edward abbey and my dad

Once as a matter of fact I did let Elaine bully me into attending a group encounter session. She believed in it (that season) and felt I needed the treatment. And why? What's my problem? Well, I have this queer thing about pretty girls: I like them. And this weird thing about steady jobs: I don't like them. I don't believe in doing work I don't want to do in order to live the way I don't want to live.

--From "The Fool's Progress", 1988

As I approach graduation and am faced with the what-are-you-going-to-do with your life questions, I seek solace in Edward Abbey. He was not a perfect man, however very inspirational, and not about to be pigeonholed into either of those categories. He actually reminds me a lot of my father. Didn't give a shit what other people thought of him, basked in his own human flaws and stark-faced self-acceptance of those flaws.

My dad has always said that time is more important than jobs, and I've taken that to heart. Of course, that's easy to say when you're living in the cush of post-high-school, pre-student loan repayment microcosm that is college and its surrounding years, but this is the only place I'm living in right now, and the only place I can live in, barring the life of some of my childhood friends who married the first person they dated, got two dogs and a mortgage, forever renouncing the drifter's life.

My dad lives alone at the top of a small hill in the foothills of eastern Oregon, and drives his old Dodge truck down to the Willowcreek Market for Hamm's beer, some smokes and a few rounds of Keno when his eyes aren't so bad. He lives frugally off of retirement money and Vietnam vetrans' benefits and grows his own weed for personal and slightly commerical use. An old hippie, still with deep-down, "don't trust anyone over 30" ideals, even though has been over 30 for most of his life. Hippie in his 1960's sex-drugs-rocknroll ideals, but without the pretense of so many Chaco-clad, bandanna-wearing, middle-class angsty 18-24 year-olds I know (and sometimes love). Not fiercely anti-government in the Anarchist, squatter, US version of ETA sort of sense, but distrustful at best. He doesn't believe we landed in the moon but that it was a staged scene in the deserts of New Mexico. He thinks the world is going to puke on December 28th, 2012, because that's when the Mayan calendar ends, and the whole world runs off of the Mayan calendar, you see?

He left home at 12 to work for 5 years on a dairy farm before enlisting in the Navy at 17. He was a very good-looking man in his army photos: blonde, side-parted hair, piercing blue eyes, and a smirk that said "I'll play your game for a few years, but only so I can get out of Emmett fucking Idaho." I like better photos of him from our flowered family albums that smell like mothballs, where he has a beard nearly as long as his long blond hair, wearing cut-off 501's, riding our horse Job down by the canal. I can see why my mom fell in love with him, a free spirit to the point of self-alienation, and did I not have wariness for his type rubbed into my brain from my childhood, saying "this spells d-i-v-0-r-c-e", I would have fallen as hard as she did for him, or someone like him. Armed with this wariness, I still might.

He has almost no friends in conservative Willocreek, all the old hippies that used to live there having moved to California by now. We used to have parties for days at a time, he said, and smoke all kinds of things and eat rum-infused watermelon and play volleyball under the willow tree down by the pond. The stories he tells me make me laugh, about how he and Mom used to paint their free-running turkeys' nails red, white, and blue for a 4th of July and Thanksgiving celebration all in one, and how, to get rid of a litter of kittens one October, he put them in paper bags, poked air holes, stapled them shut and handed the kittens out as trick-or-treats. Stories that make me laugh and wish I had been born by then, but now as a self-reflective, world-understanding adult with my mom's own mothering neuroses, I can see how he drove her mad. He must have been entertaining, but I imagine being raised by him was like being raised by a kid. I don't know what happened between them, as I was 4 when they got divorced, but it must have been a long time coming. I don't try to understand it all, because it's a waste of my time and I have better things to do. But, oh, the stories they share! They are civil to each other, finally, after about 17 years, but of course maintain a cold distance. However, there are times when I'm talking with just one of them, when they'll begin a story about the farm in their old hippie days together, and I can see the glint, actually see that sparkle of fondness return to their eye. What's done is done and it could have ended better, but if the chief part of enjoyment in this life is re-living everthing through memory (and I think it is), then it's okay; all the good parts are still there.