grandparents had a ranch, and the closest big town was Fort Benton. At a certain point in the fifties they moved from the ranch to a small farm in Hamilton, Montana, where they had a farmhouse and quite a bit of land. It was real rural. They had a horse called Pinkeye I would ride, and I remember Pinkeye taking a drink out of a creek and it took everything I had not to slide right down that horse’s neck and head into the creek. You could go out and shoot a gun in the backyard and not hit anything. I grew up loving trees, and I had a strong connection with nature when I was a kid. It was all I knew. When the family drove anywhere across the country, we’d pull over and my dad would set up a tent and we’d camp—we never stayed in motels. In those days there were campsites all along the roads, but those are gone now. On the ranch you had to fix stuff yourself, so there were tons of tools for everything, and my dad always had a woodshop. He was a craftsman and he rebuilt people’s musical instruments and made ten or eleven violins.
Projects! The word “project” was so thrilling to everyone in my family. You get an idea for a project, and you get your tools together, and tools are some of the greatest things in the world! That people invent things to make things more precise—it’s incredible. Like Peggy said, my parents took it seriously when I got ideas for things I wanted to make.
My parents were so loving and good. They’d had good parents, too, and everybody loved my parents. They were just fair. It’s something you don’t really think about, but when you hear other people’s stories you realize how lucky you were. And my dad was a character. I always said if you cut his leash he’d go right into the woods. One time my dad and I went deer hunting. Hunting was part of the world my dad grew up in and everybody had guns and hunted some, so he was a hunter, but not an avid hunter. And if he killed a deer we’d eat it. You’d rent a freezer and every once in a while you’d go down to the freezer in the basement and get a piece of meat, and for dinner we’d have venison, which I hated. I never shot a deer, and I’m glad I didn’t.
Anyway, I was around ten at the time and we were going deer hunting, so we drive out of Boise and we’re on a two-lane highway. The only light is from the headlights of the car and it’s pitch-black. It’s hard for people today to imagine this, because there are no roads that are pitch-black, hardly ever. So this is pitch-black; we’re going on these winding roads up into the mountains, and a porcupine races across the road. My dad hates porcupines because they eat the tops of trees and the trees die, so he tries to run over the thing but it makes it across the road. So he screeches to the side of the road and slams on the brakes, pops open the glove compartment, takes out this .32 pistol, and says, “Come on, Dave!” We run across the highway and we’re following the porcupine up this rocky mountain, and we’re sliding down while we’re trying to go up this hill, and at the top of this little mountain are three trees. The porcupine goes up one of them, so we start throwing rocks to see which tree it’s in. We figure out which one it’s in, my dad starts climbing the tree, and he says, “Dave! Throw a rock and see if it moves. I don’t see it!” So I throw a rock, and he yells, “No! Not at me!” So I throw some more rocks, and he hears it running, and—Bam! Bam! Bam!—it rolls down out of the tree. We get back in the car and go deer hunting and on the way back we stopped and found that porcupine and it had flies all over it. I got a couple of quills from it.
I went to the second grade in Durham, North Carolina, and my teacher’s name was Mrs. Crabtree. My father had gone back to school in Durham to get his doctorate in forestry, so he studied every night at the kitchen table and I would study with him. I was the only kid in my class that got straight A’s. My second-grade girlfriend, Alice Bauer, got a couple of B’s, so she came in second. One night my dad and I are sitting there studying and I hear my mother and father talking about a mouse that’s in the kitchen. On Sunday my mother takes my brother and sister to church with the idea that my dad is going to stay home and get rid of this mouse. He had me kind of helping him move the stove, and this little mouse ran out of the kitchen and across the living room and leapt up inside a closet with clothes hanging. My dad took a baseball bat and beat these clothes until this little bloody mouse fell out.
Idaho City used to be the biggest city in the state of Idaho, but when we moved to Boise there were probably a hundred people living in Idaho City in the summer and fifty in the winter. That’s where the research center was for the Boise Basin Experimental Forest, and my dad was in charge of the Experimental Forest. The word “experimental” is so beautiful. I just love it. They did tests on erosion, insects, and disease and tried to figure out how to get healthier trees. All the buildings were white with green trim, and in the yard there were posts with little wooden houses on top. They were kind of like birdhouses with doors, and when you opened them up you’d find all sorts of devices inside that were checking things like humidity and temperature. They were beautifully made and were painted white with green trim, just like all the buildings. Then you go into some office and there are billions of little drawers, and you open them up and there are insects in there on little pins. There were big greenhouses with seedlings going, and if you went into the forest a lot of the trees had little tags on them for some kind of experiment or something. They’d check them.
That’s when I would shoot chipmunks. My dad would drive me into the woods in the Forest Service pickup, and I loved these pickups—they run so smooth, and they’re Forest Service green. I’d get out with my .22 and my lunch and he’d pick me up at the end of the day. I was allowed to shoot as many chipmunks as I could, because the forest was overrun with them, but I couldn’t shoot any birds. One time I was out there and a bird flew way up in the top of a tree and I raised my gun and pulled the trigger. I never thought I’d hit it but I must’ve hit it dead center, because the feathers just exploded and it came twirling down and plopped into a creek and swirled away.
We lived on Parke Circle Drive in Boise, and next door were the Smiths. There was Mr. and Mrs. Smith; the four boys, Mark, Randy, Denny, and Greg; and the grandmother, who was called Nana. Nana was always out doing gardening, and you knew when she was out gardening because you’d hear this little tinkle of ice against a glass. She’d be out there with these gardening gloves on, with a mixed drink in one hand and a little spade in the other hand. She got the Pontiac that my family sold to the Smiths. She wasn’t completely deaf, but she was deaf enough that when she started the car she’d almost floorboard the thing so she could hear that it was on. There’d be this gigantic roar in the garage and you’d know Nana was going somewhere. On Sundays people in Boise went to church, and the Smiths went to an Episcopalian church. They had a Ford station wagon they’d drive to church, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith would sit up front with a carton of cigarettes. Not just a couple of packs. A carton.
Kids then had a lot of freedom to run around. We went everywhere and we weren’t inside in the day, ever. We were out doing stuff and it was fantastic. It’s horrible that kids don’t get to grow up that way anymore. How did we let that happen? We didn’t have a TV until I was in the third grade, and I watched some TV as a child, but not very much. The only show I really watched was Perry Mason. Television did what the Internet is doing more of now: It homogenized everything.
That’s something about the fifties that’s so important and is never going to come back: There used to be differences in places. In Boise the girls and the guys dressed a certain way, and if you go to Virginia they dressed in a completely different way. If you go up to New York City they dress in a completely different way there, too, and they listen to different music. You go to Queens and the girls looked like—you’d never seen anything like it in your life! And in Brooklyn they’re even different than in Queens! That Diane Arbus photograph of the couple with the baby, and the girl has a certain type of big beautiful hair? You would never see that in Boise or Virginia. And the music. If you catch the vibe of the music in a place, you just look at these girls and listen to what they’re listening to, and you’ve got a whole picture. The world they live in is completely strange and unique and you want to know about that world and what they’re into. Those kinds of differences are pretty much gone now. There are still minor differences, like there are the hipsters, but you’ll find hipsters in other cities that are just like the hipsters in your town.
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