Who Are You and What Have You Done With My Father

Who Are You and What Have You Done With My Father?

Copyright 2019 – Brenda Rees

Every person needs to know that there are some constants in life.  Things that never change.  Like when you look back at childhood you can say: “My mother does this”, or “My father doesn’t like that.”  Something that doesn’t change, so you can use the present tense in reflection.  You hold on to a piece of the inner child to tie yourself to a protecting parent.  You’ll feel a little safer knowing that the nest is always there and things there are the same as they were before careers, responsibilities and yes, even before acne.

No one ever wants to adjust those memories.  We don’t relish saying, “My mother used to do that, but she’s changed, she doesn’t do that anymore.”  Even if our parents do change, we analyze that maybe we misunderstood how it was when we were little and manipulate the present circumstances with the past cubbyholes of our memory.  Parents are pivotal and to have that point move can throw off our equilibrium, our center…we could start to wobble.

Vacations at our house were infrequent.  Because they were rare, we packed much into little.  We went north, because we went in August, when it was hot.  We went to Yellowstone a lot because you could see some pretty exciting things in a smaller area.  This made our standard four day vacation seem like it lasted half the summer, or at least a week.  I was raised on a dairy farm / cattle ranch in rural mountainous Utah.  It’s right where Wyoming takes a piece out of Utah.  That made it at least a days’ drive to most anywhere.  Twelve hours to LA, San Francisco, Phoenix or San Diego or farther to Seattle, less to Denver, the Grand Canyon or Glacier Park.

We’d take off in the evening.  My parents said it was so we could get a good start.  But I found out later it was so grandpa wouldn’t have the chance to find some farm thing that needed to be done and waste another day for Dad until it was too late to go.  We snuck out of town.  We always went between first crop and grain season and since Dad had the only grain combine in the county – he was pretty busy during grain season.

We’d take pictures in the typical frenzied vacation style.  Stop, take a look at a fantastic view, read the little roadside tourist info things, take a picture, get back in the camper and go.  Few stops were worth more than about 5 or 10 minutes.  On more than one occasion, Dad asked me to lean out the window, “make sure you don’t get the mirrors in the picture” and take a picture because he didn’t want to stop.  He wanted to have the picture because the glance at the view was something that needed to be saved, but time was important.  He could look at the view later.  The farm reference equivalent of this would be cattle that bite and swallow, bite and swallow, bite and swallow, then sit down later, cough it up and chew to digest when they have the time. 

We always tried to take these pictures with Dad’s 35 mm at least a fast enough shutter speed to make the picture not be blurry.  But sometimes, the ride was a little rougher or I’d forget to hold my breath, or the light was a little dimmer…  Dad’s night slides of Las Vegas looked like colorful fireflies in some strange synchronized dance.  Some of these pictures include a field of grain being cut by multiple grain swathers in Washington, bouncing on the fields in sequential rows, as if racing to the finish line.  Elk in Yellowstone and numerous lakes, streams, meadows and mountains, all were a blur of color and without form.  In every trip there’s was an, “I don’t have time to stop”, photo.  My sister, Jeanne and I have carried on the tradition.  When we show our vacation photos to Dad and he asks, “What’s this supposed to be?”, referring to one blurry shot, we just say that it the family tradition shot taken from the moving car.  He doesn’t think that’s funny.  The last really good one I got was of an army tank going over the hill in Southern England.  Too much traffic prevented a “focused” shot.  Like most of these photos, if you don’t know what it is, you won’t know what it is.  Dad isn’t amused.  Jeanne’s husband also fails to grasp the significance. He thinks we’re wasting film.  That’s not the point.  It’s a tradition.  It’s not something we understand, just something that we do.

Because we usually went to Yellowstone, Dad knew the way and hardly used a map except to make sure we didn’t miss some geyser or pond.  Sometimes we’d go someplace different.  There was Mt. Rushmore (through Yellowstone).  There was Glacier and Waterton Parks (past Yellowstone).  And the World’s Fair in Spokane. (Missed Yellowstone entirely).

We’d do the vacation in three days and spend the fourth driving all the way home – even if it was from Spearfish, South Dakota.  I learned to just let the miles go by from those trips.  The only thing more desolate than Wyoming east of Rock Springs is Nevada, any part of Nevada. 

You have to concentrate on the intensity of the vista to really appreciate it.  You try to notice something that you’ve never seen before or will see again.  Or just use the miles to talk.  Interstate 80 and the Wyoming landscape brought about a discussion of ph balance and alkali versus acid.  (Dad says he’s tired of those people back east complaining about acid rain, geez, send a little acid rain our way, wouldya?). 

The discussion would evolve to ancient Lake Bonneville and how it didn’t get up to Coalville (our town), but we found ancient seashells in the clay next to the barn, and where did they come from?  Or in Gillette, Wyoming, a discussion on strip mining versus hole mining and why they don’t mine coal in Coalville anymore.  Which moves to:  how the Reeses got sent to Coalville (to mine coal), and Grass Creek next to the Rees homestead being a ghost town when there were once over 1,000 people there, nothing left now…. wasn’t a National Treasurer born in Grass Creek? …. you know, the one that signs the money. They had two railroad lines coming out of Grass Creek…. one narrow gage…. going to Park City to run the engines to pump the water out of the Park City silver mines….  more discussion of mines….  not like these in Gillette.  The Park City mines would fill up with water and that was why they needed the coal – to run the pumps that pump the water out of the mines.  From there. to where did coal come from, and dinosaurs and on and on.  You can learn a lot in the cab of the camper letting the miles go by.

We’d learn a lot about each other too, on those trips.  I found out my mother was afraid of heights at a dam west of Cody, Wyoming.  She kept looking at the water side and told us kids to get away from the outside edge.  My reluctance for water (instilled in me from childhood swimming lessons with the swim teacher from hell), kept me from her side as I happened to glance down at the water and see a whirl pool where the water was being sucked down through the dam.  I had a nightmare about getting sucked down with the water that night.  I still have that nightmare sometimes.  I can see the black swirly water and I have to move to the outside edge of the dam even in my dreams.  My fear of water, Mom’s fear of heights. 

I learned of my parents’ courtship on a trip to Southern California with my Dad.  I learned a lot about my sisters on car trips with them.  On one trip to Southern California when my brother was a teenager and I found out that he cheats at twenty questions.  That’s unfortunate.  Being held captive for hours when you have to be civil and you don’t want to have silence, well, it makes you brave.  You ask things and say things that you wouldn’t normally.  You have to choose your words carefully, but you end up not just stepping around the edge of the unknown but wading through.  Why did you make the choices you did?  What drives you nuts?  Why?  Remember this or that?

Trips are for learning, seeing, understanding.  They’re about people and places and ourselves.  They’re great therapy.  They’re kind of a micro-encapsulation of life – the journey.  It reminds of one of those Longfellow things:

Not enjoyment and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way,

But to act that each tomorrow,

Finds us farther than today.

Let us then be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate.

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

– Longfellow

As we’d travel down the road, we got to take turns in the cab of the camper.  We kids or mom would navigate.  Our eyes studying the map.  Dad was pretty patient when I missed a turn, I was supposed to tell him about.  He didn’t really mind backtracking or taking a different route.  What he didn’t like was asking directions.  He said it was a sign of weakness.  He told us that several times, making light of our protests or Mom’s rolling eyes.  He told us that before all those relationship books came out to explain men to women and vice versa.  The Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years because the men wouldn’t stop and ask directions.  Men were just supposed to sense the way to go, be the trailblazer, and get us all there safely.  We’ve driven hours out of our way in the past just to see the country because he wouldn’t stop and ask directions.  The gas stations weren’t an option as we’ve never been a family of unplanned restroom breaks and we always seem to be in a vehicle with extra gas tanks and facilities.  We were stuck until the correct path presented itself.

It was always the same.  I don’t remember my Dad ever asking directions.  What would be the point?  We were lost in a part of the country we didn’t know, and the point of the trip was to see the country. Did it matter if we saw more of the country than we had planned, when we hadn’t planned anything anyway?  Mom would just say, “We could stop and ask directions.”  “Can’t”, Dad would say, “We’ll get there.”  And we did.  Obviously, we got there and back and who’s to say that it was a waste of time or not.

Years later, Dad came out to see me when I was living in Roosevelt.  He was on his way home from a meeting in Price and decided to take the long way home through Indian Canyon and Strawberry.  We decided to go over to Vernal.  He’d been there years earlier with a state soil conservation meeting.  They’d taken a tour of the CUP:  The Central Utah Project: A massive federally funded program starting the 1950s that would move water from the Colorado River drainage to the Wasatch Front and Utah’s populations and farms.  The tour showed them the little irrigation reservoirs that bureaucracy had taken decades to build and they’d had a barbeque or something at the ‘Remember the Maine Park’.  Dad wanted to find the park again and find out why it was called the ‘Remember the Maine Park’.  (We weren’t well versed in the history of the Spanish American war.)  We had driven north of town on Highway 191.  We drove around Maeser and were actually wandering our way over to the right area.  We’d been ‘looking’ for about a half an hour when he said, “Why don’t you just stop and ask directions?” 

Confusion overcame me.  Ancient instinct bells went off inside of me signaling that something was terribly wrong.  When I was very small and had been punished for some smart aleck childhood infraction, I dreamed that these mean people weren’t my real parents.  They were imposters that looked just like my parents, but their mission was to make my life miserable.  They might be from another planet, or maybe they were holding my real parents somewhere.  These old nightmares returned in a flash.  I braked the truck to a halt.  Look sternly at the man in the truck with me and said, “Who are you and what have you done with my father?”

He, of course, pretended I was being funny and said something about having to drive around all day looking for it when we could just ask.  I was stunned.  Wasn’t that the point?  Above all, don’t show weakness.  He had just punched holes in half my behavior patterns.  It wasn’t just asking for help to get back on the right road.  It was everything.  Don’t ask the teacher for help.  Don’t tell the boss that you can’t do something.  Never say you can’t, or you don’t know.  Wow.  He said it was because he wasn’t driving and therefore the destination became more important. You mean if you’re not the actual driver you can do that?  You can exhibit a chink in the armor?  You can raise your hand in class?  You can ask for help?

A pivotal childhood reference point just shifted.