A Revisionist's History: What Neil Young Did for Dad

Growing up, my dad always insisted he liked Neil Young. He even would sing a line or two: “I was lying in a burned out basement, with a full moon over my head. . . .” (I still have no clue what that means, but since just about everything else he sang involved illicit drugs, I have a general idea.) At any rate, Dad “claimed” he loved Neil Young, but I knew better.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love old Neil as much as—probably more than—the next man. More than once, I’ve put my good name on the line in his defense. To bolster my position, I have it on good authority from a Mormon Bishop that Young could have beat Jimmy Page hands down. That’s all the authority I need.

As much as I love Young’s music, it’s a well-acknowledged fact that his real skill was with the guitar. This is why songs like “Cortez the Killer” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” have such timeless appeal as evidenced by the rise in alt-country. In my unlearned opinion, it is also why songs like “After the Goldrush” have lost a little of their stature in the Neil Young field of greats.

So when I tell you that the one Neil Young song my father sang more than any other was “After the Goldrush” (followed up closely by “Old Man” both of which lack the signature Neil Young riffs), you immediately understand one thing about my father. He resonated with Young on a much deeper level than vocal aptitude.

I’m told that one summer during my father’s late teens he guided Kayaks on a remote section of the Salmon River in Central Idaho. By his own admission the Moody Blues formed much of the soundtrack for that summer on the river. Now, I don’t know about you, but even with the most generous and accommodating ear, I could never stomach “Knights in White Satin.” The music literally nauseated me every time. If he would have listened to the lyrics, perhaps he would have felt the same way. But he didn’t have to listen, he was kayaking and separated from home and responsibility by vast expanses of sage brush.


My point is this, we all hear lousy music at one point or another. Sometimes, depending on what we are doing when the garbage comes blaring out of tinny speakers, we develop a taste for it simply because it reminds us of good times.

For my father, Young, the Moody Blues and the Beatles’ Sergaent Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had the effect of conjuring up the heroic images of his youth. And in a way, they conjured up the same images for me; because even though our relationship during my teen years was fairly close, these songs allowed us to connect with each other on level to which words alone refused to carry us. We formed a sort of brotherhood listening to all the rock and roll my father knew in the 60’s. And I was ok with that.


Most Saturdays would find my father and I working—for at least part of the day—beneath the flickering fluorescent lighting of my father’s garage. Without ever really “teaching” me, it was there I learned how to do many manly tasks mostly involving dirt bikes. His portfolio of manly skills seemed to have no bounds. And while he taught, Bob Marley would sing his redemption songs about buffalo soldiers in the back ground. (Marley was my contribution to the discography.)

There was one thing my father attempted to teach me that never really stuck. I never learned to ski. My stomach still lurches (the way it does when peering into a pool from the edge of a high drive) every time I think about my pathetic attempts to snow plow.

Of my father’s many skills, the one that stands in greatest relief against the backdrop of his many accomplishments was his mastery of all things mechanical. He could safely command the helm of any motorized vehicle under and through any conditions. He once taught me how to navigate quick sand with a motorcycle in Southern Utah.

My Junior year in high school my father resolved to make one final attempt to instruct me in the art of skiing. He decided take my sisters and me to 49° North, a local resort just east of Chewelah, Washington. This one winter, he decided that we would take the Dodge Dart to the ski hill.

The Dodge was our family’s second car during my high school years. Demonstrating all the vanity of youth, I was a bit ashamed the first few months I drove it to school. Surprisingly, over time I managed to produce some genuine feelings of gratitude and appreciation for the car. Now some 20 years later, I recognize that—as far as high school cars go—the Dart was as good as it gets.

We had the 1973 Swinger, two-door model clothed in baby blue with an intact black-vinyl roof. Once waxed and Armor-All’ed, the Swinger shone. It had no rust or dints. The marine-blue, vinyled-clad interior could transport six belted high school boys in comfort and style. And the cavernous maw of a trunk could easily swallow two full-size mountain bikes. It was, by nearly all accounts, an eye-grabber. On more than one occasion, men approached my father offering to buy the car.

The Swinger had only two flaws of which I was aware. The first, it was rear-wheel drive. Second, it had only a single speaker linked to an AM radio.

In spite of all the things it shared with Eden, Spokane could not boast of mild winters. It didn’t help that my school and my home were located on opposite ends of Spokane’s fabulous “South Hill.” As a result, once the first snow fell, you could safely expect to commune with that snow until late March. Just contemplating the drive home from school would cause the muscles around my abdomen to slowly constrict leading to momentary lapses of judgment. Curiously, no one ever seemed to notice a the difference.

Not having acquired my father’s skill for snow driving at that age, I became adept at waving cars past me while my rear tires spun harmoniously on the ice. Eventually, I discovered passable routes from school to home, but not before developing a healthy respect for ice, hills and the limited efficacy of rear-wheel drive.

Naturally, my father’s decision to take the Dodge gave me pause. My father, Southeast Idaho’s finest son and master of all things mechanical, was an inveterate winter driver. He feared no hill, no matter how icy or how deep the snow. The fact that 49 Degrees was located on a huge, ice-encrusted mountain and that the Dodge self-motated using only the rear wheels interested him about as much as what Mr. Young actually meant by the phrase “burned-out basement.” It didn’t.

Dad’s approach to handling this first flaw with the Dart was to throw two tubes of sand, like oversized hot dogs, and a cement block or two in the trunk, close the lid firmly, and forget about it. Then, with reverse rake in full effect, we exited the drive way and headed north.



For any well-adjusted teenage boy, rear wheel drive is a fact to be accepted and dealt with like a man. After all, what doesn’t kill you gives you bragging rights with other teenage boys. The Dart’s second flaw, however, was an entirely different beast. It was a badge of shame, an unsightly boil on the Dart’s otherwise unblemished, if aged skin. The Dart’s AM radio and single, raspy in-dash speaker simply couldn’t accommodate the demands of a teen’s proverbial security blanket: “cool music.”

My choice in tunes consisted of the unenviable pick between Gospel or the kind of non-English music for which I would develop a taste a few years later in Guatemala. Fortunately, my father was a kind man. He managed to rummage up a FM adaptor from my uncle Jim in California. And soon enough, I found myself developing a taste for Classic Rock.

A few days prior to our departure, we came to a startling realization. Since it was a cinch we weren’t going to discuss our “feelings” during the hour-and-a-half drive to the mountain, nothing but the fickle tastes of some radio DJ stood between my father, me, and the gruesome possibility of silence. This wouldn’t do. We needed a fall-back position in the event of such a disaster.

As luck would have it, that Jolly Old Elf had only the week before brought me my very first CD boom box. Allow me to offer some historical context. The early 90’s were happy bucolic days as the world shook off the tethers of cassette-based music. With CD’s, overnight, it became possible to skip over all those filler songs that separated the gems from the dross. All you had to do was press those fancy little forward arrows, and the player would skip to the next track. Like magic. You could even press a repeat button and enjoy a “hands free” voyage into mind-numbing redundancy. There we stood on a precipice (before the free-fall into napster, 99 cent songs, and mp3’s) and we could see on the horizon the end of a dark era.


And with this dawning came the solution to our immediate threat. We reasoned that if we could bring the boom box with us, even if 98.9 KKZX, the local classic rock station, played an entire hour of Aerosmith, we could turn on the boom box and avoid saying even a word. The only problem was that we didn’t have a way of powering the boom box. Now, to be sure, we could have purchased a prodigious amount of d-cell, lead-acid batteries and neatly cleared that hurdle. But in my father’s home we lived in the shadow of a complete moratorium on all “non-essential” purchases. Genetically, that same moratorium has mysterious found its way into my own home.

There we were, stuck at a terrible impasse, when all of a sudden my father’s sheer mechanical genius came riding to the rescue. (As events will later show, it could not have been divine inspiration.) “What if,” he posited, “we were to wire a car charger adapter to the battery leads in the back of the boom box?” Not understanding a lick of electrical engineering, but wanting desperately to avoid any separation from the opiate of the teenage masses, I agreed.

With the help of a soldering gun, a little splicing, and three pounds of electricians tape, we soon were listening to Old Neil’s sonorous voice serenading the dashboard from the front seat of the dart. Success. With the exception of a fish-tail or two, the drive to Chewelah and beyond passed uneventfully.

Over the years the sting of embarrassment that accompanied my best approximations at skiing has diminished. The little I learned that day about managing skis and poles has also dissolved and passed like smoke through my ears and into the ether. But I will never forget staring out the passenger window into the falling snow and gray light. In the car, the heater purred soothingly beneath the dash, the turquoise-blue light from the dashboard illuminated my father’s face, and Neil Young sang “Heart of Gold.” That experience is etched into my mind.

Post Script: Chrysler built the Dodge Dart back before people ran electronic gadgetry in their cars. In those days, the Big Three never included regulators on the cigarette lighters to govern power surges coming off the engine. One blissful day, the following summer, dad and I were heading West on I-90 with the dirt bikes in tow. The summer sun had scorched the sky to a brassy white. Below the dash torrents of warm air poured through the vents. One minute Neil was with us there in the backseat lamenting “the dead in Ohio” and the next he was gone.

Dreamin' Man: Elephants, Giraffes, and Mummies

I had an interesting dream last night.

As the vision coalesced into a meaningful image, I found myself back at Mosaic. This time the office space was completely different. The office now occupied a two-story space open in the middle with a second-story mezzanine. The setup of the room mirrored the middle room of the Von Trapp home in The Sound of Music or the main sitting room in Giant. (See below.) Unlike the mezzanine in these other movies, the stairs to the second level weren’t visible to view. They had been hidden back behind a wall, as if they had been added to the outside of the building and enclosed as an afterthought.


At any rate, I stood on the mezzanine looking East. Sunlight poured in through the second story windows and lit up the entire room. In fact, so much light came in, I remember wondering if the eastern end of the building was open to the air. When my eyes wandered to the west, the western horizon was backlit with dark menacing clouds. The angle and intensity of the light suggested Spring.

On a side note, it may help to understand that the interplay between light and shadow in the weather has always fascinated me. Naturally, my favorite times of day have always been the hours surrounding sunrise and sunset, when the contrast between light and shadow is most acute.

There are two clear ways in which this fascination impacts my mood. First, a horizon enshrouded in storm—the promise of the storm even more so than the storm itself—strikes me as inherently hopeful and invigorating. This remains true unless or until I can see the sun tugging at the corners of the storm promising fair weather in the wings, which bookends the storm with more sunny drudgery.

All this leads into my second point. A clear, cloudless day with the sun boring down from overhead triggers a descent into my emotional nadir. Sometimes the stark, unfiltered light of day has a way of revealing the harsh unyielding aspects of life that filtered light can blur.

In any event, as I stared around the office space. It suddenly dawned on me that I was new both to the location and to the company. There I stood, staring at my cubicle. All the while, pending tasks were pressing in on my conscious mind. All this had the effect of creating a constant low-level sense of anxiety. And yet, someone, somewhere held in reserve the key tools I needed to begin work.

In keeping with my original experience at Mosaic, I soon traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia. Once in Vancouver, I climbed aboard a helicopter that rose up from the eastern shadows into the sunlight and headed west over the Strait of Georgia separating Vancouver from Vancouver Island.

Below me, the channel appeared more like a river in size and depth. Snow blanketed both banks of the channel although my attention was drawn primarily to the western bank, Vancouver Island. Unlike in Kirkland, Spring was just gaining momentum in Vancouver. Large ice floes coursed southward through the channel. And there, waist deep in icy-black water just off the western bank roiled hundreds of trumpeting and stamping elephants and giraffes. The whole scene was gripping and terrible. Their features seemed so sharp, the colors and proportions so dramatic, and their aspect or visage so intent.

Inland from the western bank, a plain stretched out for several miles leading up to some imposing peaks completely draped in snow. Few clouds marred the clear sky. For the most part, it remained clear and bright with the sun coming from a southerly angle as it might at midday during the winter. For some reason, the vividness of this scene left me with a deep impression. The colors, the animals, they all seemed so striking so tangible in an inexplicable sort of way.


As the helicopter flight continued westward we hovered lower and observed water courses meandering inland like fingers grasping at the island’s shore. On the ground below us we could see the snow melting and patches of brown surfacing. I remember approaching the rear of a large two-story frame home just inland from the shore and which was built around the turn of the 20th Century. The weather had long since stripped whatever paint had graced the walls, polishing the clapboard siding to a dull gray.

Below us, a child mechanically played or worked in the amid the two-foot snow that still blanketed the back yard of his home. Intermittent patches of icy water punctuated the snow field. Submerged below the clear water pools lay a bed of sodden wild grasses compressed from the weight of the snow.

The helicopter moved rapidly over the river and then lower to within 20 or 30 feet of the ground as we approached the child. Just north and a ways east of the house, the bank cut inland at a northwesterly angle. At about that same point and only a few feet north of where the child moved, stood an ancient Cedar completely devoid of foliage. The bleach-white skeletal remains defiantly clawed the sky. The helicopter veered right and north to miss the tree, temporarily blocking my view of the boy.

Then, just as we approached the north side of the home, I looked down to see a middle aged woman who lay almost prone on a wooden platform of sorts just off the back of the home and some fifty feet from where the child worked. While not much older than mid forties, her skin appeared so jaundiced, emaciated, and tight that she could have been mistaken for a mummified corpse.

After passing the home, the rest of the dream descended into a blurry heap. But three more scenes stand out clearly in my memory. First, we landed near a trading post on the island. I remember looking out the trading post into a sunlit yard. The sun shone so brightly that from my vantage point deep within the poorly lit room, I could only see individuals and window frames silhouetted against the bright backdrop. After that, I returned to my office in Kirkland. Dad, Carver, Ellie, Grace and I were together. The image of the elephants and giraffes stamping in left such an impression on me that I needed to show dad. But before I could show him, Carver needed a new diaper. We never found the diaper.

The dream eventually faded to a close with Dad, Ellie, Carver, Grace, and I standing on the Eastern shore of the Vancouver channel staring at the Elephants and Giraffes on the Western bank making all their commotion in the water. Behind the animals, the sun illuminated clouds and filtered down onto the snow-capped peaks below.


Now, how about endowing this dream with some meaning? Rachael pointing out that the Serengeti fauna probably suggested a connection to my current employer. Taken with the overt link to my former employer, it seems probable that this was a stage on which anxieties real, imagined, subconscious, irrational, etc. performed. Don't forget the archetypes: rivers, mountains, snow, and ice generally carry broad symbolic value. Do we have any Daniels in my audience of one? Any budding dream weavers that want to take a shot at casting light on this night vision?

A Revisionist's History: Burley

I was born in Burley, Idaho on February 11, 1977. I remember nothing of Burley. My folks ended up moving to Boise a few months following my birth—a place which resides in only the earliest of my sepia-tinged memories. Over the intervening years, my pilgrimages to and from Utah have taken me through Burley on occasion. My Burley points of contact, now some thirty years later, consist of a Burger King and a handful of worn-down truck stops.

And while I feel no palpable affinity for the place, a part of me resonates with the wide open agricultural feel of Southern Idaho. Admittedly, it isn’t difficult to stifle, gag, and hog tie that roguish romantic urge. Featureless expanses and open range have never appealed to me much. And yet, even while sitting here in this innocuous climate-controlled environment some 32 years and 300 miles away, I can almost taste the dewy alfalfa and stock-yard fragrance so characteristic of small-town Idaho.

Legend holds that my father spent at least one summer of his High School years hauling pipe over Idaho’s finest potato fields in pre-dawn chill. Perhaps that experience etched itself with testosterone-laden ink into his genetic makeup and passed to me undetected, a y-chromosome stowaway. And now, several years later, this latent ardor emerges unpredictably—rendering me momentarily wistful for a place I’ve largely visited only through a car’s windshield.