A Revisionist's History: I Will Fly

All that talk about the Grand Caravan reminded me a little of a different vehicle: the Plymouth Volaré! I contend that the Volaré—the down-sized Chrysler station wagon of the post-embargo era—is the spiritual predecessor of the Grand Caravan. Both vehicles were designed and manufactured to more effectively haul families and gear. Both vehicles, once reaching a certain mileage, wound up among the ranks of service vehicles littering constructions sites and industrial parks the nation over. Not that this can be proven, but I have my reasons for believing it.

 

Before leaving on an LDS mission with my Grandmother in the late 80’s, my grandfather sold dish soaps and supplies to restaurants, bars, and other roadside eateries sprinkled throughout Southeast Idaho and Western Wyoming. Most summers growing up, I would spend a week or two living with Grandpa Howell in Idaho Falls, or in later years, Boise. During those early years, when Grandpa stilled lived in Idaho Falls, he would often take me with him as he ventured to scenic locales like Bone, Ririe, Swan Valley, Jackson, and Driggs. I don’t remember much about these trips. But I do remember a few things. . . .

One time grandpa bought me a sandwich at a convenience store. Still naïve enough to believe that all prepared food you pay for must be good, I consumed more than half before Grandma Howell pointed out that my sandwich was moldy. Grandpa Howell insisted the green moldy flecks were "spices." As I recall, I finished the sandwich. One time as Grandpa Howell maneuvered through a windy, dirt, “short curt” through the mountains, the car rolled a little too closely to the edge. While Amy and I stared on with mixed horror and fascination, Grandma Howell came to the rescue vocally expressing her concern.

 

The one common thread through all these experiences and many others was the Plymouth Volaré station wagon. Over a period of several years, I remember Grandpa Howell driving both a Plymouth Volaré station wagon (complete with faux wood paneling) and a Dodge Aspen sedan (a badge-engineered twin to the Volaré). I traversed many a mile ensconced in their luxurious, vinyl-swathed appointments.

 

As a career, soap salesman doesn’t rank high on the relative compensation scale. No doubt with an eye to supplementing income, Grandpa Howell would often bring home his clientele’s discarded commercial dishwashers. He would clean ‘em, repair ‘em, and resell ‘em to his clientele. Even as a boy, I admired that. At least until he would ask me to detail the stainless steel dishwashers with an S.O.S. pad in the driveway. What was truly impressive though was his ability to shoe-horn those dishwashers into the back of the Volaré. Somehow, with the tailgate up, the cavernous maw of the Volaré managed to swallow the dishwasher. I want to say that Grandpa also strapped a dishwasher to his handy, chrome-plated roof rack, but that may be entirely fictional.  

 

Born in 1929, my grandpa was the product of the depression—as if that were not already immediately apparent. Resourcefulness, pragmatism, and frugality, these things ran deep in Grandpa Howell. To carry the family through the tight times or perhaps to free up valuable income, Grandpa used a sledge to crack the concrete pad in his garage. Then he excavated a potato cellar beneath the floor, covering it with an oil-stained piece of plywood to prevent an unintended trip into the inky blackness below.

 Only once did I manage to muster the courage to descend into the pit. The cool, the dark, the moist and a spare patch of relatively bright light from the cobwebbed garage window above left a clear impression on my young mind. I vaguely recall that the potato farmers in Grandpa’s ward or stake would allow members of the Church to harvest the potato “remnants.”

I’m still not sure how I managed to swing this, since potato harvest was usually in the Fall, but I once joined Grandpa on his potato harvest. Lending the whole event an air of near criminality, all this went down at dusk. Again, reaching back into the dustbin on this one, I remember Grandpa driving his Dodge Aspen, the sedan, out into the fields. We filled the trunk and the entire backseat with potatoes. It was a stupefying volume of the potatoes. It must have weighed several hundred pounds. By the time we finished it was dark and light from the dome-lamp spilled out onto the dry dusty field. Staggering beneath the load, the Aspen’s wheels sank into their wells while the headlights shone skyward as we bounced back to town.

 
I’m not sure if there is a moral to this story. But, I will say that if any man ever deserved a pickup (before the age when the pickup became America’s best-selling vehicle for 30 years running), Grandpa Howell was that man. As the owner of a 20-year-old anemic Nissan pickup and the former owner of a Dodge Grand Caravan, perhaps I inherited an ounce of Grandpa Howell’s Depression-era Good Sense.

A Revisionist's History: Mom

I had the opportunity to speak to a group of women at my Church on Tuesday evening. I was asked to consider the women that have had an impact on my life and—this was more suggested than stated—speak to how these women made do with their limited resources to overcome the challenges they faced in their time. Ultimately, I believe, it was hoped that by sharing these experiences we would be able to impart a measure of hope to the women attending.

Obviously, that was no small order to fill. Anyway, when I finally got around to putting something to paper, the following remembrances sprung, almost as it were, fully-formed from the pen. As it happened, I didn’t share what follows that evening. But since the Muse was kind enough to guide my pen, I thought I’d pass her beneficence on to the “interwebs”.

A Revisionist's History: French Town Pond

This is French Town pond looking West.

My father, a wise man, realized the importance of building a relationship with his son before teenage dementia set in. To do this, about the time I turned ten, he brought home a couple of five-gallon buckets full of motorcycle parts. Then for a winter, I would stand beside him shivering in the garage as he pieced together the parts to resurrect a late 70’s two-stroke mini-bike.

Dad continued to nurture this hobby and our relationship by establishing a few traditions. Most prominent among those was our own version of March Madness. Every March my dad would take me out of school for a week and we would travel 800 miles south to the Moab and San Rafael Swell regions of Southern Utah. Four or five months later, we would also travel to the Sawtooth Mountains in Central Idaho and ride dirt bikes for another week among lodge-pole pine.

A Revisionist's History: Painter Hayes

This morning while driving to seminary, I was thinking about an acquaintance in the ward here that commutes daily all the way to Everett. He told me yesterday that the drive doesn’t take too long in the morning before traffic, but that it can stretch out into two hours in the evening. Fortunately, for Rob Harvey, he and his wife just closed on a home in Lake Stevens, which is where this story begins.

Years ago, while living outside of Seattle during my early teen years, a difficult and pivotal era for many reasons, I met a man named Jim Hayes. Jim became one of my earliest employers painting homes in the Lake Stevens region. As I remembered Jim on my drive this morning, I realized in retrospect that he also figures prominently among the cast of mentors from those formative years.

A Revisionist's History: Into The Wild

Years ago my father introduced me to Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, a book that has since gained a lot of notoriety from an author I have since come to distrust. In the book, Krakauer recounts the demise of one Chris McClandess, a self-described “supertramp,” who jettisons gainful employment, family, and the conveniences of modern life to embrace the life of a recluse. As far as books go, Into the Wild was a good read insofar as the subject matter kept me completed riveted.

A Revisionist's History: Mission Trips on the Altiplano

Over the years a tradition seems to have sprung up among parents of missionaries. These parents often travel to the country or state in which their missionary served when the mission ends. Prior to returning to the United States, they tour the mission with their son or daughter. Once the parents have forked over the Georges to pilgrimage all the way to the field of service, it then becomes the privilege of the missionary to shepherd her wide-eyed parents through the areas in which she served.

Anyway, I’m not really as negative as all that. I believe most parents really do want to see the mission their children knew. Fortunately, most kids are more than willing to accommodate them.


I remember once, during my mission getting off a bus on a high windswept plateau in the Guatemalan Highlands. The setting sun slid slowly off the Western horizon without bothering to color the sky. At 10,000 to 12,000 feet, the wind has a tendency to picar the nose and cheeks—even in Central America. The scene was undeniably beautiful in an incomprehensibly lonely sort of way. I contemplated the thousands of miles that separated me from my home, shivered, and tried to burrow more deeply into my wool army-surplus jacket.

I don’t remember exactly why I was there or where I was going, but I will never forget what happened next. Just at that moment, at the end of the day and at what might have been mistaken for the end of the world, isolated and alone as we were there in the twilight, a 1996 Ford Taurus (a frightening car in and of itself, as far as looks are concerned) approached from the south, slowed, and turned off this isolated stretch of the Panamerican Highway onto the dirt road headed to San Bartolo.


A dozen questions crossed my mind in that instant, where did that car come from? Had someone driven it down from the States? I had NEVER seen a Ford Taurus in Guatemala. To this day, I’m not certain how that Ford got there. I’m not aware of single Ford dealer in the entire country.

The typical Chapín had little use for a full-size sedan of any make. And for good reason, the roads in Guatemala—if they may be termed such—would shred a Taurus in less time than it would take a new missionary to consider contracting dengue rather than spending two years in this raw, third-world country. Simply put, most American vehicles simply weren’t up to the rigors of Guatemalan life.

Anyway, there we stood lamely staring west, as this Taurus pulled up and stopped. One of the windows lowered and we found ourselves staring into faces of two very ordinary, middle-aged North Americans: American Gothic in a Ford Taurus rambling through the Guatemalan hinterland.

A recently-released “sister missionary” jumped out of the back and greeted one of the other missionaries in the group. Evidently, they had served in a different zone together. I gathered that she had convinced her parents to leave what I was guessing was a modest home in Utah and retrace her Guatemalan adventure. Glancing back into the front seat, I wondered how badly they really wanted to experience la pura vida. They seemed a little nervous, but eager enough.

Honestly, I was shocked and more than a little worried (and not just for the car). What they couldn’t have known, what I barely understood myself at the time, was that the hills that stretched off in every direction from our windswept intersection harbored more than its share of skeletons in the none-too-distant past.

They wouldn’t travel too much farther down the road on which we currently stood before they’d enter a wide expanse of rugged, remote hills devoid of pavement, electricity and in many locations, running water. The people of those hills not only didn’t speak English, they didn’t speak Spanish.

This people had been the primary target of government violence, kidnapping, mass murder, and no-doubt much worse during a 20-year civil war that had “ended” only two months previous. In fact, the village in which they planned to overnight had been the stage for some very serious mob violence and lynchings not even a month in the past.

No, these clear-faced Americans knew nothing about that. But then, the hand of God often shelters the good, naïve, and even—on occasion—the reckless alike. I had certainly been the receiving end of that principle.

The concept of the mission trip must have been fairly entrenched by the time I wrapped up my two-year stint in Guatemala because dad sua sponte broached the issue in a letter I received a few months before coming home. At the time, he offered me the choice of a mountain bike or a mission trip. For someone who was ready to leave Guate far behind, this seemed like a great deal. I took the bike and counted myself lucky.

A Revisionist's History: My First Encounter With Off-road Cycling

During my early childhood, we moved often. Not long after Dorian, we ended up on Red Fox Court in Kuna, Idaho. Kuna is a Boise bedroom community possessing few, if any, redeeming qualities.

And yet, unlike my shadowy memories of Dorian, Red Fox Court stands out as bright, clear, and positively cheery in relationship to Dorian. Also there was that dry, irrigation canal that ran behind our home. On Saturday afternoons, dad would ride his dirt bike up and down the paved embankments of the canal with one of us kids desperately clinging to his waist. Not only that, but a Circle K convenience store—with all the attendant “advantages” that come with a convenience store—sat less than a city block from our front door. How is that for the very picture of convenience? No, “the Court” wasn’t all bad.

I had many firsts on Red Fox Court. I earned my first set of stitches there (a subject for another revisionist entry). Then, there was the day I learned that clear plastic bags do not good astronaut helmets make. Once when checking the mail at 8:30 in the morning, I saw the moon in broad daylight. But of all the firsts, there is one that stands out in stark relief from all the rest: I learned to ride my bike and in the process realized that my life would be drawn to wheels like a moth to flame.

The love affair with wheeled motion pre-dated the two-wheeler. It began during the days of trike-dom. One morning, while pedaling my tricycle across the lawn near the northeast corner of our home, I suddenly felt the resistance behind the pedals evaporate and the bike accelerated effortlessly for a few moments. Evidently, there under the corner of one eave, the rain water had polished a slight dip in the lawn. Riding through the bowl had caused my stomach to drop as if riding a roller coaster. That thrilled me.

Layered over that thrill, however, I could sense something almost imperceptible. Like the hint of vanilla in a good chocolate chip cookie, there was something in the cushion of the grass combined with the near solidity of the sod below that contributed to the overall experience. I can’t quite explain what it was exactly that appealed to me about that. Maybe—to continue the food metaphor—the pillowy nature of the turf combined with the more solid substrate below the thatch to create two layers of flavor like sweet chocolate and salty peanuts.

Whatever the reason, this second sensation has over time become just as compelling to me as the more plebian "roller-coaster" thrill I first recognized. To satiate the second sensation, I’ve found myself drawn—almost instinctually—to fish-tailing in the snow, power-sliding motorcycles on dirt roads, off-roading in family sedans, trail running, and of course, riding single track astride what my seminary students have come to know as a "fancy mountain bike."

Up to this point, we’ve only discussed the symptoms—rather than the causes—of my tendency or inclination to traverse rough terrain. As for the causes, that's easy. I chalk that one up to genetics. After all, I’ve have it on good authority that my dad was a pre-eminent gravel-road racer. (See below, a picture of my father, what part of him that is visible, wrenching on his rally car.)

A Revisionist's History: Dorian

My memories begin in a place known to me only as “Dorian.” Dorian, a place not even remotely related to proto-Grecian tribes, refers to a street in Boise, Idaho. I’d say it’s a charming place, but as far as I know that isn’t true. And all that Google Maps can provide is a few blurry street views depicting a place that bears far more resemblance to the Australian Bush than middle America.

Like approximately 145,376,000 Americans, my family resided in a ranch-style home with a single-car garage. My folks parked their 1978 Honda Civic in the garage. And like the car, their Dorian home was a diminutive place—at least by today’s standards. But we were okay with that. They were simple times and we were simple people.


All of my memories of that home are dark, I mean oppressively dark. Maybe there were large trees in front of the home blocking the natural light. Maybe my folks couldn’t afford to keep the lights on. Maybe I had cataracts. Then again, this was the late 70’s and early 80’s before the age of full-length draperies and amber glass had run its course.


Anyway, one day my parents lured me into our living room with the promise of a present. I don’t remember what I was expecting. But whatever it was, it did not prepare me for the complete and utter let down of receiving “big boy” underwear. Call it deceit. Call it euphemism. Call it what you will. There, as I stood in our dimly-lit living room, just for an instant, life threw back the curtain to expose all its bitterness. It would represent the first of many of life’s hard lessons taught on Dorian.

All boys—myself included—enter this world understanding one simple truth: clothes—especially underwear and socks—do not a present make. I remember clearly thinking to myself: “I’m supposed to be excited about this??” As the first-born, I put on a good face, but something died within me that day.

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.

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.