I lived in a growing community when I was in high school. Lots of baby boomers and lots of government work. We needed another high school, so I went to school from 7:00 to 12:00 noon. The kids who would go to the other school went from 12:30 to 5:30. My last class the year I was a sophomore was English as taught by Mr. Howell.
How he got a job teaching impressionable youngsters in very conservative half Mormon Idaho Falls remains a mystery. He was 35ish, a womanizer, smoked, drank, and had diabetes. The first day of class he stood up and told us he thought grammar was so much bunk and we were on our own if we wanted to learn it. But he would be delighted to teach us literature. He was true to his word. Half the time he either gave us an assignment out of the hated grammar book (which we were then expected to correct ourselves from the teacher’s edition sitting on his desk) and left or didn’t show up at all, sometimes leaving a page number on the blackboard in his ungainly scrawl.
When he was there, and completely present, he taught us more about literature than I learned from many a college prof. It was in his class that I learned that not everything written is as it seems to be on the surface. It was from him I learned the magic words simile, metaphor, symbol. He hated poetry, so we had none of that, but we did go deeply into much of the good modern writing that he loved.
I started to write…not just the phony baloney soap operas that I had been writing to entertain a few of my friends, but long maudlin essays on truth and beauty. I would stand at his desk until all the other students were gone and then I would hand him pages of sophomoric dribble. Mr. Howell would accept them graciously and actually read them. He was a generous reader and told me my essays were refreshing and that he enjoyed reading them. Then we would discuss truth and beauty and symbolism for a few minutes. Just Mr. Howell and me. Those discussions were the jewels of my days. I missed the bus and walked two miles home in the snow for them.
One day I asked Mr. Howell if he would recommend a book for me to read. Oh, heaven! He started rattling off a list of books and authors that I should read. I wrote as fast as I could. I still have that list; it is one of my treasures. Some of my favorite books have been taken from that list. Some of the books I have not yet read, and do not plan to read. If my parents knew that my sophomore English teacher recommended that I read The Last Temptation of Christ (Nikos Kazan…long Greek name) and The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger), I am sure they would have had him fired. I have picked up The Last Temptation once or twice and looked at it, but I have not read it. I read The Catcher in the Rye a few years after he recommended it and wondered what all the fuss was about. I didn’t find it particularly good or terribly shocking. I enjoyed Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) much more. But then there was Crescent Delahanty (Jessamyn West) which I read when I was fifteen, and have reread five or six times as the years have gone by. It’s a different book every time I read it and always a delight.
Mr. Howell told us that sex was always good in a book and suggested that there was sex in the story we had just read. No. No….there was no sex in that book, Mr. Howell, we all said in our own way at the same time. Quite an uproar. He laughed, throwing back his head so his longish blond hair flopped back down on his forehead. When it was quiet, he asked us about the boy and girl who held hands. Yes, but that wasn’t sex we said. That was just holding hands. Fifteen and sixteen year olds know the difference between sex and holding hands. Just ask them…they can tell you. But the desire is there, he told us. The desire is what makes it interesting, is what drives so much of what people do. There may not have been anybody going to bed together in that story, but there certainly was sex. We had to admit he was right. And he still is.
I think someone must have blown the whistle on him. Mr. Howell didn’t teach at the high school the next year. His obituary was in the newspaper before I graduated from high school. Someone found him dead in his apartment. A diabetic coma, the newspaper said. He died alone.
I never got to thank him for teaching me to read. Again.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Monday, August 28, 2006
City Girl
I grew up in Idaho Falls with a subdivision behind me and sheep in the field across the street. On the other side of the sheep Taylor Mountain sat, soft and majestic, changing color with the seasons. A half hour’s ride would take us into foothills so wild in places I believed I was the first white girl to lay eyes on it. I chose not to think of the ski hill or the dry farms. I used to sit for hours on the cement slab we called the front porch and look at the mountain. If the sheep were nearby, I would talk to them. I could really get them riled up, baaing at them. Probably drove the neighbors crazy, not to mention the farmer.
Three houses down the subdivision ended abruptly in a grassy field bordered by a small irrigation ditch. I hollowed out a little house in the tall grass by the ditch one summer. It was green even in August and smelled of wild things and earth and water. I could hide there and be alone with my ten year old thoughts, letting the sky and the earth seep into places in my soul I hardly knew needed filling until they were full. I wrapped the quiet around me like a familiar blanket, letting it comfort me, letting it quiet me.
A block or so the other way, along St. Clair was the Idaho Canal, which I understood my grandfather had helped to dig. It was deep and ran for miles. Trees loved the banks and the grass and weeds grew tall all along the canal. Water for irrigation ran most of the year, icing over in the winter. I loved the constant patient gurgle of the water. It seemed to answer when I talked to it, to whisper soothing gentle things I heard in the deep places of my soul. I could sit under a weeping willow in the grass and be hidden from the occasional car that drove down St. Clair. I took my troubles there as long as I lived in the red brick house on 17th Street.
My mother used to encourage me to play with the children in the subdivision. A girl close to my age lived in the house behind me for a while. We marveled over the double coincidence of sharing the same uncommon first name and the same birthday, although I was a year older than her, but that was about all we had in common. Around the block was another girl close to my age. Her father had been in a boating accident and drowned, leaving a young widow with four or five young children. I remember her mother, a generous comfortable woman who baked bread and gave thick hot slices slathered with butter to any neighborhood child who happened by. This woman married her poor drowned husband’s brother a little too quickly for the neighbors and promptly began having babies again. She nursed her babies long and tenderly, a practice my own mother talked about in the shocked whispers that guaranteed her children would hear, especially when she didn‘t want them to.
I read too much. I went off by myself and daydreamed. I watched the mountain and the sheep. In the summers as I entered my teenage years I took long walks and bicycle rides in the country, mostly by myself. I shut myself up in my bedroom and listened to the soundtrack from Dr. Zhivago and read more. Mom used to take my books away until I finished my chores. I read practically every book in the Idaho Falls Public Library, a building that filled me with awe. At school I was quiet, speaking mostly in literature classes, after my great intellectual awakening the year I was a sophomore. I nursed heavy crushes on the the smartest boys, but didn’t dare talk to them. Most of my high school friends were from the surrounding farms and went to a different school. They hadn’t figured out I wasn’t cool. They didn’t know about the books I couldn’t hide at school or the awful shyness. They called me a city girl.
Copyright 2006 Rinda Fullmer
Three houses down the subdivision ended abruptly in a grassy field bordered by a small irrigation ditch. I hollowed out a little house in the tall grass by the ditch one summer. It was green even in August and smelled of wild things and earth and water. I could hide there and be alone with my ten year old thoughts, letting the sky and the earth seep into places in my soul I hardly knew needed filling until they were full. I wrapped the quiet around me like a familiar blanket, letting it comfort me, letting it quiet me.
A block or so the other way, along St. Clair was the Idaho Canal, which I understood my grandfather had helped to dig. It was deep and ran for miles. Trees loved the banks and the grass and weeds grew tall all along the canal. Water for irrigation ran most of the year, icing over in the winter. I loved the constant patient gurgle of the water. It seemed to answer when I talked to it, to whisper soothing gentle things I heard in the deep places of my soul. I could sit under a weeping willow in the grass and be hidden from the occasional car that drove down St. Clair. I took my troubles there as long as I lived in the red brick house on 17th Street.
My mother used to encourage me to play with the children in the subdivision. A girl close to my age lived in the house behind me for a while. We marveled over the double coincidence of sharing the same uncommon first name and the same birthday, although I was a year older than her, but that was about all we had in common. Around the block was another girl close to my age. Her father had been in a boating accident and drowned, leaving a young widow with four or five young children. I remember her mother, a generous comfortable woman who baked bread and gave thick hot slices slathered with butter to any neighborhood child who happened by. This woman married her poor drowned husband’s brother a little too quickly for the neighbors and promptly began having babies again. She nursed her babies long and tenderly, a practice my own mother talked about in the shocked whispers that guaranteed her children would hear, especially when she didn‘t want them to.
I read too much. I went off by myself and daydreamed. I watched the mountain and the sheep. In the summers as I entered my teenage years I took long walks and bicycle rides in the country, mostly by myself. I shut myself up in my bedroom and listened to the soundtrack from Dr. Zhivago and read more. Mom used to take my books away until I finished my chores. I read practically every book in the Idaho Falls Public Library, a building that filled me with awe. At school I was quiet, speaking mostly in literature classes, after my great intellectual awakening the year I was a sophomore. I nursed heavy crushes on the the smartest boys, but didn’t dare talk to them. Most of my high school friends were from the surrounding farms and went to a different school. They hadn’t figured out I wasn’t cool. They didn’t know about the books I couldn’t hide at school or the awful shyness. They called me a city girl.
Copyright 2006 Rinda Fullmer
Monday, August 14, 2006
Mocassins
Richard and I went to West Yellowstone for our honeymoon. It took us a whole hour and a half to get there. Driving. We stayed in the Westbank on the Snake River in Idaho Falls our first night. It was a nice hotel, but we were starving college students so when we got to West we stayed in two different $10 log cabins that barely had indoor plumbing. Knotty pine a la 40's. We thought the second one might be better than the first. It wasn't, but hey, both cabins had beds and showers. That's all we really cared about anyway.
Saturday afternoon we came up for air and wandered around West. We found the usual touristy restaurants and trading posts. Hamburgers at three times the price because there were bright shiny new wagon wheels on the boardwalk rails in front and red checkered tablecloths inside. And knotty pine. Don't forget the knotty pine. We found a treasure in all this old west hype (lower case intentional...touristy old west is not the same as Old West). Around the corner and up a back street was a boot shop that sold the real article. The little store was no more than the size of a living room but the shelves were full of real leather boots that a man could wear without embarrasment. No trumped up red eagles on shiny black patent leather here, just honest brown leather cowboy boots that were either beautifully tooled or beautifully plain. Tucked back in a corner we found a shelf of mocassins. The real deal. Dirt cheap. Richard asked if I wanted a pair. I didn't have any money. I had spent it all on the wedding buying things like cake and pictures and dresses. Oh yes, I wanted a pair.
They were ankle high with conches and ties on the outside and fringe, a deep roan color. I loved them from the first minute I put them on. I wore them everywhere but to church and work that summer and into the fall. They got better the more I wore them. Those mocassins are my all time favorite shoes.
Somewhere there is a picture of us taken shortly after we got married. We are both in jeans. Richard is wearing his cowboy boots (honest brown leather beautifully tooled purchased in Mexico) and I am wearing my leather soled mocassins.
Saturday afternoon we came up for air and wandered around West. We found the usual touristy restaurants and trading posts. Hamburgers at three times the price because there were bright shiny new wagon wheels on the boardwalk rails in front and red checkered tablecloths inside. And knotty pine. Don't forget the knotty pine. We found a treasure in all this old west hype (lower case intentional...touristy old west is not the same as Old West). Around the corner and up a back street was a boot shop that sold the real article. The little store was no more than the size of a living room but the shelves were full of real leather boots that a man could wear without embarrasment. No trumped up red eagles on shiny black patent leather here, just honest brown leather cowboy boots that were either beautifully tooled or beautifully plain. Tucked back in a corner we found a shelf of mocassins. The real deal. Dirt cheap. Richard asked if I wanted a pair. I didn't have any money. I had spent it all on the wedding buying things like cake and pictures and dresses. Oh yes, I wanted a pair.
They were ankle high with conches and ties on the outside and fringe, a deep roan color. I loved them from the first minute I put them on. I wore them everywhere but to church and work that summer and into the fall. They got better the more I wore them. Those mocassins are my all time favorite shoes.
Somewhere there is a picture of us taken shortly after we got married. We are both in jeans. Richard is wearing his cowboy boots (honest brown leather beautifully tooled purchased in Mexico) and I am wearing my leather soled mocassins.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Motorcycle cowboy
Summer 1966
They drove by all hours of the day and night, those boys on their Hondas and Suzukis. My ear was as tuned in to the whine of their motors as a goose is to a gander. Sometimes they stopped at my house, the ones I knew. Rod and Lynn, Ted and Farrel.
I met Rod at the Pioneer Day Rodeo. The Pioneer Day Rodeo was a bit of a conundrum in and of itself. Established to commemorate the coming of the Mormon Pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, in Idaho Falls it attracted the cowboys from the surrounding counties. Cowboys didn't exactly live up to the high standards the Mormons set. There was drinking and chewing and wild talk at the rodeos themselves. Who knows what went on afterwards.
I went to the rodeo with my best friend Shirley. Well, we actually drove over with my parents who never missed a rodeo. My father was a sort of reformed cowboy, a Mormon who cowboyed when he was young and never quite got it out of his blood. Shirley and I didn't want to sit in the stands; my mother wasn't as interested in the rodeo as my father and she had eyes in back of her head. I was just shy of 16, Shirley was getting close to 17, and the sap was rising in us. We wanted to move around, to watch the cowboys out of the ring. You couldn't smile and say "hi" to anyone engaged in the business of bronc riding; he just wouldn't see you at all. But if you were out there in the field after he got off, he just might notice you while he was walking off his cramps. Rod wasn't a rodeo cowboy. He was just walking around the fields himself, wanting to talk to bull riders and bronc busters, hoping somebody would give him a hand, start him out rodeoing. He noticed me and I said "hi". I was a good girl and so was Shirley. We went home with Mom and Dad, but Rod had my phone number in his pocket when he climbed on his Suzuki.
It was only a matter of days before he rang the doorbell, asked me to go for a ride on the back of his bike. He showed me the exhaust and told me to be careful climbing on. I didn't say anything about the scar I had on the inside of my thigh from straddling a bike like his in my cutoffs. I just wore long jeans. I climbed on and put my arms around him soft, not really holding on. He turned and smiled at me with his big brown eyes, then took off like a bat out of .....well, you know where. I grabbed hard and held tight; it was that or fall off. He laughed softly and turned his head as he said "That's better." We ate up the miles on that Suzuki with the wind in our hair and our mouths smiling so big we were lucky we didn't catch bugs on our teeth.
Rod was stocky and tough. He worked that summer moving sprinkler pipes. In those days boys were anxious to do a man's job, pitting their strength against the 10 foot lengths of pipe and moving them down the field. He was also gentle and respectful. He wasn't Mormon, though I was, and he knew I didn't drink. He did. From here it looks like underage drinking and a crying shame. From there, he was bold and daring and a little bit bad. He never once came around when he had been drinking. He never once invited me to a kegger, although he couldn't resist bragging about them when he would come to see me, always out of earshot of my parents. I wasn't quite 16, so I couldn't date yet, but that was a new rule in the church and Mom wasn't quite sure what she thought of it. She figured motorcycle rides weren't dates, and though he wasn't a "member", he was a nice boy and respectful, so she didn't object to our rides. She would have shooed him out with her broom if she knew about the drinking.
It seemed like a long time that I listened for the phone, that I listened for the sound of that Suzuki motor bike turning in the drive. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn't have been, looking back, because by the time school started, Rod had quit coming round. No fight, no words, just more days between his phone calls and visits until one day I knew he wasn't coming back. I still carry the memory of him standing in the dark in my front yard, pulling me into a close embrace. "Oh, you're sweet," he whispered into my neck, his breath almost choked off. Though he never took advantage of me, never even kissed me, he made me a woman that night with those three little words.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
They drove by all hours of the day and night, those boys on their Hondas and Suzukis. My ear was as tuned in to the whine of their motors as a goose is to a gander. Sometimes they stopped at my house, the ones I knew. Rod and Lynn, Ted and Farrel.
I met Rod at the Pioneer Day Rodeo. The Pioneer Day Rodeo was a bit of a conundrum in and of itself. Established to commemorate the coming of the Mormon Pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, in Idaho Falls it attracted the cowboys from the surrounding counties. Cowboys didn't exactly live up to the high standards the Mormons set. There was drinking and chewing and wild talk at the rodeos themselves. Who knows what went on afterwards.
I went to the rodeo with my best friend Shirley. Well, we actually drove over with my parents who never missed a rodeo. My father was a sort of reformed cowboy, a Mormon who cowboyed when he was young and never quite got it out of his blood. Shirley and I didn't want to sit in the stands; my mother wasn't as interested in the rodeo as my father and she had eyes in back of her head. I was just shy of 16, Shirley was getting close to 17, and the sap was rising in us. We wanted to move around, to watch the cowboys out of the ring. You couldn't smile and say "hi" to anyone engaged in the business of bronc riding; he just wouldn't see you at all. But if you were out there in the field after he got off, he just might notice you while he was walking off his cramps. Rod wasn't a rodeo cowboy. He was just walking around the fields himself, wanting to talk to bull riders and bronc busters, hoping somebody would give him a hand, start him out rodeoing. He noticed me and I said "hi". I was a good girl and so was Shirley. We went home with Mom and Dad, but Rod had my phone number in his pocket when he climbed on his Suzuki.
It was only a matter of days before he rang the doorbell, asked me to go for a ride on the back of his bike. He showed me the exhaust and told me to be careful climbing on. I didn't say anything about the scar I had on the inside of my thigh from straddling a bike like his in my cutoffs. I just wore long jeans. I climbed on and put my arms around him soft, not really holding on. He turned and smiled at me with his big brown eyes, then took off like a bat out of .....well, you know where. I grabbed hard and held tight; it was that or fall off. He laughed softly and turned his head as he said "That's better." We ate up the miles on that Suzuki with the wind in our hair and our mouths smiling so big we were lucky we didn't catch bugs on our teeth.
Rod was stocky and tough. He worked that summer moving sprinkler pipes. In those days boys were anxious to do a man's job, pitting their strength against the 10 foot lengths of pipe and moving them down the field. He was also gentle and respectful. He wasn't Mormon, though I was, and he knew I didn't drink. He did. From here it looks like underage drinking and a crying shame. From there, he was bold and daring and a little bit bad. He never once came around when he had been drinking. He never once invited me to a kegger, although he couldn't resist bragging about them when he would come to see me, always out of earshot of my parents. I wasn't quite 16, so I couldn't date yet, but that was a new rule in the church and Mom wasn't quite sure what she thought of it. She figured motorcycle rides weren't dates, and though he wasn't a "member", he was a nice boy and respectful, so she didn't object to our rides. She would have shooed him out with her broom if she knew about the drinking.
It seemed like a long time that I listened for the phone, that I listened for the sound of that Suzuki motor bike turning in the drive. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn't have been, looking back, because by the time school started, Rod had quit coming round. No fight, no words, just more days between his phone calls and visits until one day I knew he wasn't coming back. I still carry the memory of him standing in the dark in my front yard, pulling me into a close embrace. "Oh, you're sweet," he whispered into my neck, his breath almost choked off. Though he never took advantage of me, never even kissed me, he made me a woman that night with those three little words.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
Back to Jackson
Late 1940's early 1950's
The tourists were going "out West" again, in droves. Some of them went to dude ranches and some of them just drove around, liking the sights and sounds of the West, safe now, but not quite tame. Did they know how the Westerners, even city slickers from the big towns like Bozeman and Pocatello, Billings and Cody, looked at them? How they watched those tourists in their fine tailored suits as they walked the streets of towns held together with barbed wire and flour paste and sandy grit? Did they feel the fine disdain the ranchers felt for the "dudes" who paid good money to do work they weren't suited for, work that had to be done over, like as not, by someone who understood the business end of a pitchfork?
The streets in Jackson were lined with ancient boards, eaves that came out over the boardwalks and held up by ancient stripped poles of lodgepole pine so straight they didn't need tapering. You could still tie up a horse on the rail in front the general store or the saloon. Most days it wasn't crowded, just an old town with a lot of history. Winter, it was almost completely closed in, lying like it did at the base of the Tetons. Not much skiing yet, no housing boom and there wouldn't be one for another fifteen or twenty years. Most folks just lived like they had always lived here, in cabins. Some of them had wires hooked up for electricity and leantos on the back were converted from cooksheds to bathrooms with running water, but the chinks had to be patched to keep the winter chill out just the same. Deer got into the gardens and mosquitos got into the house in the summer. In winter it was just cold; ten, fifteen, twenty below and the wind blowing all the time.
Some days in summer people flocked in for the fakey acted out quick draw on main street. It always started in the saloon and spilled out onto main street by the park with the antler arch. The roads would be lined with station wagons and Chevy sedans, not a pickup in sight. It was just such a day that my inlaws brought their children the two hours to Jackson, a little outing for the kids, a rest from the backbreaking work of running a farm. After stretching their legs and walking around a bit, the littlest one needed feeding. I am not sure which of the boys the little one was, but she took him and the next littlest one with her back to the car while he took the older children to see the sights with a promise of meeting under the antler arch in half an hour. She got the toddler quieted down with something to play with and settled the little one in to nursing with a blanket drawn over for modesty.
People kept walking back and forth on the walk, most not even glancing at the woman in the car with her babies. Two women, set apart as Easterners by their dress, walked by, looked in the window and stared. Not noticing that the window was rolled down to catch the air, they just stood and stared. Finally, as they walked off, she heard one say to the other "How quaint!", as though she and her hungry baby were part of the show, part of the Wild West.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
The tourists were going "out West" again, in droves. Some of them went to dude ranches and some of them just drove around, liking the sights and sounds of the West, safe now, but not quite tame. Did they know how the Westerners, even city slickers from the big towns like Bozeman and Pocatello, Billings and Cody, looked at them? How they watched those tourists in their fine tailored suits as they walked the streets of towns held together with barbed wire and flour paste and sandy grit? Did they feel the fine disdain the ranchers felt for the "dudes" who paid good money to do work they weren't suited for, work that had to be done over, like as not, by someone who understood the business end of a pitchfork?
The streets in Jackson were lined with ancient boards, eaves that came out over the boardwalks and held up by ancient stripped poles of lodgepole pine so straight they didn't need tapering. You could still tie up a horse on the rail in front the general store or the saloon. Most days it wasn't crowded, just an old town with a lot of history. Winter, it was almost completely closed in, lying like it did at the base of the Tetons. Not much skiing yet, no housing boom and there wouldn't be one for another fifteen or twenty years. Most folks just lived like they had always lived here, in cabins. Some of them had wires hooked up for electricity and leantos on the back were converted from cooksheds to bathrooms with running water, but the chinks had to be patched to keep the winter chill out just the same. Deer got into the gardens and mosquitos got into the house in the summer. In winter it was just cold; ten, fifteen, twenty below and the wind blowing all the time.
Some days in summer people flocked in for the fakey acted out quick draw on main street. It always started in the saloon and spilled out onto main street by the park with the antler arch. The roads would be lined with station wagons and Chevy sedans, not a pickup in sight. It was just such a day that my inlaws brought their children the two hours to Jackson, a little outing for the kids, a rest from the backbreaking work of running a farm. After stretching their legs and walking around a bit, the littlest one needed feeding. I am not sure which of the boys the little one was, but she took him and the next littlest one with her back to the car while he took the older children to see the sights with a promise of meeting under the antler arch in half an hour. She got the toddler quieted down with something to play with and settled the little one in to nursing with a blanket drawn over for modesty.
People kept walking back and forth on the walk, most not even glancing at the woman in the car with her babies. Two women, set apart as Easterners by their dress, walked by, looked in the window and stared. Not noticing that the window was rolled down to catch the air, they just stood and stared. Finally, as they walked off, she heard one say to the other "How quaint!", as though she and her hungry baby were part of the show, part of the Wild West.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
Mountain Man
Summer of 1969 or late spring 1970
It was stifling in the courthouse and I couldn't wait to get out to the riverbank. I had smiled and cajoled and swallowed complaints all morning as I rang up the fees for license plates on the old cash register. The air was fresh and clean out along the Snake and the water going over the falls sent out a fine mist, cooling the parks that ran along both banks. I grabbed my lunch and book as soon I heard the noon whistle blow and went across the street to the river side as fast as I could go in a skirt and heels. I settled into a bench and just sat for a minute, taking in the sound of the water crashing over the rocks and the fresh blue sky. I was younger by at least 10 years than all the other "gals" I worked with. It was good to have a little time to myself. I opened my sandwich and my book at the same time and soon I was lost to the world around me.
I didn't hear him walk up, or feel him sit at the other end of the bench. I just somehow became aware that I was not alone. When I turned and saw him, it was all I could do to stay where I was. He was wearing buckskins, honest to goodness fringed buckskins that were dark and grimy with wear. He had a beard and long hair, so dirty the color was uncertain. The beard looked like it had been trimmed with a knife in big chunks. His fingernails were ragged and rimmed with black dirt all the way around. He was staring at me, looking me up and down like I was game he was trapping.
"I come inta town fer a wife." His eyes were very blue and they bored into me as he spoke. His voice was gravelly and rough, like it hadn't been used much. The creases on his face were deep, filled with oily grime. "Are ya married? I had me a squaw, but I got a hankerin' fer a white woman. Someone to cook and keep camp fer me. Ya look like ye'll do. Are ya married?" One more look from those piercing eyes and he dropped them, brought out a bowie knife and started working on his fingernails.
"I have a boyfriend." The words sounded stilted and false, even though I did have a boyfriend. I gathered my lunch things and picked up my book. I left him there sitting on the bench at the side of the river. I never looked back.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
It was stifling in the courthouse and I couldn't wait to get out to the riverbank. I had smiled and cajoled and swallowed complaints all morning as I rang up the fees for license plates on the old cash register. The air was fresh and clean out along the Snake and the water going over the falls sent out a fine mist, cooling the parks that ran along both banks. I grabbed my lunch and book as soon I heard the noon whistle blow and went across the street to the river side as fast as I could go in a skirt and heels. I settled into a bench and just sat for a minute, taking in the sound of the water crashing over the rocks and the fresh blue sky. I was younger by at least 10 years than all the other "gals" I worked with. It was good to have a little time to myself. I opened my sandwich and my book at the same time and soon I was lost to the world around me.
I didn't hear him walk up, or feel him sit at the other end of the bench. I just somehow became aware that I was not alone. When I turned and saw him, it was all I could do to stay where I was. He was wearing buckskins, honest to goodness fringed buckskins that were dark and grimy with wear. He had a beard and long hair, so dirty the color was uncertain. The beard looked like it had been trimmed with a knife in big chunks. His fingernails were ragged and rimmed with black dirt all the way around. He was staring at me, looking me up and down like I was game he was trapping.
"I come inta town fer a wife." His eyes were very blue and they bored into me as he spoke. His voice was gravelly and rough, like it hadn't been used much. The creases on his face were deep, filled with oily grime. "Are ya married? I had me a squaw, but I got a hankerin' fer a white woman. Someone to cook and keep camp fer me. Ya look like ye'll do. Are ya married?" One more look from those piercing eyes and he dropped them, brought out a bowie knife and started working on his fingernails.
"I have a boyfriend." The words sounded stilted and false, even though I did have a boyfriend. I gathered my lunch things and picked up my book. I left him there sitting on the bench at the side of the river. I never looked back.
Rinda Fullmer
Copyright 2006
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Jackson Pass
Jackson Pass
We fought, Bob, Susan, and I
over who got the window.
No one wanted it.
Through tempered glass we saw gravel,
the tops of lodgepole pines,
and the road again.
Straight up. Straight down.
I slid into my seat,
burrowed into any book.
I wouldn't count the switchbacks,
hairpin turns Daddy called them.
He sat relaxed, hands easy on the wheel
even when one of us would scream.
Not even the safety of the seatbelts held us
on the slippery blue of that plastic backseat
in the old Chevy.
Daddy laughed and told stories
his father used to tell,
almost true stories of the Old West.
Grandad was a trucker,
hauled freight in a wagon
snaking up and over Jackson Pass
on the unimproved road.
Jackson Hole, Freedom, Tetonia, West Yellowstone,
St. Anthony, Sugar City, and Wilford
where later tiny Vera was buried
almost before she was born.
Summer complaint, Grandma called it.
Grandad's hands were as good as his horses:
he could drive anything with that team.
He had charge of the Yellowstone stage
the day the horses got spooked by gunshot
in front of the lodge by the Falls.
Straight for the canyon rim they went
at a dead run
before the guests had time to step out
onto the stool ready at the door.
Grandad soothed them, turned the team
with inches to spare.
Franklin Roosevelt was on that stage,
so the story goes.
Grandad stopped driving and took to farming
sometime after he courted Stella,
soothed her into marrying him.
The longest way home is the sweetest way home
he told me fom his leather chair
by the uncurtained window
that faced the dusty Umatilla street.
A good team always knows the way home
Grandad said with the sun on his face
long after Grandma died.
His hands lay flat on his thighs.
Some time after they put Vera in the ground
he just couldn't stay put in one place anymore,
so he quit farming.
A road engineer they called him later in the newspaper,
but he earned it the hard way,
digging ditches while Grandma cooked for the crew.
Grandad built roads and bridges in Idaho
and all over eastern Oregon,
improved roads for other to people to drive on.
He died in Umatilla with garters on his sleeves,
far from Jackson Pass.
His good hands lay still in the box.
I didn't go to his funeral.
It was on a school day.
March 17, 1996
revised August 5, 2006
copyright Rinda Fullmer
The Wild Wild West and how tame it has become
I have been doing a lot of thinking the last few days about the west, make that the West with a capital W. Part of it is because I have been reading The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie Jr. (I think I said Arlo in my last post...Arlo is the folk singer, Alfred B (Bud) Guthrie won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1950 for The Way West.) I am more than halfway through the book and Boone Caudill, the hero, has just arrived in Jackson Hole. He ran away from a harsh father in early 19th century Tennessee and ended up working on a keel boat headed west. Long story short, he teamed up with a mountain man after Black Feet Indians killed most everyone on the boat. They have gone to Jackson for a rendezvous in 1837. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, used to be called the Hole in the Wall. This is a place I used to know, but I don't know it any more. It's just not the same place it was when I was a kid, or the same place it was in the stories I heard as a child.
Ah...the romance of the old west. Excuse me, Old West. It was a place of heart as much as a place on the earth. The mountains are large, so big I have known Easterners that were afraid of them, that were sure they would crumble of their own weight. I grew up with a view of the Grand Tetons from our living room picture window...on a clear day. We had lots of clear days in Idaho Falls, but they would disappear for weeks at a time during the winter. Now, it is true that they were far away and very small, not at all close like Taylor Mountain, where we could see the lights for night skiing every night, but they were there and they colored my childhood. On the Fourth of July, like as not, you would find us in the car driving over Jackson Pass to Jackson Hole and the Tetons. The little kids (I was the oldest of this group) would have new cap guns and small cardboard boxes full of rolls of paper caps. No shooting was allowed in the car, but once we were out of the car, we could shoot as much as we wanted. I have seen the meadows with elk and the marshes with wild swans. I have seen the majesty, the grandeur of those tall tall mountains. I grew up on stories about my grandfather driving a team of horses and a freight wagon over Jackson Pass before it was paved. The switchbacks and hairpin turns went almost straight up when I was a girl and my father told us they were nothing compared to what they used to be. The thought of driving horses up there in all weather on unimproved roads made my grandfather into a hero.
A few years ago my husband and I went to a family reunion not far from Jackson. Richard asked if I wanted to go to Jackson. I didn't want to go. We had been there about 20 years before and I didn't recognize the place. I have heard that it has become artsy and a tourist trap, the last outpost of the Old West. And now I am reading about a rendezvous there in 1837, and somehow, that seems closer to Jackson than than place I last saw. Wild country and wild men. Indians and fire water, warm and willing squaws. No white women, no permanent citizens, just lodges thrown up for convenience and a fort. The true West, with the elements untamed by cozy fires and hunger slacked by "buffler" liver eaten raw, not a Big Mac. That's where I want to go. Somewhere open and wild, untouched. I would dress in men's clothes and just sit in the background and watch. Ah...but then reality sinks in. I would not like everything I saw, for much of what went on there was completely wild. Fights to the death over simple insults, men drunk on seeing women after months in the hills as well as liquor, gambling that got rough...and they called it a "frolic". Maybe just out in the meadows or in the mountains would be more to my liking...like the honeymoon in Owen Wister's The Virginian.
The point of all this is that the West just isn't what it was. It's been tamed and broken to man's hand like a horse. Even the environmentalists can't stop the progress, and in my heart I know that it's probably for the best. The mountain meadows of the past feed scores of people with their winter wheat. I just find myself being more and more attracted to the idea of the Old West, to rodeos and cowboys and teamsters who can handle any team under any circumstances. Going back to my roots. Deep in my heart, I am a cowgirl and I am glad to live in Idaho.
Ah...the romance of the old west. Excuse me, Old West. It was a place of heart as much as a place on the earth. The mountains are large, so big I have known Easterners that were afraid of them, that were sure they would crumble of their own weight. I grew up with a view of the Grand Tetons from our living room picture window...on a clear day. We had lots of clear days in Idaho Falls, but they would disappear for weeks at a time during the winter. Now, it is true that they were far away and very small, not at all close like Taylor Mountain, where we could see the lights for night skiing every night, but they were there and they colored my childhood. On the Fourth of July, like as not, you would find us in the car driving over Jackson Pass to Jackson Hole and the Tetons. The little kids (I was the oldest of this group) would have new cap guns and small cardboard boxes full of rolls of paper caps. No shooting was allowed in the car, but once we were out of the car, we could shoot as much as we wanted. I have seen the meadows with elk and the marshes with wild swans. I have seen the majesty, the grandeur of those tall tall mountains. I grew up on stories about my grandfather driving a team of horses and a freight wagon over Jackson Pass before it was paved. The switchbacks and hairpin turns went almost straight up when I was a girl and my father told us they were nothing compared to what they used to be. The thought of driving horses up there in all weather on unimproved roads made my grandfather into a hero.
A few years ago my husband and I went to a family reunion not far from Jackson. Richard asked if I wanted to go to Jackson. I didn't want to go. We had been there about 20 years before and I didn't recognize the place. I have heard that it has become artsy and a tourist trap, the last outpost of the Old West. And now I am reading about a rendezvous there in 1837, and somehow, that seems closer to Jackson than than place I last saw. Wild country and wild men. Indians and fire water, warm and willing squaws. No white women, no permanent citizens, just lodges thrown up for convenience and a fort. The true West, with the elements untamed by cozy fires and hunger slacked by "buffler" liver eaten raw, not a Big Mac. That's where I want to go. Somewhere open and wild, untouched. I would dress in men's clothes and just sit in the background and watch. Ah...but then reality sinks in. I would not like everything I saw, for much of what went on there was completely wild. Fights to the death over simple insults, men drunk on seeing women after months in the hills as well as liquor, gambling that got rough...and they called it a "frolic". Maybe just out in the meadows or in the mountains would be more to my liking...like the honeymoon in Owen Wister's The Virginian.
The point of all this is that the West just isn't what it was. It's been tamed and broken to man's hand like a horse. Even the environmentalists can't stop the progress, and in my heart I know that it's probably for the best. The mountain meadows of the past feed scores of people with their winter wheat. I just find myself being more and more attracted to the idea of the Old West, to rodeos and cowboys and teamsters who can handle any team under any circumstances. Going back to my roots. Deep in my heart, I am a cowgirl and I am glad to live in Idaho.
Friday, August 04, 2006
Book meme
My eldest daughter, the granola otherwise known as Amka, has tagged me. Aah...this is a good tag. I like to think about books.
1. Name a book that has changed your life. I don't remember the title of the book. It's the first book my mother read to me. I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't love books and that has been one of the things that my life is about. My favorite Christmas present as a child was "The Anthology of Children's Literature", a book that was fat enough even for me. Oddly enough my parents apologized for giving me the book. They thought it didn't compare well to the gifts the other children received. I would be willing to bet that I am the only one who still has a gift from that Christmas and that my gift brought more hours of happiness and pleasure than all the other gifts combined.
2. One book that I have read more than once? Just one? Can't do it. I will share a list of writers whose books I have read more than once and will most likely return to again. Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark, My Antonia), Jessamyn West (Crescent Delahanty...first read this one while I was in high school), Wallace Stegner, Conrad Richter, Herman Wouk, Carl Sandburg (yes, he is a poet but he wrote wonderful biographies of Lincoln and his wife as well as a terrific novel, Remembrance Rock, one of my all time favorites), Gerard Manley Hopkins (yes, I know he is a poet and technically did not write a book, but he is my favorite poet) William Stafford (also a favorite poet), Tillie Olsen, Orson Scott Card, William Shakespeare. I am sure if I thought long enough I could go on. Currently I am loving novels based on American history and written during the 20th century. Ten years ago I was kneedeep in medieval history and world literature. Love old English...and I ain't talking Shakespeare here...he was the first modern writer.
3. One book you would want on a desert island. Just one???? It would have to be a very big, very fat book that I edited myself with all my favorite scriptures, favorite poetry, and excerpts from my favorite novels.
4. One book that made you laugh. Ummm.... Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I used to read this to my kids. :) Gloria Sylvia Cynthia Stout would not take the garbage out....so I wraps my hair around my bare and down the road I goes....No one loves a Christmas tree on March the 25th...heheh still makes me giggle
5. One book that made you cry. Sophie's Choice by William Styron (read this one during one of my WW II phases)
6. One book I wish I had written. Hmm...I have frequent episodes of writer's envy. I wish I written some of Hopkin's poems. I wish I had written The Tempest by Will Shakespeare (one of the finest things ever written imho). I wish had written all the books I have inside me.
7. One book I wish had never been written. Hard to say here. Whose opinions are not valid enough to write? I wish that people would get along together better than they do. I wish no one would write a book that inflicted undeserved pain or suffering on anyone else.
8. One book that you are currently reading. Oh my. Just one? I never read one book at a time. I am reading The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie Jr. Another of those American historical novels. Pretty good, too, I might add. I picked it up because it has a forward by Wallace Stegner. I am also reading Healing Moves by Carol Krucoff and Mitchell Krucoff, MD, a book about how exercise is actually good for you. hmmm. Honey and Salt which is a book of poetry by Carl Sanburg. My Hopkins is always on my bedside table. I also dabble in the scriptures, Old Testament and Book of Mormon, but not as regularly as I did a few months ago.
9. One book you have been meaning to read. One book???? Just one? Well, I have recently discovered that Jessamyn West and Willa Cather were more prolific than I thought they were. So I have their bibliographies to finish. And both of them read Virginia Woolf, a writer whose books I have not read. Ought to do that...she was one of the most influential women writers in the US. I have also been thinking about all the literature in the world that was not written by Brits or Americans. Lots of stuff out there to read.
10. Now tag five people. Yikes...I am just getting started in this blogging world. I am gonna pass on this one.
1. Name a book that has changed your life. I don't remember the title of the book. It's the first book my mother read to me. I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn't love books and that has been one of the things that my life is about. My favorite Christmas present as a child was "The Anthology of Children's Literature", a book that was fat enough even for me. Oddly enough my parents apologized for giving me the book. They thought it didn't compare well to the gifts the other children received. I would be willing to bet that I am the only one who still has a gift from that Christmas and that my gift brought more hours of happiness and pleasure than all the other gifts combined.
2. One book that I have read more than once? Just one? Can't do it. I will share a list of writers whose books I have read more than once and will most likely return to again. Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark, My Antonia), Jessamyn West (Crescent Delahanty...first read this one while I was in high school), Wallace Stegner, Conrad Richter, Herman Wouk, Carl Sandburg (yes, he is a poet but he wrote wonderful biographies of Lincoln and his wife as well as a terrific novel, Remembrance Rock, one of my all time favorites), Gerard Manley Hopkins (yes, I know he is a poet and technically did not write a book, but he is my favorite poet) William Stafford (also a favorite poet), Tillie Olsen, Orson Scott Card, William Shakespeare. I am sure if I thought long enough I could go on. Currently I am loving novels based on American history and written during the 20th century. Ten years ago I was kneedeep in medieval history and world literature. Love old English...and I ain't talking Shakespeare here...he was the first modern writer.
3. One book you would want on a desert island. Just one???? It would have to be a very big, very fat book that I edited myself with all my favorite scriptures, favorite poetry, and excerpts from my favorite novels.
4. One book that made you laugh. Ummm.... Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I used to read this to my kids. :) Gloria Sylvia Cynthia Stout would not take the garbage out....so I wraps my hair around my bare and down the road I goes....No one loves a Christmas tree on March the 25th...heheh still makes me giggle
5. One book that made you cry. Sophie's Choice by William Styron (read this one during one of my WW II phases)
6. One book I wish I had written. Hmm...I have frequent episodes of writer's envy. I wish I written some of Hopkin's poems. I wish I had written The Tempest by Will Shakespeare (one of the finest things ever written imho). I wish had written all the books I have inside me.
7. One book I wish had never been written. Hard to say here. Whose opinions are not valid enough to write? I wish that people would get along together better than they do. I wish no one would write a book that inflicted undeserved pain or suffering on anyone else.
8. One book that you are currently reading. Oh my. Just one? I never read one book at a time. I am reading The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie Jr. Another of those American historical novels. Pretty good, too, I might add. I picked it up because it has a forward by Wallace Stegner. I am also reading Healing Moves by Carol Krucoff and Mitchell Krucoff, MD, a book about how exercise is actually good for you. hmmm. Honey and Salt which is a book of poetry by Carl Sanburg. My Hopkins is always on my bedside table. I also dabble in the scriptures, Old Testament and Book of Mormon, but not as regularly as I did a few months ago.
9. One book you have been meaning to read. One book???? Just one? Well, I have recently discovered that Jessamyn West and Willa Cather were more prolific than I thought they were. So I have their bibliographies to finish. And both of them read Virginia Woolf, a writer whose books I have not read. Ought to do that...she was one of the most influential women writers in the US. I have also been thinking about all the literature in the world that was not written by Brits or Americans. Lots of stuff out there to read.
10. Now tag five people. Yikes...I am just getting started in this blogging world. I am gonna pass on this one.
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