and social order. By the end, there were Vietnam and the Rebellions of ’68, and everything was up for grabs.
Red Skelton, a brilliant mime and comedian of those decades, performed a TV skit that exemplifies well that late-Fifties/early-Sixties crux:
The drunkard’s wife decides, once and for all, to teach him a lesson. She inverts the furniture and objects of his living room, nailing the furniture to the ceiling, on which is glued the carpet, hanging the pictures and mirrors upside down, and so forth.
Skelton enters after a night on the town, unsteady of gait, humming tunelessly to himself, smiling innocently. He stops, confused. Everything is familiar. Everything is, in one sense, in its proper place. And yet nothing obeys the laws of memory or the laws of accepted physics. He, himself, is marooned on the ceiling, and unable to get himself “right side up.” Lost in space.
To have come of age in the late 1950’s, as a White American Male, was to have your fingers upon the door handle of that room, but to have not as yet turned the knob.
This is one story, of such a time, and place, and person.
This is a work of imagination. It is also a work of experience. There is truth in the old saw that all fiction has significant autobiographical elements. There is also truth in the statement that all autobiography contains significant fictions. Thus, in this book, the conventional disclaimer about “resemblance to any persons living or dead” loses meaningful relevance.
There are many people whom I wish to thank. Jim Smith of Sunstone Press became a partner in this effort. Kent Carroll was extremely generous with advice and encouragement, when advice was plentiful, but encouragement very hard to come by. I am blessed that my wife, Beth Preble, is not only my muse, but also my clearest-eyed critic. My daughter and son-in-law, Denise and Peter Joseph-Martin, produced my wild buckaroo grandsons who are the proximate stimulus to putting this four-decades-old dream down on paper. The music of Woody Guthrie burned into my younger memory the relationship of song to story, and I thank the Woody Guthrie Foundation for keeping the song going. My best buddy, Typhoon, curled as a pup at my feet when I wrote my previous book. She performed the same service now again, in her twilight years.
And finally, I would like to thank the men and women of the US National Park Service and the US Forest Service, past, present, and future, for their dedication to conserving our most irreplaceable treasures.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2002
Dust Bowl Refugee
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
TRO-copyright 1960 (renewed), 1963 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc.
New York, NY
Going Down the Road
(I Ain’t Going to Be Treated This Way)
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays
TRO-copyright 1960 (renewed), 1963 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc.
New York, NY
Pastures of Plenty
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
TRO-copyright 1960 (renewed), 1963 (renewed) Ludlow Music, Inc.
New York, NY
900 Miles
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie
Copyright 1958 (renewed) by SANGA Music, Inc.
All rights reserved
It was merely a few months past my nineteenth birthday, during the late winter of 1956-1957, when I decided to ride my thumb to Alaska, four thousand miles and more.
Who knows how, or where, such desires take root, from what long-hidden seeds they sprout. Are they stirred in from the genetic soup of grandparents who left the Old World for the New? Are they remembered from whispered words of stories or lullabies heard near the dawn of life? Are they lessons learned in school and at the movies, of Boone and Crockett, of Huck Finn, and, later, of Shane?
I have a scratchy eight millimeter old home movie film: the family at a picnic in the woods of the lower Hudson Valley. All, except one, are gathered around the wooden table. Then, out from among the trees, knobby knees striding under short pants, a crude walking stick waving, comes three-year-old me, unmistakable joy on my face and in my heart. If I had been old enough, I undoubtedly would have been whistling. Could I have known then that the archetypal American myth is that of the lone wanderer, the one who rides in and then rides on, looking always only for the next mountain, and again and again pushed over the hill and far away by the sight of a neighbor’s chimney smoke? Call me Ishmael?
Later, in early adolescence, it was Western dime novels (though they indeed cost twenty-five, and sometimes thirty-five cents even in those long-ago days). In compulsive ritual, every Friday after school I would pedal my bike the three miles to a favored cigar store, spend what seemed like hours choosing from among the books on the racks, and pedal home again. What fantasies galloped along with that two-wheeled and many-spoked magic steed, pushing across the suburban prairie, carrying the precious mail by Pony Express! Once home, I would read the week’s treasure as slowly as possible, making it last, obsessively, until the next Friday. With Max Brand, Evan Evans, Peter Field, Luke Short, and a score of other authors, I stole horses from around Kiowa campfires, drove long-horned, half-wild cattle across the Cimarron, rescued the widow’s ranch from the banker who wore the black string tie, held out against all odds at Fort Apache, and most, most of all, lived as a Free Trapper in the 1830s Shining Mountains.
With the zany compulsiveness of adolescence, I held my treasures in a special, separate bookcase, arranged alphabetically by author, nested within unique sections by publisher: Pocket Books, Signet Books, Bantam Books, and the new, ‘expensive’ Ballantines. Dreams were filled with the contents of that bookcase. The Black Hills, the Arizona Territory,
