger when one of the girls’ high school classmates, the son of a well-off contractor, was arrested and in due time convicted. Maybe his lawyer was partly successful on an insanity defense, at least when it came to the penalty — nobody could figure why a sane person would just up and kill a couple girls.
     And maybe it doesn’t make any difference whether he was insane, or tortured, or just plain evil. He got out of prison and killed himself in Utah a year or two ago.
     My Aunt Tommie died a couple weeks ago after a long stoic battle with a series of strokes that robbed her of everything but faith. Years ago, in one of the last conversations we shared, she asked if I believed in hell, and I wonder if she was thinking of the boy whose handiwork she found decaying by the side of her narrow country lane. She always believed in family, God and physical fitness — in much that order — but it seems to me that her religious tendencies became more somber and pronounced in the years following her brush with homicide.
     I know the whole affair deeply wounded my town. Murder really is a crime against the entire community, which in this instance suddenly felt an unwanted kinship with Charley Manson’s Southern California. There wasn’t a family untouched by horror, that didn’t start locking their doors, that didn’t feel their world transformed and diminished.
     In the end, I don’t believe in hell, though it’s an attractive concept when considering murderers like this one. But if there is, I hope my Christian aunt was wrong and that divine forgiveness isn’t within everyone’s easy grasp. Some sins shouldn’t qualify for a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. Time doesn’t heal all wounds.
     I’m thinking today of the parents of daughters slain by the Green River Killer, who may be under arrest at last. I feel a great sense of gratitude toward the investigators who stuck to it, and hope they’re right. What if my town’s murderer had never been caught? Awful as it was, I have to believe it was better for us all to have it resolved, to hold the criminal up to the light for loathing.
     I hope all these families brought together in mourning can begin to find a little comfort now, maybe in justice, or maybe in simple relief that some other family will not have to feel the same agony they did.



Pudding
     I picture Grandma sitting by the window with a wrinkly Mona Lisa smile, scarred hands folded in her lap, watching the little birds. She possessed a playful calmness, and an unstudied elegance in telling stories about the ordinary folks of whom our family is composed. She was an anchor firmly tied right down to the secret spinning axle of the earth, her embrace, her powerful gravity keeping the rest of us from being flung into space.
     Her name was Hilda, and as that implies, was part German, though that part of our family came to this country so long ago she had forgotten what they were. One of her cousins recently traced a mutual ancestor back to the tiny village of Wingeshausen which he left in the early 1600s. But despite the faintness of her Germanic bloodline, it seems to me there was a sort Grimms fairy tale quality to her personality and recollections. It isn’t that they were dark, necessarily, but more that they were fundamental, and ambiguous as real life always is.
     Born in 1901, her long life nearly bridged the 20th century, and she well remembered the days when Shoshoni still encamped in buffalo hide teepees on the flat above home, casting long pyramid shadows in the soft summer evening, the sounds of drums and laughter rolling gently along the valley and mixing with the floating cottonwood down.
     She remembered tales about Calamity Jane, the wild cowgirl her grandmother took in and then kicked out for dressing like a man and going to town. She remembered next to nothing about a patron of her grandpa’s saloon, a no-account who called himself Butch Cassidy. She remembered the lives and deaths of hundreds of good men and women. Maybe, a person lives long enough and mourning simply wears off all the rough edges, hot tears burning away all impurities. Anyway, she didn’t have any that were evident to an adoring grandson.
     Grandma always feels close this time of the year, maybe because delicious food was a way in which she best expressed herself. Our convoluted peasant heritage reveals itself in dishes like bread drenched in gravy, mustard pickles, and suet pudding. My mom didn’t have any daughters, so knowledge of some of this has rolled down to me, and this weekend I’ll be making our annual suet pudding so it can age before the big event Tuesday.
     It is rich in winter’s basic foodstuffs, good things pulled from under the burlap down in the cellar, especially potatoes and carrots. Many modern people will recoil at the thought of root vegetables playing a dominant part in a dessert, as though I’m suggesting a breakfast of chili piled with grated onions. And even more will recoil at the idea of moisturizing these roots with a snowball-sized glob of beef fat, and not just any beef fat, but suet from the kidneys. Americans who don’t think twice about having three cheeseburgers a day turn green at the thought of eating innards. But Grandma’s pudding is GOOD. I’m sure part of its appeal is the hard sauce, consisting of butter, cream, sugar and brandy.
     Loaded with spices, and steamed for three hours, suet pudding is the smell and feel of Christmas. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was always warm, but became really tropical on Christmas day, humidity roiling from the kitchen throughout the house, droplets gathering on the wavy-glass windows, collecting in frozen puddles on the sills. Suffused in this warmth and pleasure, after dinner they’d cap their version of a perfect holiday by watching the Lawrence Welk Show, turned way up so Grandpa could hear it.
     Grandma was determined to die in her home, and I wish she could have had her wish. How things end is as important as how they begin, and her personal fable ought to have wound to its conclusion on the same patch of ground where Grandpa died. Even so, she came darn close, and passed away enfolded in love and warmth at 92.
     May you make good wishes this Christmas, and live see them all fulfilled.



Firecrackers
     Firecrackers have become disreputable, somewhere in the same camp as lawn darts and asbestos-lined oven mitts, but I love ‘em.
     Looking back to boyhood in the 1960s, the month leading up to the 4th of July ranked higher than Christmas; Christmas was a one-shot deal, whereas my friends and I usually wheedled fireworks from our parents for weeks before the actual holiday.
     We all lived on and near an Indian reservation, so perhaps I have a skewed idea of just what was available back then, but the fireworks stands I remember were half-block-long Aladdin’s Cave sorts of affairs, stacked to the rafters with thousands of tissue-wrapped treasures from China. (Probably it all was from Taiwan, since we didn’t trade with the “Red” Chinese back in those ideologically pure days.) Dragons, tigers, wizards and cobras — I saw them all for the first time on fireworks packages.
     There were stacks upon stacks of firecrackers of different brands and lengths, and bundles of bottle rockets ranging from dull blobs on bamboo slivers that only zipped up into the air, to more interesting ones that flew and exploded, to others the size of broom handles that we rarely bought because they cost an astronomical 30 cents apiece.
     There were smoke bombs and Roman candles and flying saucers and booby traps that popped when your mom broke the string stretched across the doorway. There were “snakes,” little gray pellets that when ignited squirmed across the sidewalk releasing sulfur fumes and leaving stains finally erased only by winter snows.
     Our fireworks were rarely a nighttime activity; we bought them for a bang, not pretty colors. My big brother Greg was a set-em-all-off-at-once kind of guy who’d hang a 500-cracker string from a tree branch, light it and run. I was more of a demolition engineer, poking individual firecrackers into ant hills to see how the ants reacted when they went off. (Maybe paying dues, as an adult I can’t even bring myself to squish a sugar ant crawling across the kitchen counter.)     We were amazingly stupid. By all rights, an entire generation of 40-something men ought to be wearing eye patches and missing parts of our thumbs and index fingers.
     On the one hand, I know it’s nothing to joke about since there are plenty of people who do indeed lose eyes and fingers in just this manner. But I also have to think that childhood’s the time when we’re supposed to make mistakes and test limits and do dumb things. Sometimes there are painful consequences, usually not.
     Despite using rusty old pipes and M-80s to make beer cans bazookas, my cousin Jimmy Bell managed to retain all his appendages and go on to become a lawyer — last I recall, even kind of a stodgy one. My oldest pal from infancy, Cale Case, who used to make his own explosives from salt peter from his dad’s pharmacy, somehow survived to become a state senator.
     I’m just not Ralph Nader’s biggest fan. Life is inherently a crapshoot and running around trying to make everything safe is sort of like trying to pick all the peppers out of Thai food. Tell people about the risks of what they’re doing and then make them live with the consequences. That’s my rant for today.     A kid learns lessons from everybody and everything, and I think back with considerable admiration on the patience of the men who manned fireworks stands. Dealing with scores of little kids gazing about with longing in their eyes and not enough dimes in their pockets can’t have been the world’s most enjoyable job. But they were polite, and fair when we brought back our duds for a trade-in.
     This’ll probably be the first Independence Day my kid remembers. Don’t tell my wife, but maybe Elizabeth and I will make ourselves a trip up to the Shoalwater reservation for some fireworks. Lizzie’s such a firecracker herself I think she’ll get a kick out of them.
     I’ll do my best to let her know that even some of the best things come with a bite. You’ve got to be careful. Use with adult supervision only. Do not hold in hand. Place on a hard surface. Don’t be a jerk. Watch out. But take some chances anyway.



Wallop campaign
     It gets to be this time of the year and I start thinking of past elections I’ve been involved in — how joyous and hopeful they can be, or sad and deflating. The funny thing is that victory can ultimately turn out to be cause for remorse, and loss can evolve into a kind of victory.
     I won my first election, for seventh-grade student council, but results have been a little spotty since then. Running as a freshman for high school student body co-president with my old buddy Kip Wheeler, a junior, turned out to be a serious case of over-reaching versus goody-two-shoes Harvey North. The voters just weren’t convinced by our slogan — ”Kippy-canoe and Matthew, too!” — or by our platform, which I think consisted of full-time independent study for everybody.
     My next political foray also ended in a loss, though not for me personally. The summer between freshman and sophomore years in high school I was a volunteer campaigner for state Sen. Malcolm Wallop, who was running for Republican nomination for governor of my home state of Wyoming.
     Our merry little band of teen-agers and 20-something volunteers and lowly staffers traveled through every one of Wyoming’s mostly desolate counties door-belling, handing out brochures along parade routes and driving, driving, driving in a tank-like old Travel-All without a whiff of air conditioning. We also fully explored the pleasures of drinking beer and, in my case, flirting with an “older” woman, a terrifyingly sophisticated 22-year-old. I thought I was in tall clover, when I wasn’t scared witless.
     Nearly every moment of that summer was memorable for one reason or another, but the day that most often flits across my memory was an apparently uneventful one, probably in early August. It was dry and gritty hot, as a day can be only in the high plains desert, and we pulled up to a cinderblock and clapboard roadside store/filling station that squatted beneath deformed cottonwoods 50 miles from the nearest town with a population more than 40.
     For the life of me, I can’t imagine why I think of it at all, unless maybe it was pulling a truly icy Coke from a dented reach-in soft drink machine and throwing it back into my throat in relief. So far as I can recall, there weren’t any “coming of age” events that day, just sweaty work in a hard place. Funny how some things stay with you.
     Malcolm Wallop lost the primary but came so close he was a cinch for the GOP nomination two years later to run as a more-or-less token candidate against a powerful incumbent U.S. senator. And, lo and behold, Malcolm won. A brilliant man and essentially a decent one, he quickly became intensely partisan in ways that didn’t strike me, a dumbly idealistic 19-year-old, as altogether honest. We had our first disagreement over President Carter’s proposed energy policy, of all things, and our friendship unraveled more bitterly when I became political reporter for a newspaper he considered an arch enemy.
     Malcolm twice won re-election and was a powerful man during the Reagan years, but for all of that has turned out to be something of a loser. Long out of office, I heard news of him just last week in the form of a clipping from the Washington Post society column sent by an East Coast friend
     “Former Wyoming Republican senator Malcolm Wallop and his third wife, French, are in the midst of a divorce. Quite a nasty divorce, judging by this change-of-address card for her 67-year-old husband — her second — that the 51-year-old Mrs. Wallop is sending out to tout Washington. The card reads: ‘French Wallop regrets to inform you that due to a significant indiscretion on the part of her husband of 16 years, he may now be reached at the following address’ — a decidedly different one from the Wallops’ luxurious town house overlooking the Potomac. When we reached her yesterday, French Wallop told us: ‘I think it speaks for itself. This is a sad event.’”
     I am sad for my old former friend. Winning does not equate to wisdom.
     And me? Well, I’ve bounced back quite nicely from that humiliating student body president election, and the only baby I want to kiss is my own. I became deeply involved in other campaigns but eventually learned political ambition is a drug I can happily live without.