The Journey to the West (8)

My ongoing sort-of-Memoir, The Journey to the West, was set back three Sundays because my computer was, once again, being repaired. That, of course, is trivial, because everyone's journey is subjected to all kinds of setbacks, detours, false starts, road blocks, writer's cramps, and even occasional journeys to the east. The Journey to the West is not a smooth, simple trip without any hitches or setbacks. But it is inevitable and whatever detours it makes does not change the ultimate and entirely predictable outcome. Perhaps as the Spanish sometimes say, "Life is merely an illusion, the truth comes only at the end," the illusion is our reality for the moment. My illusion, such as it is, continues:

For those of us about to become teenagers there was little in the way of organized activities. There was no Youth Center or anything like that. But we found lots of things to do and were seldom bored. As the town was small, it was only a short walk to be on the surrounding mountains. There was a small, clear, and quite lovely stream that ran down one mountainside and formed a small but pleasant pool. We often played there, sometimes making lean-twos and hiding places. We whittled, making little bark whistles and pretend knives and swords, and even primitive spears and bows and arrows. High on a nearby hill was a large wooden reservoir that served as part of the city water supply. We often went there where we sat looking down on our town, telling what to us were dirty jokes, and reflecting upon life in general. I do not recall ever being alone during these years, I had many good friends and no enemies to speak of. Life for us was pleasant and leisurely. Sometimes my father would load some of my friends and me into the big Hudson and drive us a few miles to a place called Stropes Pond. It was a sort of motel that had a fairly large pond where we could swim in the summer and ice skate in winter. Once I fell through the ice so our visit was cut short.

There was a larger creek that ran through town, Placer Creek. Unlike the Lead Creek it was unpolluted and we could fish there for trout. It ran into the Lead Creek eventually. The fishing was not great but we usually managed to catch a few small trout and we learned how to fish both with bait and with dry flies. My friend Bill was the most ardent and dedicated fisherman and always did better than the rest of us. My father also took us fishing in the nearby lakes, Rose Lake, Medimont, Black Lake, and others. We fished for bass and crappies and perch. Interestingly enough, when we first fished for bass we did not use fishing poles, we merely twirled the plugs around and threw them out as far as we could. The line was wrapped around some handmade wooden holders when it was not in use. I assume this was the kind of fishing my father’s family had brought from Norway. We almost always caught fish. It was not long, however, before we became modernized and all had casting rods and fly rods and more desirable equipment (I don’t think we caught any more fish but we felt more pride in what we were doing).

There was no bookstore in our town. There was a store that mainly sold stationery and cameras and such things and where they sometimes had books, but never more than just a few. We did have a library and I quickly exhausted the books that were of interest to me. I particularly remember books like White Fang, Silver Chief, Carcajou, Call of the Wild, and books about horses and other animals. And there were The Hardy Boys and other juvenile adventure stories. I was from the beginning an avid reader but selections were limited. The Cigar Store where my father worked carried by far the largest selection of magazines. I remember browsing there quite often, but we didn’t buy many magazines and subscribed to nothing but the local paper, The Wallace Press Times. In 1995 my friend Bill returned to me a book I had lent him when we were children (65 years late!), Rex, the Wonder Dog. Bill and I read, most of our other friends did not read much and reading was not considered very important.

Of course we played at sports, football, softball, basketball, track and field. Curiously, looking back at it, we didn’t play baseball (hardball, that is). People followed baseball in the paper and on the radio, but we only played softball. I suspect this was because we had such a small playing field we would not have been able to keep the hardballs out of the Lead Creek. As I wore thick glasses I did not excel in sports, although I played. If I tried to play without glasses I couldn’t see well enough, and if I wore my glasses they often broke, much to my father’s displeasure. I finally gave up sports, not only because of the glasses, but because I wasn’t really big enough to compete effectively. It could be said that I became more of a “lover.” I have often wondered how different my adolescence and later life might have been had there been contact lenses at that time. I believe there were unbreakable glasses of some kind but I never had them.

In those days you had to complete the eighth grade before you could quit school. And many of my friends did just that, going to work in the mines or the mills or wherever they could (there were commonly eighty or ninety freshman in High School, but by graduation there were only about forty at most). In the eighth grade we were allowed to take courses like shop, where we learned to use wood lathes and power saws, and other tools. We also took drafting lessons and learned how to draw blueprints and such. Needless to say, intellectualism was not of interest to most, if any, of the residents of our town. But we were, of course, required to take English, American History, Algebra, and Civics, none of which were received with much but apathy (by the time I graduated from High School I had never even heard of psychology). There was diversity, however. Because it was a mining town that drew itinerant miners from all over, we had Germans, Italians, Finns, Irish, French, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, and others. There were no Jews, no Blacks, and no Hispanics. This did not mean there was no prejudice against such ethnics, there was. But strangely, the most intense prejudice was shown towards Missourians, as once a bunch of them were brought in as strikebreakers. The same was true of blacks as once a company of black soldiers was brought in to break up a strike. It was said in our town, “the sun will never set on a black person (n......) here.”

Girls, too, were now taking on an entirely new perspective and importance. We didn’t date quite yet, but we met in groups to play “spin-the-bottle,” and kiss and giggle, and talk of imaginary conquests and encounters. We learned to dance to juke boxes and records played in the wealthier kids’ basements, and of course learned all the new songs, that in those days were often sentimental and had to do with the war. “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” “Saturday Night,” “Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer,” and other such favorites. It was the era of the big bands, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Les Brown, and many others. We learned to jitterbug and dress in pegged pants with key chains and had crew cuts and in general had a good time in spite of the war. In many ways I think these may have been the best years of my life.