I can't find it now, but when I thought about starting this post (which may end up being very long) I had just seen an article about a photographer who went through the "heartland" of America and talked to people about what happened at the end of 2016, and why they supported Trump. (Or not) He came up with a kind of classification that seemed interesting to me where the folks he talked to tended to split into two distinct categories and they really didn't understand each other. On the one hand he described people who were more likely to have been the students who would mostly choose to sit in the back of the class in school, and the rest of the folks who tended to sit at the front of the class. These classifications struck a chord with me and caused me to want to examine my own life and what lead me to my beliefs and values.
His observation was that people who were kids in the back of the class tended to be the blue collar folks. They didn't have the education that the other group had and by and large they voted for Trump. The kids in the front of the class were the ones who went off to college, became professionals, white collar, and voted for Clinton. This got me to thinking because I was definitely a kid who sat at the back of the class and I was definitely on the blue collar route through most of my childhood, but it was really my senior year girlfriend who talked me into trying to go to college. She was aware of the Pell Grant program that I could qualify for since my family didn't have much money. That senior year of school I ended up hanging out with a lot of front of the class kids because I was dating her. Not only that but my best friend was pretty much a front of the class kid as well. So, what happened? Because, while I can see what this guy was talking about and it seemed to me that the election played out as could have been predicted by this oversimplified model, I was definitely not fitting into it. Why?
So, that's what this post and this blog is about. A little navel gazing in the hopes of coming up with a narrative of sorts for this boy's life. This boy in the back of the class.
Lunch Box Leftovers
One of my earliest memories is digging through my dad's lunch box looking for an uneaten candy bar. The Thermos lunch box smelled of plastic, sawdust, chainsaw oil, and diesel fumes. From the time I was a baby to the time I was halfway through high school my dad was a logger. (Don't ever call them lumber jacks. I never heard them refer to themselves that way.) I was born on the Olympic Peninsula in a town called Port Angeles. But at that time, my family's home was actually Forks, WA, a small town that would be made “famous” as the setting for the teen fantasy romance novels, Twilight. I really have no memory of the town itself, but some hazy recollections of events.
My memories get jumbled around this time and I don't really have a clear idea of where they all take place. We lived in several different houses and several different towns before I got to elementary school. Starting with Forks, then to Happy Camp, CA, then to Granite Falls, WA, then to Everett, then back to Granite Falls, then somewhere in the middle….I think. In fact I have memories of living in 6 different places in my first 6 years of life, and this doesn't even include a short stay where we lived with my grandparents on their farm.
In Forks, I remember my dad sitting in the kitchen with a huge gash in his knee where he got slashed with an ax, or a chainsaw, or something. I remember a golden retriever dog named Cindy. I remember being told to go play in the freeway and heading toward the door because we lived right off a highway. (My mom stopped me) I remember not being able to go from the yard to the house because of all the "alligators" climbing all over the wall of the house. (I'm told there was a few gecko type lizards in our yard, so that must have been California.) I remember a time when my mother and I were up in a white pickup truck on a narrow logging road where we had to turn around and on one side of the road was a sheer cliff and the other side of the road was a soaring bank. (My mother tells me that there is no way I could have that memory because she was pregnant with me at the time, but my memory is pretty clear on that one.) I have some clearer memories of our time in Everett. My dad made my sisters and me toast with PB and J mixed with honey and made into a sandwich. They were magical and I remember being pretty sure that my dad invented them. We had an elementary school across the street from our house with a play area and jungle gym. (Asphalt under the equipment to break our fall) Our next door neighbors were African Americans but my dad didn't call them that. I had a friend who lived down on the corner who, for his birthday, got a train set in his house that you could actually ride on. It was his birthday so I don't remember ever getting a turn. I remember being stranded on the top of that jungle gym because there was a "big kid" riding a motorized go cart around the playground and I knew his plan was to run me over with it. I remember seeing a moon landing in that house on the black and white TV. I remember grandpa's house in Everett and having to give hugs to "Grandma Ruth". She sat in the kitchen and drank. She smelled like alcohol all the time. Even at that age I knew she wasn't my real grandma. I knew that my real grandmother on my mom's side died before I was born. I remember a dog named Ginger. She was a beagle we got from my uncle. She got ran over by a log truck. (Found on the side of the road by the same uncle.)
That house we lived in when we had Ginger was in Granite Falls. It was a house on a big lot set up against the forest. We had apple trees, and room to run and play. The neighbor had a rain barrel and in the woods behind our house there was a stone wall that seems very tall and dangerous for us to climb in my memory, but was probably no more than 6 feet tall and was probably, in fact, shorter than the monkey bars with the asphalt under it at our other place. The other thing we had at that old house was a pig sty. (Not my bedroom, which is one reason that later in life when my mother would tell me that my room was a pig sty I knew it was hyperbole because I remembered what one actually looked, and smelled like.) I have a vivid memory of the pigs getting out. My mom and dad had to chase them around the yard with big garbage cans to get them back into the sty. They would not let me help because I guess I was just a kindergartner or something, so I had to watch from the window. I seem to remember that right at that time there was a lightning storm going on, but I may be conflating memories. Also, I don't think we lived there that long but it seems like a big chunk of my early life was spent on that little "farm" up the road from the lumber mill.
We also spent a lot of time up at the real farm. My grandpa on my dad's side had a big farm in Granite Falls down a road with our name on it. And on that farm he had a bunch of cows. (EIEIO) It was right next to another big farm owned by my grandpa's brother, Oscar. He also had a bunch of cows. You know, when you are a kid you never really know what to believe, so you just believe everything you are told. So we were told that my grandpa's cows were nice, but Uncle Oscar's cows were mean. I don't know. As an adult I have yet to meet a mean cow. I mean, there are mean bulls, but cows? This kept me off of Uncle Oscar's property. I was pretty scared that I would step one foot on the other side of that electric fence and be trampled by a thousand mean and nasty bovine bitches. One day my cousins and I were with my grandpa on a trailer being pulled by his old John Deere tractor in a field down by the Pilchuck River. I remember we went down there to pick something up from Uncle Oscar's side of the property. Whatever we picked up was thrown into the trailer and we started heading back to the farm. Then the cows showed up. And they started chasing the tractor. In my memory my grandpa pushed the accelerator and the motor started humming at a higher pitch, but the cows were gaining on us. I even remember that one of the cows got so close that one of her hooves hit the back of the trailer and scared the shit out of my cousin and me. We got away. When I got older I told my dad this story and he said that the cows probably though we had some hay or something. I'm just saying, if they didn't want me to go onto Uncle Oscar's property then they should just have said I'd get in trouble if I did…not that I'd get stampeded by a bunch of angry heifers. To this day I think I might have some lingering cow issues.
My grandpa's house was fun, but it came with a few moments. The time I went down to the basement and saw my grandpa sawing the head off of a cow. In my memory the head was frozen, but now I'm not so sure. The smells of the basement are very memorable but confused with other memories. Early on the smell was unmistakable. Potatoes. Later, after one of my uncles took over the farm and the old house the basement smell would change to baby powder. That is because it was renovated and they put a pool table in. I would spend quite a few hours down in the basement playing pool with my cousins.
The stairs at that house were steep and I was always sure that I was going to fall down and break every bone in my body. I had a real fear of going up and down the stairs to the second floor.
Drive South
While we were living in Everett, my mom's younger brother, Uncle Joe, came to our house and talked my mom and dad into moving to Oregon. He was working down in Eugene as a cop and come up to visit. As a logger in Washington my dad had to deal with seasonal shut downs in the winter when the snow in the mountains got too deep for the logging effort to operate. And when they shut down in the winter, my dad didn't get paid. In Oregon, my uncle pointed out, they log year round. So we loaded up and moved down to Springfield, OR, which is right across the river from Eugene. Like Minneapolis/St. Paul you can't think of Eugene without Springfield.
Uncle Joe is a big man. I knew he was a marine and that he was "overseas" when I was younger. He was in Viet Nam. The only person I knew who had spent any time in Viet Nam up to that point was him. I'd learn later more about it, but I saw pictures. My younger cousin Mark would see a plane in the air and point to it thinking his dad was in that plane. Then my Aunt Linda would explain that he was "overseas" still but he would be home soon. I don't know how much time there was between hearing my cousin ask about the plane when they were visiting us along the Pilchuck river one summer and the day we moved to Springfield but it couldn't have been very long. He served two tours over there and when he came back it was well known in the family that he didn't want to talk about it. So, I never asked.
But when we drove down to Springfield together my mom, dad and sisters were in the car behind us and I got to ride in the front seat in the lead car with my uncle. And he drove for a stretch of I5 steering with his legs and that was maybe the coolest thing I'd ever seen. He was also the only uncle I had at that time (that I knew of) who rode a motorcycle. It was an enduro style bike and he’s take the kids for a ride around the trailer park they lived in.
We moved in to some apartments in Springfield in an area that seems mythical to me now. I have some much of that town memorized to this day, but I cannot visualize where it would be. It was walking distance for a very young child to a park down by the Willamette river close to the bridge that took you over to Eugene. Day Island Park, I think it was called. But I don’t think I ever went down that road again when I became a teenager. It was at these apartments my family would meet the folks that would have a profound impact on so much of what happened in our lives going forward. My mom met her best friend in the lady who lived down the breezeway from us. She had three children. The youngest daughter was my older sisters age. The two older boys became heroes to me for quite a while and the two of them introduced me to a lot of things that shaped my young life and set me on my path. The middle boy was named Kevin. So, since the families became so intertwined I became Little Kevin and he became Big Kevin. Edward was the oldest and since his mom was divorced he was the man of the house.
So by way of leaving signposts along the way, I’ll share the pop-culture stuff that I remember from this particular time in my life. My favorite TV shows at this time were Adam-12 and Combat.
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