February 15, 2003

           This is me husking corn at a campsite in Montana a little over fifteen years ago. Time off, at the phone company, was generous and best used for these type of outings. They always made sure you never got enough off in one stretch to do anything else. What to look for? That’s Liz’s hammock in the background. The towels drying indicate we’d been in the lake. Harder to see are the lid from my pressure cooker by the thermos and the stack of books on the table right in front of me. That pressure cooker is the handiest thing ever to go camping with.
           6:30 a.m., Miami. I hit the used bookstores fast. But they’ve [already] been picked over—by me, you. The stock does not rotate much. I keep sing new ones which I haven’t been in yet. Today, though, even if I did need to work on the car, I spend the day reading in the sun, and now I can identify different types of log cabin. [A History of the American West, no details.]
           [Author’s note: I was referring to the general lack of bookstores in this area, that I seem to have already picked through what is available. The remainder of this post is about memories evoked by reading the book about log cabins.]
           My father had the worst business mind I’ve ever seen, and I knew it when I was a kid. He decided to go “farming” when I was already 13, playing in a band, and chasing skirt. He had some crazy idea that he could clear and farm 640 acres by hand. He meant your hand. [There were constant] threats of brutality and death if you did not go work.
           Basically, he threw the money promised for my college into that mud. I clung to the hope that my own father would not lie to me until I was over 22. The majority of the money was spent trying to make the place look lived-in [like an old homestead]. Thousands of dollars in old broken-down machinery and rusty bails of old barbed wire thrown around. Not one penny for college.
           It turns out my parents had “decided” I was to quit school (in grade nine) and to work this homestead to support them in old age. They left out the part about asking me.
           One of these times, he used a chainsaw to cut down 8 or 10 trees, and the tractor to haul them in a square. Then he notched the logs halfway through. Now some ten years earlier, I had a set of Lincoln logs and spoke up—a rare and dangerous move. Shouldn’t the logs be notched only ¼ of the way? I got the standard “who in the hell do you think you are” lecture.
           The logs sat flat when stacked. He got that Bohunk look on his face. Did he apologize? Dream on. But he did pass that look on to my brothers.
           [Author’s note: none of my family had any business sense. I had a paper route, which I delivered the goods, collected the money, paid the bills and what was left over was mine. This made perfect sense to me, but none of the others could fathom it. They kept asking how much I made per hour and would laugh when I couldn’t answer.]