But before going there, maybe stepping back a bit can
give some sort of background to the
story that that old man tells - you know, put things in perspective a bit.
I’ll start by saying that for the most part, it seems
that people do what they do, banding together and saying things and taking on
ways of being within all the various situations that make up their lives; and
when you walk into someone else’s life, you usually get what amounts to close
to a whole dumpster’s worth of those scraps and street-sweepings of their own
situations, whether you care to or want to realize it.
And one way of looking at it is that you’re pretty much
at the mercy of those who are there doing whatever they’re doing, so why not
just go with it?
Another way of looking at it is to just admit that you’re
bringing your own world of situations into the arena, so to hell with all the
philosophy and just take it all to its fullest potential.
I used to think somewhere in between, believing that the
true heroes of the world were the people who decided on a moment’s notice to
just do what they felt was right and just and whatever they were supposed to
do. They looked around them and made a
choice and that was that.
But now, all I can say is that I did what I did and made
it through. I pulled it off.
But it’s actually not so black and white. Let me try to explain.
So to get to that Christmas
day in 1980, in a small college town in Idaho, that’s where I walked into what
was to turn into a whole series of events I could never have imagined in my wildest
dreams.
There were other days like
that - moments, like milestones you might say, like that moment a few weeks
later when I first heard about that van.
That one was like a moment
when suddenly the stage was set - and the world had changed forever, when I was
hit with like a gut-feeling realization that because of that one moment - I
would need to deal with life in a completely different way from then on
in.
And oh yeah, of course, that
shot I never took. That was another one
of those moments.
Actually I guess there were quite a
few of them...
And even after everything that has happened, I still have
to admit that in all those moments, I never really felt like I ever made any kind
of “true hero decisions” – I pretty much just went along with what was happening
around me. Nothing dramatic or heroic, I
just survived - but I can say that – I survived, and even more than that, I… Well, you’ll figure it out…
But that Christmas day moment was what I’ve come to think
of as the beginning. But even that wasn’t
the beginning…
A few months earlier I’d heard from a woman I’d met in a
bar, in Utah, or maybe it was Arizona, that there was this group of people up
there in Idaho who called themselves “tree-planters” and they had the skinny on
a lot of various connections and could probably set me up with some work for a
while and she’d make a call if I wanted.
At the time, I was hitchhiking back to my parents’ place
for Thanksgiving after finishing a stint of roadwork down in Nevada, which had
been good pay but most of it was all pretty much gone, so sure, I said, make the
call, and I had written down an address and heard myself calling my folks and
making excuses, I really wished I could be there, etc, etc, you know, they were
getting used to it, they understood, they said, stay safe, they said, we love
you, I saidme too.
And then, as if watching a movie I watched myself
heading to Utah, then Idaho but somehow taking ages to get there, ending up
spending the week of Thanksgiving with a some friends of friends somewhere in
Colorado gutting and skinning and canning venison, and then feasting on some of
the best fresh tenderloin I have ever tasted, and the conversation was
good.
And then I was heading on again like along a steady
continuance of so many stray and haphazard celebrations of life so purposeful
in each of their own little ways, and I just kind of forgot to notice about time, and
finally arrived on a snow-strewn stretch of well-worn porch planks in the
middle of an Idaho cold-spell right on Christmas day morning.
Crazy the way it had all happened to get me there just on
that day but I’ll always remember the places along that journey like a trail
that had been laid out by something I could almost convince myself had been
something a little more solid than fate, like time and space talking in a
language that I couldn’t logically understand but that I had somehow been able to
take part in, doing side-jobs here and there, getting the next suggestion for
some next place to go, feeling good about everything and of course
almost every day seeming like I was used by everyone as an excuse for them to
take a break from their everyday life, relax, show me some little part of
their world, make it a special day if only because this guy Ray had arrived,
passing through and they were all such good people, and it’s just the way it
was, and then Stimms met me at the front door, “ah yes, Ray,” he said, said he
remembered the phone call and that I’d be coming, welcome, come on in, he said,
we’re just opening presents.
Just like that.
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