King of the Mild Frontier (12 page)

Turns out, three blocks twice a day toting a backpack filled with junk food does not Edmund Hillary make. This was the Fourth of July bike race all over again. A hundred yards into the hike I was fifty yards behind, and the only thing that burned more than my legs and lungs was my desire to go home. Hirais and Bilbaos sat on large rocks, patiently waiting for me to catch up. My brother was begging Chuck to keep some sense of respect for the Crutcher name and take me back. Chuck sternly but quietly ordered me to keep up, but these guys had actual muscles in their
legs and were anxious to get to the top and start fishing. Maybe I should ride on the packhorse, I offered. The packhorse was at maximum capacity, Chuck said. Which thing would I like him to take off for me to ride? Seeing the expression on his face as I named the first three things, I realized that, like my parents, Chuck Spence sometimes asked questions to which he didn't want an answer.

After the third or fourth time I trailed back out of sight in the trees, Chuck ordered me to walk in front of everyone. Peer pressure. No one was allowed to pass me on the trail, but they were allowed to say anything in the way of encouragement, either positive or negative. They wanted to know if my feet hurt. They wanted to know if I could walk any slower. They wanted to know where I got the coonskin cap.

When we finally reached Shirts Lake (so named because, viewed from the peaks above, it resembled a shirttail), I wanted to eat and take a nap, and when I opened my pack to pop a couple of the twelve root beers I'd packed and crack open a package of chocolate-covered graham crackers, I was nearly beaten to death. Did I know how much twelve bottles of root beer weighed? And if I didn't know I wasn't supposed to bring them, why did I wrap them individually so they wouldn't clank together? Good questions, again no answer required.

The rainbow trout in Shirts Lake were known to jump out of the lake into your pockets. You could walk across Shirts Lake on the backs of rainbow trout, they were so plentiful. They were so crowded they'd gut themselves if you'd promise to take them out and eat them. A half hour into our first fishing session, the Bilbaos, the Hirais, and my brother all had their limits. I had zero fish. As crowded as they were, as overpopulated as was their homeland, not one was willing to suffer the humiliation of being caught by a whiny dweeb in a coonskin cap with root beer on his breath who couldn't get his hook in the water because it became hopelessly entangled in the bushes behind him. My temper caused me to jerk on the pole with all my might while loudly assailing the nature of Nature at the top of my lungs, leaving hook, line, and sinkers dangling from the bush. That same temper
forced
me to kick my creel into the water, losing all my extra equipment and bait.

The guys went back to camp to clean the fish and prepare the fire for lunch. Part of the frontier theme of this outing was to live off the land and water, so I stayed on the shore, casting the line Chuck Spence had disgustedly untangled for me. Still no fish ventured toward my hook.

Finally Chuck came back down to where I was fishing. “I'll be dogged,” he said. “I've never seen
anyone
fish this lake as long
as you have without even a bite. What are you using for bait?”

“Brrres,” I mumbled.

“You should be using salmon eggs. Burrs?”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“I've never heard of that. Reel 'er in. Let me see.”

“It's okay. I think I just got a bite.”

“Reel 'er in.”

I reeled her in, bringing my bait into sight. Three green berries.

“What the hell are those?”

“Brrres,” I mumbled again.

“Berries,” he said. “Where did you get them?”

I pointed to a bush behind us. “Off that salmon-egg bush,” I said.

Chuck Spence was a man of great patience. He and my father were friends. His wife and my mother were friends. We had all been known to have Thanksgiving dinners together. It would not have been advisable for him to do what his expression told me he wanted to do. “I'll make you a deal,” he said, his voice pinched. “Lose the coonskin cap, and I'll catch your meals for you.” He went on to suspend all frontiersman requisites for me, in order that the rest of our group could enjoy their camping trip.

That night a huge grizzly bear mauled me in my sleeping
bag. He lumbered right into the camp and picked me out like some kind of human candy bar. When he was finished, I was breathing through the sucking holes in my chest. I'd been huddled at the bottom of my bag, and initially when I felt his claws, I tried to scream, but no sounds would come out. No sound at all. At least in the dream. In reality, I screamed loud enough to send the packhorse fleeing back down the mountain.

I slept next to Chuck for the rest of the night, and the next day when he hiked back down the mountain to retrieve the horse, he took me with him and came back with only the horse. There would be no heroic
Field and Stream
stories passing through the Spence household to the ears of the fine pianist Paula Whitson, the coonskin cap was history, and my craggy face continued to be wasted on the body of a total wimp.

It turned out, as I discovered later, that Chuck Spence had been a soft kid himself, and he believed any kid could be hardened into a marine with patience and understanding. So just before Thanksgiving, he included me when he announced that the entire scout troop would be going on a winter overnight during the week between Christmas and New Year's. At the meeting he listed the winter gear required, then took us through the scout survival manual paragraph by paragraph. His most oft-uttered statement was, “Are you listening, Chris?”

Many bad decisions are made sitting in the privacy of one's bedroom with one's friends, allowing an imaginary world where dweebs rule to stand in for the real one. With the help of Jackie Craig and Spencer Hayes, who played Dewey and Louie to my Huey, I decided the Bilbaos and Hirais and John Crutchers of the world had nothing on me when it came to survival in the wild. In the face of all I knew about myself, in the face of the fact that we couldn't tie one square knot between us, in the face of the fact that we stood to actually freeze to death, we decided to be camp partners with
one another
and show nature and the rest of Troop 235 a thing or two.

“This isn't a good idea,” Chuck said, telegraphing “Don't you remember West Mountain?” directly at me. “You guys should spread yourselves out with the more experienced campers.”

“We've really been studying this survival book,” I said, “and we're doing great in the rehearsals.”

“The rehearsals have all been here in the Legion Hall,” Chuck said. “It's sixty-eight degrees. There is no wind. There is no snow. There is no bitter cold.”

“Yeah, but we're really getting it down.”

Though I'm sure he didn't know the term, Chuck Spence liked karma. He was willing to let a lesson present itself and present itself and
present itself until it was finally learned.

As I've stated, Cascade, Idaho, sits in a long valley in the Rocky Mountain range, nearly a mile above sea level. I have pictures of my six-foot, five-inch father standing atop the tank of his thousand-gallon gas delivery truck with one arm stretched as high as he can reach, and his fingers are still a good three feet below the top of the snowbank behind him. I used to walk the five blocks to school (oh-oh, here it comes…) in weather so cold you had to stop in three stores to steal candy—I mean, to keep from getting frostbite.

The Hirais and their cousin Ron Nakatani, who would lend his name to one of my favorite
Ironman
characters, formed one group. The Bilbaos and my brother and a couple of older kids formed another. Two other groups of kids who hunted and fished with their fathers in all weather over long weekends pooled their survival resources. Jackie Craig and Spencer Hayes and I needed no help from any of these dudes who thought they were so cool. I had a brand-new Boy Scout camp cook kit and a knife with scissors and saw blades and cutting edges and a leather punch and a fork and spoon. I had new boots. I had new mittens. All I lacked was a coonskin cap. I almost froze solid.

We parked the vans and walked maybe a half mile to the camping site. The temperature was above zero, and a light
snow fell. The other campers immediately gathered wood and started fires, then built lean-tos to shelter themselves from the weather. They gathered more wood and put down tarps. Within an hour some of them were actually ice fishing.

Smokey the Bear had nothing to fear from Jackie and Spencer and me. We went through our six books of matches unable even to set fire to the newspapers we put under the wood we were too lazy to cut down to tinder and kindling. The lean-to structures built by the other groups might as well have been Egyptian pyramids for all the likelihood of our being able to construct one. An hour and a half into the experience, we were grousing at one another and shivering like wet puppies, unwilling to ask for help. We put one tarp down, our sleeping bags on top of that, another over the bags, crawled into the bags fully dressed at three o'clock in the afternoon, and went to bed.

Chuck Spence looked on in mild amusement. At dinnertime the Bilbaos and Hirais brought us cooked food, but we told them we'd already eaten.

The elements were kind for that time of year. The temperature never dipped below ten degrees, little wind blew, and only a skiff of snow fell. We awoke in the morning to a bright, crisp winter wonderland. Blue sky backed snow white trees in picture-postcard splendor. Gray smoke
snaked skyward from four campfires, and the smell of sausage and pancakes wafted to us, shivering in the bottoms of our bags. Chuck Spence came by and shook us. Let's do it, guys. Get up and make a campfire. We're leaving in just a few hours. Let's have one success before you go home.

We counted to three about eight times before finally jumping up and cramming our feet into freezing boots, the only article of clothing that hadn't gone into the sleeping bags with us. Spencer got another book of matches from Chuck, and we agreed to follow the manual exactly and get a GODDAMN FIRE GOING this time. With numb fingers we chopped the kindling. A little moss from a nearby tree, then tinder, the kindling, some smaller sticks placed into a perfect tepee. I hadn't been this cold since my Christmas-tree-hunting expedition in grade school, but finally the fire crackled. Jackie dug sausages and bacon out of his pack, I pulled out the camp cook kit, and Spencer kept adding wood to the fire.

“You guys want to build that fire on more solid ground,” Chuck said as he inspected our handiwork. “This snow has to be five feet deep; your fire will sink.” He was right, it was already sinking, but we were freezing to death and none of us was about to go through the process of building another one. “And it's not the smartest thing to build your fire under
a tree,” he said. Jesus, Chuck, give us a break. It's the middle of winter, we could barely light our own tinder. We sure as hell weren't worried about catching a tree on fire. And even if we set the entire forest ablaze,
at least we'd be warm.

The camp cook kit was rendered useless as the fire sank out of reach into the snow, and we began dropping sticks in to keep it going. Spencer got out his fishing pole, put a sausage on the hook, and dropped it down. The smell! The sizzling! Within moments the three of us stood over the heated hole, our fishing poles baited with sausages as if we were fishing for coyote pups. Get out your Polaroid, Chuck Spence. This should go into the manual under Boy Scout resourcefulness.

Spencer reeled in his first sausage; almost done…a few seconds more. He dropped it back. A slight rustling above us, a soft sliding sound, and the fire was
gone!
The heat of our fire had warmed the tree branches above us; the snow slid off and our fire disappeared as if by Mandrake the Magician. We stood with our fishing lines vanishing into the snow as if it were a lake, all traces of warmth or food a bitter illusion, looked at one another in horror, squinted our eyes, peeled back our lips, and transformed ourselves into a perfect trio of bawlbabies.

When Chuck Spence delivered me home that afternoon,
he asked my mother if she remembered how much she'd wanted her second child to be a girl. My mother said yes. Chuck Spence said, “He is.”

My brother asked—no, begged—that I be given back to my biological parents.

 

On a warm, melting day about a week into April, the town doctor drove into my dad's service station. I was on the island before he could pull to a stop and gave him service so super he'd remember it today, were he living. He handed me his credit card and said, “I've been noticing you're having a little trouble with your complexion.”

“I haven't touched it!” I yelled.

He smiled and opened his glove compartment, removing a paper bag filled with prescription soap and an ointment. “Wash with this three times a day,” he said. “It won't get rid of them completely, but it will cut them down. And by the way, that's not how you get them. You're going into adolescence and your skin is oily and about all you can do is keep your face clean and it will pass.”

“You mean…”

“And guess what,” he said, handing me the certificate lying on his front seat. “You just caught yourself a Mystery Motorist.”

DINNERTIME IN THE CRUTCHER HOUSEHOLD
was a finishing school for diners. My dad knew more rules for getting food around the table and into your mouth than there are cars on an L.A. freeway. “Kids,” he was fond of saying, “eating is not a pretty thing. It's our job to make it as civilized an activity as possible.” I remember being anxious about turning five, the age at which you were no longer allowed to eat green peas with a spoon. It would extend dinnertime by twenty maddening minutes.

After Glen died, my dad worked twelve to fifteen hours a day at the service station, or delivering gas and stove oil
and diesel to smaller retailers and to farms and mining and logging operations around the county, so dinnertime was the only time of day we were all together. It always played to mixed reviews for me because, though I looked forward to seeing him, if you were in trouble, that's when it got talked about; and there were always the rules. He called them table manners, but to me they were rules.

My mother never sat at the table with us, but rather “pieced,” as she called it, eating as she prepared the food at the counter or at the stove and drinking Tab and Jim Beam whiskey from a glass sitting in the closed cupboard behind my dad's head. At the height of her drinking she sipped away a full fifth, starting at four or so in the afternoon as she started cooking and stopping when her head hit the pillow around nine-thirty or ten, minutes before my dad would wake up from his after-dinner nap to watch the ten o'clock news followed by the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

So we're sitting at that small Formica table slid into a small nook in a very small kitchen. Big house, small kitchen. My mother hates that; she'd rather have it the other way around. Less space to clean, more to work. My dad sits at one end, my brother at the other, my sister, Candy, and I across from each other in the middle. My mother is nibbling on a piece of raw steak, which I will later come to call
Oklahoma sushi, from the stove between sips.

“Okay, that's it,” Crutch says in response to someone asking for the potatoes, followed by no one picking up the potato bowl with the right hand, switching it to the left and passing cross-body to the right toward the person who made the request. “From now on when you want something on the table, say the name of the person closest to it. We don't need all the confusion.” That's how a rule gets set in stone, in response to some phantom “need” only Crutch sees. So it has been said,
once,
so it shall be done. He will hold both passer and passee responsible for compliance: If someone asks for something and doesn't say the name of the person, no one is to pass it. The culinary version of Simon Says. It is the latest in a long list of edicts one starts learning at five, when he or she is, as I said, no longer allowed to eat peas with a spoon. (No wonder my mom doesn't like to sit down with us. It's tough enough to remember all these rules when you're
not
killing brain cells.)

Back to the business of eating and catching up with one another's days. My brother is in junior high school, and he's excited about a debate they're having at school tomorrow. Pro and con in the Old West: cattle ranchers versus sheepherders. John's saddling up with the cattle ranchers. I like that. Roy Rogers is a cowboy, and I don't know any shepherd
heroes, with the possible exception of Jesus, and the sheep He moved from place to place were mostly His apostles. At this stage of my life, riding a golden palomino has it all over riding a cross. I imagine a stampeding herd of cattle. I imagine a stampeding herd of sheep. I imagine steak. I imagine
mutton.
No contest.

To keep my brother sharp, my dad gives him cattle, takes sheep, which delights John no end because he has
prepared
for this. My dad then proceeds to kick his ass, metaphorically, all over the kitchen. One animal has as much right as the other on the open range, which is, as advertised, open; and beyond that, one American has just as much right there as any other American. One by one, my dad shoots down my brother's arguments until John is nearly in tears and I'm about to turn in my six-guns for a shepherd's crook. “Elbows off the table,” my dad says to Candy. “The table is for your food and your plate.” To me: “Don't play with your food, Chris.”

I tell him I'm not playing with it, I just can't keep the peas on the fork. I recite an old poem
he
taught me:

He smiles. “Just don't play with your food.”

My brother sits there gathering himself, probably wishing he had taken sheepherders for tomorrow's debate.

My dad says to him, “Okay, now you take the sheepherders.”

John brightens. He has great short-term memory, prepares to take my dad down with his own arguments.

This is where I'm grateful for being the second child. I have long since learned to watch my brother navigate the faster rapids so I can see the best places to negotiate them when it's my turn. John goes with the basic human and animal rights Crutch just unloaded on him, and my dad hits him with the fact that the ranchers were there first and they have a right to the life they have carved out for themselves in that rugged country. The finer points pass over me, but one thing is clear. My brother had his butt kicked from the table to the sink; now it's getting kicked from the sink to the table. He is one pissed debater, drinking from his large glass of milk to keep from crying, then excusing himself from the table.

“Break your bread into quarters before you butter it,” my dad says to me. “And you were right to take the butter from the butter plate with the butter knife, but you don't use it to butter your bread. Use your own knife. The butter knife is for everyone.”

I'm almost ready to eat the bread dry. My dad watches John plop down in a chair in the living room, pissed and pouting. In a few minutes he'll join a cowboy gang so he can kick the sheepherders' butts tomorrow in school.

“So which one is right?” I ask my dad.

“Depends whether you're a sheepherder or a rancher,” Crutch says.

“Yeah, but which one is
right?
”

“If you're going to play with those cookies,” he tells me as I twist open an Oreo to lick out the frosting, “you're going to lose them.”

I return the cookie to its original form. Not long ago I peeled all the chocolate frosting off a piece of cake to eat as a dessert for my dessert. I ate the cake, then excused myself for a minute to go to the bathroom and bleed off any hint of discomfort. Eating that frosting with no cake to cut the sweetness would be heaven. When I returned, the frosting was gone—into Crutch's stomach. “If you're going to play with your food,” he told me, “you're going to lose it.” And you can guess as to whether there was room for bawlbabies who had just lost their frosting at our dinner table.

I wait now for the answer to my question. “Neither,” he says. “Both.”

Obviously that can't be the real answer. Next he'll be
telling me to put my hands into freezing cold water or go hop into the furnace. Again. I tell him
one
of them had to be right.

He points to the corner of a candy-bar wrapper sticking out of my pocket. “What do you think that's worth?”

“You mean after I already ate part of it?”

“New.”

“Five cents.” (Boy,
those
were the days.)

“What if it were the only one left in the store?”

“It's still worth a nickel,” I say. “It says so right on the wrapper.”

“What if there were only one left in the store and Ron Boyd's right there with you and he wants it as badly as you do and he tells Woody he'll give him a dime?”

Damn. That Boyd…

“Okay,” he says. “Let me make it easy. Say you're out in the desert. You've been there ten days without food, and you're almost ready to starve to death; I mean, drop over dead. You see an oasis in the distance but know you can't make it because you are so weak from hunger you can't take another step. You have ten thousand dollars in your pocket that you can spend on anything you want once you make it to safety, but you have no food and no water.
Now
Ron Boyd shows up with that candy bar. You offer him a nickel,
and he says, ‘No way, man. I'll give it to you for ten thousand dollars.' You say, ‘That's all I've got,' and he says, ‘Perfect. Give me the ten thousand, and I'll give you the candy bar.' What do you do?”

“Pay ten thousand dollars for a candy bar? No way.”

“So you'd rather die. How much good is the ten thousand to you if you're dead?”

“What if I tried to give him
five
thousand?”

“Well, you're proving my point, but let's give it a try. I'll be Ron.”

I'm into it. I get down on the desert sands of the kitchen floor. My mother steps over me to get another drink. I say, “Ron…Ron…I'll give you five thousand dollars for that candy bar.”

My dad shakes his head emphatically. “Nope. Ten thousand or nothing. And you have fifteen seconds to decide because after that I'm going to eat it myself.”

Aaaauuuuugh!
“Wait! How about six thousand?”

“Ten seconds,” my dad says. “Nine…eight…seven…”

“Okay! Okay! Ten thousand.”

We pretend to make the exchange. My dad finds it necessary to remind me that under normal circumstances it is bad manners to lie down on the kitchen floor during dinner, but there was a lesson here, so on a one-time basis, it is
permissible. The man has interesting priorities.

“There's not always a right answer,” he says. “There's only an answer in
context.
Which is
right
about the candy bar? Is it worth five cents or ten thousand dollars?”

I point to my wrapper. “It says right here, five cents.”

We are quiet a moment, and John has gathered himself and come back to the table. I say, “So you didn't answer my question. Who is right, the cowboys or the sheepherders?”

My dad's eyes roll: his most emphatic emotional expression. He says, “The goat men, Chris. The goat men.”

He starts repairing the damage with my brother so John can go into school tomorrow and kick a little woolly ass, and as I excuse myself from the table—“May I be excused, please?” is the only proper avenue of escape—he turns to me. “You know that candy bar you have in your pocket?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'll buy you two of them if I don't get a note from Mr. Knee tomorrow telling me you got a bloody nose for trying to sell one for ten thousand dollars.”

Candy spent the rest of the evening putting “Lever bought a candy bar for ten thousand dollars” to music.

 

I was seventeen when I knew I'd never be married. When I look back on that time, when all the vibrance of learning
and interacting and relating was going on in the kitchen, my mother moved through it like a ghost waitress, refilling her glass, drinking herself inconspicuously into a state of numbness. Before I knew what she was doing, I thought she was solar powered. The sun went down and she got dumb. In fact, as the sun was setting, so were her brain cells. Sometimes I think part of the reason she drank was because my dad's kind of thinking scared her. She had so many unarticulated wounds of her own and wanted some way to address them simply, though she could certainly never give herself permission. She came from a time and a people who valued men's responses more than women's, so she seldom stood up for herself other than to get angry when she was totally fed up with not being heard. She was kind and helpful and sacrificial to a fault, and she seemed to feel inept as a mother and as a wife because she could never please except by staying out of the way and not challenging my father for fear of getting the cowboy/sheepherders treatment. So we went by the king's-in-his-castle rules, and the king had no respect for the expression of emotional pain. You could express it, just don't expect a response.

My parents were considered by the townspeople to have a solid marriage. There were few suspicions of infidelity and they never fought in public and seemed to respect each other.
My dad was an intelligent, relatively successful man who was always supported by his wife and whose kids were generally well behaved in public and would probably not grow up to go on welfare. They were community minded and accommodating, and you could always count on them to do their part, though my dad could be what the Bilbaos' mom described as “a little hard to get to know,” which meant he was intimidating. It was a great package, but inside that package, for whatever reason, it fell to me to make my mother feel better. Because she could never please, she could never truly
be
pleased, but I'd work my ass off to do it anyway.

The evening scenario
around
that dinnertime interaction went something like this: Jewell would see Crutch coming up the walk out the kitchen window and pour him a gin and tonic, handing it to him as he came through the door. He drank it as he watched the evening news, rattled the ice when it was empty, which signaled her he was ready for his second. If for some reason the TV was louder than the ice clinking against the side of the glass and she didn't hear, he rattled it again and the second drink appeared. Then we had dinner, which Jewell swept through like a ghostly waitress, and afterward Crutch would have a glass of iced tea, stretch out on the couch to watch TV, and fall asleep, while my mother cleaned the kitchen and polished
off the Jim Beam. I would sit in the living room, planning to go outside and play hide-and-go-seek or kick the can or ante-eye-over with my friends. Often I could hear them out there starting up the game, sometimes even calling my name to hurry and come out.