This is it.  The last of my boyhood stories.  I posted this here a year or two ago but I think it makes a fitting end to what I have been posting here the last few months.   This story happened later than the rest of the collection.  It happened during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school.  But to me it is important to include it here.

My Dad

It was hot.  The trail was dusty and the pack was getting heavier with every step up that long, steep trail that followed French Creek up the mountain.  I began to wonder if this had been a bad idea.  It was the summer of 1950 and I was sixteen years old, skinny, and weighed 120 pounds soaking wet.

 The previous Fall I read two books; ‘Waters of the Golden Trout Country’ and ‘Sequoia and Kings Canyon Trout’ by a man named Charles McDermand.

Charles McDermand was the head of the sports department at a downtown department store called The Emporium.  I went there to talk to him about his book.  Probably twice a month I would visit him and he would tell me about the High Sierras and the Golden Trout country.

I told my Dad we should take a backpacking trip into the Sierras the next summer and we started to plan it.  I did the planning and he did the listening.

It would take some money to buy equipment and for the bus tickets to Huntington Lake.  We could improvise some of the gear from what we had around the house and Dad bought some strips of wood and began making our pack frames.  He also hired me to do the janitorial work around his print shop to earn money for the trip.

Meanwhile every Saturday I made my way the Emporium to talk to Mr. McDermand and from there I would go to Smilie’s Outfitters on Mission Street where they sold camping and wilderness and expedition supplies.  I talked to the proprietors and gleaned as much information as I could and priced things I thought we should have.

Things were coming together.  Dad had the pack frames made.  I had earned enough money for our bus tickets and two rather large canvas tarps.  We had selected a pot and skillet and coffee pot from mom’s kitchen and a couple of Mason jars.  Large safety pins held together extra blankets from the linen closet that would be our ‘sleeping bags’.

On the weekend before we left I took Dad to the Emporium and introduced him to Mr. McDermand.  They talked for a while.  Then I took him to Smilie’s and we shopped for some essentials liked dehydrated apples and a waterproof match case. 

On the evening we were supposed to leave Dad came home with a five pound slab of bacon and a sack of beans.  Those would be our staples for a week.

We laid out pack frames on the living room floor and spread our tarps over them.  Dad divided up our gear and then wrapped the tarp around everything and lashed the bundles to the pack frames.  We were ready to go.

After saying goodbye to mom and my brother we hefted our packs walked up to Hyde Street and took the cable car downtown.  At the end of the line we walked to the Greyhound bus depot and waited until it was time for the Fresno bus to leave.

We arrived in Fresno early in the morning and sat around the bus depot having breakfast and waited for the Huntington Stage that would take us to Huntington Lake.

The stage was simply a station wagon that delivered mail and small packages to the small towns and farms and ranches along the way to Huntington Lake.

At Huntington Lake we walked to the public campground at the edge of town and set up for our first night of the trip.  It was a chance to check out our gear and the routine we would follow for the rest of the week.

When Dad took his pack out of the back of the stationed wagon he found it was broken.  Tomorrow was Sunday and the little hardware store at Huntington lake would be closed so our hike would be delayed a day until Dad could get the material he needed to repair his pack frame.

The man in the campsite next to ours came over to talk to us.  He had just come back from the high country and was telling dad about it.  Dad told him about the busted pack frame he had to repair and the man went back to his car and bought a store bought pack and frame and told Dad he could borrow it.  He lived in Los Angeles and gave Dad his address to ship it to him after we got back.  1949 was a different world and a different country 68 years ago.  People trusted one another.

The next morning the man in the next campsite waved to us and wished us luck as he pulled out to drive back home.  We packed up and started hiking down the highway to Florence Lake where the trailhead to the high country was.  About 30 minutes later a man in a pickup truck stopped and asked us if wanted a ride to the lake.  Dad accepted and we put our packs in the bed of the truck next to his boat.  When we got the lake he offered to take us across in his boat.

It didn’t take us long to find the trail and we started hiking up the Kern River valley.  It’s pretty level and I thought this was going to pretty easy.  There we were in the wilderness.  Nobody else was around.  Whenever we stopped to rest we could hear the rushing waters of the Kern River.  It was paradise.

We finally got to the side trail that led up to Hutchinson Meadows, our destination.  We camped there and took out the Mason Jar of beans that had been soaking in water all day and poured the contents into mom’s pot.  Dad scraped out a fire pit and started a small fire.  I was assigned to gather firewood.  When the fire had burned down to just coals Dad put the pot of beans on to boil and sliced a couple pieces of bacon from the slab and put them into mom’s skillet.

The bacon started frying and the beans were boiling.  The pine smoke smelled wonderful and our beds were laid out just waiting for us.

Soon the bacon had fried up and the beans were semi-cooked. We sat around and ate out of the pot and the skillet and Dad started to talk to me about when he was a boy.  He had some wonderful stories to tell.  We had never had time to talk like this before.  I learned more about him that night than in all my 15 years.

Before long it was dark and we climbed into our bedrolls and went to sleep.  The hike and semi-lack of sleep the night before caught up with me and I dozed off quickly.

Then sometime in the middle of the night I woke with a start and it sounded like a thousand dogs had surrounded us baking and yelping and carrying on like they were going to attack us.  Dad laughed and said they were just coyotes to ignore them and go back to sleep.  Eventually I did and woke up to the smell of hot coffee.

Dad had breakfast ready.  Not much, just the cold left over bacon and beans from last night and some fresh coffee.  We had to get back on the trail because it was a long hike to Hutchinson Meadows.

I cleaned up the dishes on the banks of the Kern River while Dad began to repack our gear and lash my bundle to my pack frames and stuffed his gear into the borrowed pack.

The trail to Hutchinson Meadows was long and steep.  This was not going to be the walk in the woods yesterday was.  My steps grew shorter and the pack grew heavier.  I just plodded along behind Dad.

Periodically we stopped to rest whenever French Creek was close enough to the trail for us to get some cool water to drink.  Then Dad would say, “We’re wasting time.  Time to go.”

We finally made it Hutchinson Meadows, the place we would call home for the next 3 days.

I gathered fire wood and dad started cutting down pine boughs for our bed.  He stuck them into the ground at a forty five degree angle, one beside the other, until he had a nice, comfortable, pallet made.  We would sleep on those for the next three nights.  He place one tarp over the boughs and our bedrolls on top of it.  The other tarp would be our cover in case it rained.  But it never did.

We had extra beans and bacon that night and did a lot more talking.  My dad and I were becoming friends.  We sat around the fire, each of us poking at the coals with a stick.  The night was quiet.  And I learned how people could just sit quietly with each other without the need to speak and not be awkward.  Just being together was comforting.

The next morning dad made the apple sauce and pancakes.  That was it.  In the days before freeze dried breakfasts and dinners meager rations were the order of the day.

After breakfast I cleaned up the dishes.  Dad filled the Mason jar with water and put in the beans to soak all day.  He wrapped the food in one of the bedroll blankets and tied it off with a rope.  Then he swung the rope over a high limb of the pine tree and hoisted it up and tied it off so the bears couldn’t get to it.

Then we went fishing.  We climbed over the boulders up to the benches above the meadow where the little lakes were.  And we caught Golden Trout. Canary yellow Golden Trout.   Creatures of beauty.  And they would supplement dinner tonight.  Dad would also salt some to take home with us.  He knew how to do those things.  He was kind of a mountain man but I never knew it.

We spent three days at Hutchinson Meadows.  Three days that would map out the rest of my life.  We never saw another soul up there.  The world belonged to Dad and I alone.  Wilderness camping got into my blood.  And Dad and I became a lot more than father and son.  I felt I could talk to him like I could talk to my friends at home.  And I learned a lot about him.

About when he ran away from home in Michigan when he was 14 and wound up in Oklahoma during the oil boom.  He linked up with a guy who had a truck and at night they could go out and steal drilling rod from one outfit and the next day sell it to another outfit.

How he worked on the highway gang building the road along the Klamath River in Northern California.  He was the cook.  He told me he had wounded a deer one day and had to cut it’s throat because he had no bullets left.  That deer fed the highway gang for two days.

When winter came and work on the road stopped he stayed up there and hooked up with a miner and they panned for gold on Indian Creek.  They didn’t get much gold.

He was arrested by the sheriff in Yreka because they thought he was a train robber. It was a case of mistaken identity.

I don’t know how he became a printer and a graphic artist.  But he designed the original Safeway logo...the round one before they squared it off to look modern.

My dad was also a gardener and when we lived in Mill Valley he grew mushrooms in a dark corner of the basement.

He was a quiet man and I never saw him get excited.  Mom used to get angry with him from time to time, but I never saw him get angry with her.

He was not a religious man.  He was a reader.  He read lots of books.  Our living room was stacked with books.  And from time to time he would sneak a book to me that was banned by the church and tell me not let my mother see it.  Like Mark Twain’s ‘Letters from Earth’ and Anatole France’s ‘Penguin Island’.

One night a friend of mine and I were in a used car lot on Van Ness Avenue driving cars around the with their starter motors until the batteries went dead.  We got caught and were arrested.  Our parents were called.  My dad and my friend’s dad came to get us.  My friend’s dad was quite angry but when my dad saw me sitting there he burst out laughing.

And when I got kicked out of St.Ignatius high school my mom was livid.  When I told my dad why he didn’t say anything.  He just gave me a look and a nod that said, “I’m proud of you son.”

I never saw my dad much after I joined the Marines.  Only when I came home on leave.  When I was in Korea I wrote him letter once.  My mom wrote back to me that when he read it he had a tear in is eye.

One time when I was home my brother and I took him to see the movie Paint Your Wagon.  I had never seen him laugh so loudly except for the time I got arrested.

He contracted Alzheimer’s.  My brother Leon was home and he took care of Mom and Dad after they retired.  I was living in Utah with my own family at the time.  I called my Mom once and my Dad answered the phone.  My Mom wasn’t home so I asked my Dad to tell her I called.

A while later she called me and asked if I had called.  My Dad had told her someone called.  She asked, “Was it Leon?”  “No,” he told her, “it was the other guy.”

The last time I saw him he was in a nursing home bed and reminded me of an infant in a crib.  He died shortly after that.

What I was in my working life I owe to my Dad, the Jesuits at Saint Ignatius High School, and the United States Marine Corps.  But mostly, I think, my Dad.  He started me on the path that led to Saint Ignatius and the Marine Corps.  The independent thinker that clashed with the religious theology that the Jesuits didn’t appreciate and a work ethic and respect for authority that got me through boot camp and my military career and my promotion from technician to engineer when I was working as a civilian.  Not to shrink from my beliefs when criticized but not to be so stuck on them that I couldn’t change my mind if thought they weren’t serving me well anymore.

I think of him from time to time and it’s always with fondness.

Noel

Edited October 8, 20214 yr by birdguy

I remember reading this story a few years ago. It was just as entertaining now as it was the first time around. Thanks my friend!

Well written and extremely interesting read. 

 

Thank you Noel.  🙂 

Thanks for the nice words guys.  I'm all out of these boyhood stories.  I have some Marne Corps stories to post.  Most of them have been posted here before.  If you want to read them I'll begin posting them next Friday.  The first one is about boot camp.

Noel