My father had been getting ready to die for a year before he fell from a stepladder in his garage on the First of November in his 77th year, the year I turned 37.

 

He had been sorting things out, giving me his tools a few at a time. This started with the only sentimental object he had from his own father: a drilling brace with a makeshift handle fashioned from a piece of leather harness. My grandfather had made the tool himself. He was a teamster at the turn of the century back in Minnesota.

 

Now, 80 years later in our garage in a small town along the east face of the Montana Rockies, my father ran his hands over this dried-up leather handle, and he handed weathered tool to me. “I thought you’d like this,” he said.

 

Then, as he often did the last few times traveled back from my home in Oregon to see him in Montana, my father went poking through dusty old bean cans filled with rusty nails and screws, mouse pellets and spiders and memories of years of flying wheat chaff and barley dust from Montana farms we had worked together. Farms my father had worked all by himself. Farms he’d worked with his two brothers, before the younger one went off hollering to mustang the Missouri breaks and before the older one went off to corporal in Algeria and Italy. Farms Dad and his father had worked together in 1915 and 1925 and 1935 through drought and grasshoppers, through Depression, through shoulder-high snowdrifts and dustbowl summers.

 

They froze and sweltered in shacks they built on Assiniboine land: land they stole as “homesteaders” with the help of the government, land they broke open with steam tractors and batched upon through salt pork winters that lasted into May.

 

Over the years, after prosperity finally found him, my father often climbed that stepladder. He would climb it after he’d tipped up the whiskey bottle he hid behind the truck seat or the bottle he hid behind Mom’s canned pears in the fruit cellar. Whiskey made him want to get higher up, and the ladder would wobble and I’d steady it and him and he’d somehow manage not to fall. In later years when rheumatism had caught up with him, he’d still climb painfully up on reluctant knees. He’d work slowly, turning over a sheet of plywood stored up there for years or bumping around my old rusty child’s sled or trike or scooter. The toys lay among the dusty artifacts on the rafters. I never told him he should not climb the ladder and make that boozy inventory.

 

My heart choked me while he did it. When the climbing was over, I cleared my throat and whited the incident out of my memory as I did all the nightmares I lived through when whiskey twisted a corner of my father’s mouth into a sneer, made his shoulders sag, his words slurred, and his step unsteady. My stepmother found him where he landed on his head on the concrete garage floor when the ladder topped He lay still breathing and soaked in blood. She called the ambulance and it carried him away. Attendants restarted his heart twice on the way as they spend 60 miles across the farms to a Great Falls hospital.

 

My stepmother’s voice came over the phone. “Looks pretty bad.” I knew that he would die, had died, and she asked me to agree to unplug the life support system. “Yes,” I agreed. “Unplug the machine.” A neurologist said he felt no pain.

 

I hung up then and walked outside and stood on my driveway in Oregon and looked out across the green golf course hills in the distance, and I saw my dad standing next to me in our Wheatfield, irrigating shovels on our shoulders. His overalls and sweat-stained slouch hat were tailored for him. The windswept gold wheat that we sowed and watered was high as my father’s shoulders. The sky was sharp blue.

 

This was my dad who was no dreamer. He lived through his hands. He had been a farmer and carpenter, a county assessor. He grinned a lot except when the whiskey opened his rage and he’d bang his hammer on a plowshare, kick a pig out of his way and swear at neighbor kids. Often then his longing would come out.

 

“The swans! The swans!” he sobbed once out of his alcohol haze as he drove the pickup truck at twilight. The truck weaved perilously across the centerline of the country highway. “The sky is full of ‘em!” He waved broadly at the flocks. The great birds and their cousins the Northern Geese filled the luminous sky, as far as a boy’s eye could see across Freezeout Lake. Yet, for all its breathtaking grandeur, this was a common sight in those days, an everyday sight like antelope bounding over barbed wire fences and back bear rummaging in the woods.

 

My 12-year-old heart shut out the swans and burned with constricted fear and hatred for my father’s maudlin whiskey tears. The great birds circled as if God laughed at my father, as if the same Divinity that ordered the swan’s magnificent migration also mocked his pain. This splendid natural spectacle, so contrary to the experience of my father’s own life, was so damnable, so unjust that the sight of the swans uncapped his rage, his ancient, bitter grief. His anger flared.

 

He busted at the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. His own nightmares were trapped in that hand. “The swans!” When he was a boy, my father’s mother killed herself.

 

“She drank carbolic acid of’n a pie plate,” he told me in his blizzard voice, flat as the landscape. He said this years later, after his hair had turned white. “Take care of the children,” my grandmother told my father when he was a boy. Leaving him with his absent father and five younger brothers and sisters, she then went up stairs and drank the meanest kind of poison. “A very sweet and quiet person,” he called her.

 

Poking in the attic once 50 years after her death, I found her old guitar covered with floral designs. Her husband, my grandfather the farmer and teamster, was usually away from her and the kids, trading horses or lies with his neighbors.

 

My father had two younger brothers and three younger sisters. Just the six were home with their mother on the day she quit on them. My father took care of the kids, as best he could. He was 12 years old. He baked bread, wiped noses and asses, sent the children off down the railroad track to school. He took care of the two youngest ones all day at home. He scrubbed floors, washed clothes on a washboard. He quit school himself, though he loved books. His grandfather had promised to send him to college some day; the grandfather had a study filled with philosophy books and he loved to read and argue religion with the milkman. “No,” my father said to his grandfather. “I have to help my dad.”

 

It was too hard for the boy. He couldn’t do it. The children were divided up among relatives and my father and grandfather got on the Milwaukee Railroad and went west from the Minnesota farm to a new homestead in eastern Montana. They had crude tools, clothes on their back, and a team of horses they slept with on the train. They were the kind of homesteaders called Honyockers. They got off the train at a place called Flaxsville, then drove the horses and buckboard out onto the bald prairie. They had planks, salt pork, flour and a butter churn filled with water. They built a claim shack and started a new life.

 

The other children were brought West later by friends and relatives. For the children it was hard and sometimes pointlessly cruel. One of my father’s sisters was locked in a root cellar for punishment by cousins who dumped water on the cellar door and laughed while it trickled down on her there underground in the darkness. She didn’t know why they did this. They all endured.

 

In 1928 my father married a young schoolteacher, and they loved to go dancing. Thirty years later, in the attic, I found her soft and sexy dresses and photographs of her, a pretty, smiling girl—a flapper. I could love her myself if I met her today. Five years after their wedding, they had been unable to have children, and she grew ill, wasting away month after month until she died. It was pernicious anemia. “She was sick for a long time,” he said to me once. “The doctors couldn’t save her. I took her everywhere I could. I think they made her worse.”

 

By then there wasn’t enough land for all the family, and my father had to leave the farm and live in a shack with other men. They picked up work as they could in the New Deal 1930s. They dug coal out of the prairie with shovels and hauled it in a wagon. One winter, Dad spent his nights on a warm job—firing a steam shovel boiler at Fort Peck Dam then under construction on the Missouri River. “Largest earth-filled dam in the world.” Throughout his life, Dad often mentioned the dam with warmth because it warmed and fed him through a 40-below winter. “I sure got itchy to get back on the farm.”

 

In 1937, another schoolteacher, my mother, came into his life. She laughed a lot, was just under 5 feet tall, came from a tight small-town North Dakota Norwegian family, consisting of her mother and two sisters. All women in their family, it was tidy from tea to postum. My mom’s dad, a gardener and handyman, had died of congestive heart failure, leaving his wife and daughters to get by taking in gentlemen boarders. The girls had knitted socks for soldiers in 1918, went to the Lutheran Church every Sunday, studied hard and emerged as extraordinarily educated country girls in the late 1920s: a nurse, a librarian, and a teacher – my mom. Her world was distant from my father’s, even though she had spent six years down the road from in Montana, teaching at last in a little one-room country school.

 

At 30, my mom was close to becoming an old maid, firing the school stove at 6 a.m., sweeping out at night and teaching all day. Dad was a lonely widowed would-be farmer who lived with roughneck pals and cowboy brothers. They kept a whiskey bottle on the table and usually kicked the mud off their boots at the door. There wasn’t a lot of choice in partners on the prairie. So he and mom married in 1937, honeymooned at Old Faithful and went back to a tarpaper shack from my dad had managed to acquire.

 

There my dark-haired, dark-skinned sister and I, with my Viking complexion, were both born. My mother must have found it tough there in the 1940s to run a tidy house among the sod farmers, horse wranglers, sheepherders and blacket-wearing Indians. The lonely biting winds, the dust and everlasting snowstorms were no help.

 

“She didn’t like it there,” my Dad said. “She wanted a better place for you kids to go to school.” She wanted to move to a town away from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, where Marlene would no longer suffer the abuse she did. She looked like an Indian and was treated second class as school. So we moved west to the edge of the Rockies. It was there in 1948 that my father stood smiling in that field of gold wheat.

 

A year later my other sister was born: red-haired, fair, prone to smiles and mischief like my two wind-burned uncles and my three laughing red-haired aunts. There was never enough money in farming, never enough for more than taxes and payments, not even when Dad bought a second farm. Always a good provider, Dad worked harder. He carpentered, poured cement, managed lumberyards, went after government jobs, politicked. But farming alone didn’t work for him financially. No matter how he worked and dreamed, his farms just never made money.

 

Suddenly, one night in 1961, all our cards were thrown into the air. After driving around with my girlfriend I came home and found my father sobbing, frantic. My mother gasped on her bed, her face gray. The doctor shoved me out of the way as he charged through our living room door towards the bedroom. Both my father and the doctor bounced on the bed where he lay ever more still. They couldn’t restart her breathing. She was 54.

 

I felt nothing when Mom died. Many nights at dinner, my father drunk, us aching in silence, he would slouch in his chair, spilling and mumbling. No matter how drunk he was, Mom said nothing, and we were silent. Our hearts froze up. No matter how much laughter my father’s bawdy siblings brought into the household on their occasional visits, my mother did not laugh with them. She scorned their late-night Whist playing and refused to allow a whiskey bottle on the table. “Don’t said ‘ain’t’,” I heard her tell my father.

 

In her last years I had seen her turn away when Dad tried to kiss her. I myself loved the Whist, the warm laughter of my father’s world, loved it as much as I hated the frigid distance growing between my mother and me on these occasions. She had liked me less, I think, as I left boyhood behind and became ever more one of those forbidding creatures she never understood: a man.

 

As I boy until I was at least 7, she dressed me pretty and delicate in shorts and neatly ironed cotton shirts. In winter, like my sister, I often wore long stockings held up buy a garter belt—to keep me warm, she said. She obsessed about the cleanliness of the parts of me most foreign to her, daubing on stinging alcohol after my bath. As I grew up rough-and-tumble, she gave me dolls to play with and called me in from lay earlier than the other boys.

 

She forbid me to play in the swamp with frogs, snakes and rafts where—secretly and deliciously – I always played anyway, catching more frogs than the other boys and feeing them to the snakes. I went for rafts in a big way and usually fell off into the mud, as well. So, in a silent rage that had become mere emptiness, I never cried when my mother died. I refused to go and see her dead. She had frozen out my father yet stayed with him. By dying, she froze me out.

 

I left for college the month after Mom died, leaving behind my father with my red-haired sister, Linda, who was 12 then. I partied hard, woke up in strange places, once after falling headlong, drunk, down a flight of stairs. When I came home on weekends, my father was often drunk, banging pots and spilling gravy as he prepared enormous roast beef dinners with boiled potatoes and green beans. He mumbled sentimental memories to me, and I pretended to be offhand with him, denying my heart was failing, too, from spiritual congestion. I was alone with him and my younger sister.

 

Our older sister had escaped to college. Years earlier she had been mortified to look up at one of her school dances to see my father, drunk and dancing by himself in the school gym. She had written him off then, but denied it. She had left five years before my mother died for college in Minnesota and then Chicago. She escaped into a new world and, except for token visits, she never came back.

​

When I said I didn’t want to farm, my father sold the land. He made the garden and his lot in town became his farm. He worked it and polished the big house that, gleaming from his complete attention at first, threatened to overwhelm him as he grew tired and stiff in his old age. Maybe they would move out of the little town into a Great Falls apartment and he would repair toys in his spare time, my stepmother said.

 

My father kept sorting and giving away. He lawyered his will. He explained his will to me over and over again. Once he got drunk and knocked my stepmother down. My stepbrother told me this; from her there was only silence. My uncle got out of prison. My younger sister married and had children. My older sister led a separate life in a different state. Once dad visited her, got drunk outside her house and fell down and dislocated his shoulder.

 

Twice, on my visits home, I caught my father when he nearly fell from a stepladder in the garage. I never warned him not to climb. I only told him to be careful. I never spoke to him about whiskey after I was 12 when he raged in the whisky grip and I stole his full bottle and dumped it in the flowerbed. “I see you dumped out the whiskey,” he said to me the next day. “Yes.” He left this talk unfinished. My action spoke clearly. He heard me and we were silent.

I don’t know if he was drunk or sober when he fell or jumped from the ladder. I do remember how we sweated together, dug in the mud together, carried our shovels together under that blue sky through that golden wheat. Then, I loved this good man. I never cried at his funeral. Although that was 40 years ago, I remember it clearly.

 

I did not speak during the funeral. Neither did anyone else who knew my father well, although those who knew him best were there—a hundred friends and relatives mostly from those fields years ago. No one spoke of the black and white that was my father. Without speaking, we all silently welcomed the preacher who had never known my father, and this stranger spoke over his ashes. The sermon had no relation to the life of this man.

 

In the years since he died, the whiteouts of my memory have emerged as shadows. Every day now I see another nuance, another shape. I see and hate the horror that lay in the dark corners of my father’s soul. I see and love that golden wheat and sunlight that we shared. The whiteouts are all gone to grays. Some day, the world will grow darker still, and silence will envelope it all.

 

 

 

Oregon's  Dragon

 

____________

 

From The New York Times.

 

OREGON'S 'DRAGON'OREGON'S 'DRAGON'; by Dean BakerPublished: March 31, 1981

 

EUGENE, Ore.— Oregon's silent, seductive high desert turned to ice suddenly, ominously, at 3 A.M., halfway between Burns and Rome.

 

Four of us city people from Eugene half-slept snug and speeding in the car, bound for wilderness adventure, rafting the mystic Owyhee in the morning. The fresh spring blizzard swirled out of nowhere and everywhere, dancing hypnotically into the headlights, instantly obliterating black sky, silver stars, silhouettes of sage and scrub pine, and distant desert hills. The world disappeared and the car stopped and stalled.

 

We woke and mumbled, suddenly scared, inside an alien world, then stumbled out to push - to get away, out of this, to be comfortable. The storm seized us. Clammy, shaking, we strained but barely budged the car. Our feet slid and we were helpless on the sheet of ice that was Highway 78. Sliding, numb-fingered, we fumbled in the trunk for wool clothes, half-joked about snow caves.

 

Then headlights bobbed over the horizon and crept toward us.''Hello,'' said the beard at the wheel. ''Trouble?'' Mud globs clung to his battered car. Snow slouched on the oars and rubber raft on top. Six days he'd been on the Owyhee, he said. We were crazy to go on. ''Snowing even worse there,'' he said. ''I barely made it out.''

 

Then he pushed our car and it started. The snow let off. He drove off north away from the river. We ignored his advice and went on.Good thing we did because what lay ahead was more discomfort, more danger, and - particularly - the kind of exhilaration that virtually has vanished from America. Simply: One loves the sunrise most after a freezing night.Luckily, Mother Nature still can show us that.

 

Luckily, there are plenty of people left in Oregon, at least, who can show us ways to find her. Bob Doppelt of Eugene is one such person. The Green Dragon Canyon of the Owyhee is one such place.Mr. Doppelt makes his living guiding expert and beginning rafters, showing them how to row their own white-water rafts on the Owyhee, the Salmon, the North Umpqua and the Deschutes. But he is more than a guide. He is a wilderness guru, an apostle for Mother Nature.Four years ago, Mr. Doppelt - who has a master's degree in counseling and environmental education, and has worked as a river guide for 10 years in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming -started an outdoor program at the Lane County juvenile department. It was his idea that kids who vandalized, burglarized, stole cars, and had family problems could break old habits and develop their self-images through somewhat dangerous outdoor activities: river-running, rockclimbing, skiing, rough-weather camping.

 

The idea, of course, is that there is a hunger in humanity to encounter nature in an elemental way, to find a place within her, to challenge her, perhaps to embrace her. ''It is when we play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity'' -Mr. Doppelt hung that quotation from Dag Hammarskjold in his office.The program worked. Many kids did straighten out, at least for the short run. Yet the county cut funding for the program, and Mr. Doppelt quit in June 1979.

 

He rechanneled most of his energy into his rafting firm.But his philosophy of natural encounter and danger is the same: ''It fits in well here in Eugene. It's part of the 'head trip' here where people like to get out, run themselves, row the boat themselves, climb mountains themselves.''And so, the day after the blizzard, there were the four of us and many others - a string of 10 rubber rafts in the cold rain, on the churning Owyhee River, wide, deep, swirling, rock-strewn.

 

Mr. Doppelt led the way, patiently teaching each pair of rafters to read the river, how to take the least water (or the most), and avoid capsizing or ripping a raft. Four days on the river. No way out of those steep canyons full of cold rain except to bite your lip, spit on your hands, and row.The sun shone some the second day, more on the third and fourth. Nobody piled up on Wreck Rapids. No one was sucked into the one-way cave at Whistling Bird Rapids. Only one couple capsized and the boat was saved. Nothing spectacular. Just roaring water. Rain. Rock walls.

 

At night, silence, stars. The third day, after rapids, the boats spun into an eddy, and there it was: the Green Dragon, Oregon's own grand little canyon, a holy place, drawing all eyes upward and up again - 100, 200, 300 feet, and more.Silence except for the Owyhee's ripples. Awe. Golden Eagles' nests on the emerald-moss canyon walls. ''Behold,'' whispers Bob Doppelt from his raft, ''the Green Dragon!'' He laughs and his music rises up the canyon walls and his bearded face shines in the desert sun after a gray day of rain. We all laugh. The sun is marvelously warm. 

 

Dean Baker is author of a  historical novel about Oregon, ''The Last Yoncalla.''