Re: My Savage Childhood

When I was 7, my father took me on his knee and asked me if I would like to live in the mountains, and have a pony, and go skiing every day. I said, “I guess so.” It was lucky that I gave my consent, because as it turns out my parents had just bought a piece of land without ever having seen it. The land in question was 40 miles outside of a tiny town in the mountains (at that time, population: 800), 3 miles up a dirt road, on top of a mesa that had no electricity, television reception, or phone lines.

How was I to know, at age 7, what was being asked of me? I pictured myself riding on a magical talking pony who would be my best friend. I pictured myself making snowmen. That was about it.

My parents later came to feel guilty about their rash and amazing decision to leave a comfortable life in Texas and “fly to other [evils] [they] know not of.” My father was a relatively famous and well-paid columnist for a major newspaper, and we lived in a gorgeous, huge Victorian brick house, on a block teeming with children my age. We were comfortable, well-groomed, and my mother didn’t have to work. I was taking rigorous Suzuki piano lessons from a well-respected instructor. It seemed natural, at the time, that my parents would want to go live at 9,000 feet on some pitch-black rural mesa with no running water, but looking back I realize that they actually didn’t have any idea what they were getting into.
And so began the next 15 years of our lives. My parents sold our house for an insane amount of money (“we robbed those people,” my father later said) and sunk it all into building our new house, standing brave and alone atop a windswept mesa, with the deer and elk bounding around it and the hawks crying above. Our house was to be a beacon of modern trends in “low-impact living:” We would have only solar power. We would get our running water from a naturally occurring spring on our property. We bought a snowmobile. We bought parkas. We bought a book on solar power.

If this portion of my life were a movie, there would be a very dramatic slow-motion shot of me watching my rocking horse, Cactus, get bought at our final garage sale. The melancholy expression on my face accompanied with the mournful, slow bouncing of Cactus as he was loaded into some stranger’s truck, would signify the passage of childhood and the beginning of a darker, more difficult life. In reality, I don’t remember him being sold, because I was too excited at the garage sale–running from prospective buyer to prospective buyer and telling them the entire history of every item they examined. There was no slow-mo and I don’t remember ever feeling sad. This is the failure of modern filmmaking.

The most amazing thing to me is the following true story: A year or so earlier, my family adopted a stray dog named Rover (why do people let children name pets). He was this fuzzy little gray dog, and he lived with us for a few months until my parents saw a “lost dog” poster with his picture on it. So we took him back to his rightful family. I was bereft. But the interesting thing is that Rover would come visit us from time to time. He’d march in the door and we’d make a big fuss over him, and then after a few hours, he’d go back to his real family. It was weird, especially since they lived kind of far away from our house.

At the time of our move, we hadn’t seen Rover in a really long time. And then! The U-Haul was all loaded up, the neighbors were waving goodbye, we were about to pull out of the driveway, and there came Rover. I remember thinking it was a profound and significant moment. I ran over to him and explained at great length where we were going and how I would never, ever see him again. I have always been good at working myself up into tears of anguish. And so we drove away, Rover looking on.

I can’t really remember, but I think Rover looked a lot like “Shithead” from “The Jerk.”
Let me just open the next segment of this entry by saying that I am glad beyond words that my parents moved us away to this crazy new life. It was an incredibly weird, difficult experience, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. When I think of growing up in suburban Texas it makes me shudder. I am glad I grew up in the wilds, riding horses and building treehouses and struggling physically all winter just to get home safely. Everyone should have the experience of living somewhere where the environment is trying to kill them for at least 6 months out of the year. I am very grateful to my parents for putting us in this weird position.

Now.

It was in Colorado that my brother and I developed what would become a crippling fear of the dark. The wind screaming around the corners of the house, the glass rattling in the wood stove, various animals stalking about killing each other and gibbering, having no electricity and needing candles in all the bathrooms, not being able to flush our toilets because our spring dried up inexplicably…we lived in a stench of bodily functions and in my memory of those first 3 winters it was always nighttime. Black, freezing nighttime. My father would read to us by kerosene lantern-light, from books by Jack London–chosen for their Arctic subject matter. We listened to Call of the Wild, White Fang, and various Robert Service poems about prospectors dogsledding in Alaska. At night I dreamed of corpses frozen on mountaintops, of wolves circling in, of blizzards. We would wake up at zero o’clock in order to get to the bus stop on time to make it to school in town, which in the winter was nearly an hour’s drive away. My father would wake us up gently, rubbing our feet and putting on wool socks after putting tons of wood on the fire in an effort to drive away the perpetual cold which sunk its teeth into our very bones.

My brother and I slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room while the house was being finished. Nothing went as planned. Our spring dried up. The solar power had numerous bugs, and we were always blowing fuses and spending days without any power. The radiant heating in our floor never worked, which turned our entire house into an ice-pit where you would not want to put your feet. Our snowmobile broke all the time. You couldn’t get a car up our road in the winter because we were the only house up there and the county didn’t bother to maintain it. We cross-country skiied to the bus stop every day. One time we missed the bus and had to hitchhike to school with my mother, and she sat in the passenger seat of this strange man’s truck and wept openly for the entire drive while he sat in companionable silence and my brother and I held hands in the back seat. We had to take baths in this horse trough filled with water heated in a tea kettle, in front of the stove, shivering and complaining.

Those were tense times. My parents were completely out of their element, terrified, and worried constantly. What had at first seemed like a charming novelty–not having a phone–became an oppressive weight on my mother’s mind. What if your father gets bitten by a rattlesnake? What if you crack your skull open? These were all legitimate fears, and my mother was right–if any of those things happened, we would have been screwed. Our nearest neighbors were roughly 2.5 miles away, over terrain you needed a snowmobile to cross, and the snowmobile would rarely start, and anyway my brother and I were too young to drive it (although, when it comes to operating vehicles, kids grow up shockingly fast out there). One winter fairly recently, we stood and watched a neighbor’s house burn down to the ground (over the years, more and more people have moved onto our mesa, and now it is more like a scattered neighborhood than an isolated wilderness). The fire truck couldn’t get up our road. My mom brought the firemen coffee while they sat around on their truck telling stories, waiting to see how they would get the vehicle out of the ditch where it was stuck. Everyone stood in silence and watched the house burn until nothing was left but the chimney. Then everyone went home and examined their own houses. My father assured us that “this place would go up like a match” if a fire ever got out of control. It was very sobering. One winter a man on his way to someone else’s house got lost walking up our road, wandered off into a field in the snow, and walked around in circles until he got hypothermia and then froze to death. In school we had “hypothermia awareness classes” along with “avalanche awareness classes.” We had to watch these graphic movies about the evils of back-country skiing. We had guest speakers come in and weep while they told us the story of “ducking the rope” (i.e. skiing in an area the ski patrol has deemed unsafe), being in an avalanche, and all of their friends dying. We learned how to use beepers (radar devices which you are supposed to wear when back-country skiing) and we got to practice being buried in snow and waiting for the avalanche dogs to find us. In spite of all this, everyone I knew went back-country skiing on a regular basis. That was what it meant to be a rebellious teenager in my town. I was not, obviously. I was very lame. In 8th grade I broke my jaw skiing and that was pretty much that, for me and skiing.

The summers, though. The summers were another story altogether. That high blue sky, the aspen grove singing quietly to itself, the tall dry grass rustling, the cries of hawks and eagles, the fact that we could get a car up our road. We ran around shirtless and barefoot like little hobbits. At night we took walks and looked at the sky. Never in my life have I seen stars like the ones from home. The high altitude and the lack of any city lights below makes them astonishing in their multitudes and brightness. The air is clean and crisp. You can smell things from miles away–the people across the canyon having a barbecue. You can hear things for miles away, too–the scrabbling of animals, the occasional car driving far away on gravel.

Though I haven’t traveled all that much in my life, I have been to some amazing places. And never in my life have I seen a place as drop-dead gorgeous, as emotionally and spiritually uplifting, as clean and wide-open and glorious as that town and its surrounding area. The mountain, looming over the town, 13,000 feet high, with its intentional avalanches every winter–the town dropping explosives from a helicopter to loosen the accumulation of snow before it becomes too dangerous, the entire town playing frisbee in the street and cheering when the avalanche happens, and then the helicopter flying low over Main Street, the pilot pumping his fist out the side door in triumph. What a weird place! Seeing the people riding their mountain bikes with skis on their feet–riding to the chairlift, getting off, and just skiing away. Ski culture is so bizarre to me, probably because I never enjoyed it that much. When I was in school, we actually had “powder days,” where school would be canceled because of snow. Not because the snow made driving dangerous or anything like that, but because the snow would be “so good,” and there would be such “wicked pow” that nobody would be able to restrain themselves from skipping work/school and trying to get “first tracks.” Ski injuries being so common that they have their own abbreviated nicknames. Every knows what “ACL” means. When Andrea hurt herself skiing last year, and people would ask her what she broke, she would say, “tib/fib.” Sometimes the AirLife helicopter would fly overhead, and everyone would fall silent, shading their eyes and looking up at it, wondering what horrible injury had befallen someone on the slopes. One time we were all on the chairlift, heading up to join our various teams for practice, when word was passed down from chair to chair: “Todd fractured his skull. Todd got treed and fractured his skull.” Then the helicopter flew over us, and we knew Todd was in it. He had to have brain surgery. This was not as funny as other occurrences of the Chairlift Grapevine, such as “Pat’s going to ask Marisa to the sock-hop” and “Willie spanked Brian in Steamboat.” (literal spanking)

Our neighbors from 2.5 miles down the road helped us out so much. Helping us build our house, letting us sleep over when we couldn’t get home at night, showing us things, teaching us things. Those boys were always so sweet to me, even when Middle School came and I turned into a pariah. They always treated me with respect. “Those boys do what their momma tells them,” my mother says, and it’s true. When my brother broke his femur skiing, and was later discharged from the hospital, they arrived home to find that the eldest boy had shoveled our entire driveway so that my brother could walk from the car to the house without falling down and dying. My friendship with them has always made me laugh. These huge, scarred, hard-living boys who ski literally 8 hours a day and then get up at 5 a.m. to work construction, alternating between the two all winter. They hunt deer and drive big trucks with chains in the back for yanking people out of the ditch. They have such physical strength and stamina that it is mind-blowing. And then me, the extremely awkward, bookish girl with glasses who always hated skiing and cried at the sight of their slaughtered elk. And yet, I would do anything in the world for them and vice versa. The phrase “like family” is very important.

One winter a mud slide covered a great portion of our road, and the way to our house became totally impassable. Again, since we were the only people up there, the county didn’t bother clearing it until summertime. My father put on a pair of waders, walked over the mudslide to our house, got a sled full of clothing and our dog, and walked back out. We then lived in a trailer park right outside of town for 6 months, until the county finally cleared our road. That was a glorious time for me, mainly because for the first time I could ride my bike to school like a normal person.

I love our home. After a few years, the bugs got worked out, our solar power became much more reliable, and we dug a well so that we wouldn’t lose our water every winter. The well-digging was really intense too, this man came out to the field by our house, and actually used a divining rod. A divining rod! A forked stick that you hold in your hand, and when it “quivers,” that means there is water. My parents were so nervous. But then he did find water. And we rejoiced, just like old timey homesteaders on the plains of Nebraska! Just like my childhood hero, Laura Ingalls Wilder! WATER! After his divining rod found the water and his digging machine dug our well, the man said, “Praise Jesus” to us and went away. And we never had to pee outside again. Although sometimes we did anyway, just for fun. Peeing outside is surprisingly peaceful.

Living in this fashion taught me many things, and made my family much closer and more loyal than we might have been had we stayed in Texas. I am glad that I had to be a 7 year old carrying a jug of milk and walking 3 miles uphill at 10 o’clock at night in the snow. It was absolutely not fun, but I tell you what my mother didn’t raise no sissies. I am glad that we got to have a horse, and big dogs, and tons of cats. I am glad that I lived in a place so silent you could hear the blood rushing through your head. No cars, no noises, no nothing. An occasional airplane would fly over head, and my mother would curse it for interrupting our solitude. I am glad I grew up without watching any television. I am glad I know how to dig a snow pit and what to do in an avalanche. I am glad I was raised in the weird mountain resort community, which is part millionaire and part stoner hippie vibe jam. This is where I learned the term “trustafarian.” When we moved there, it was still such a small town that you could just write a blank check at the grocery store–like, the store itself had these blank checks, and you could just write your name and the amount on it, and they would take it to the bank and the bank would say, “so, Old Man Brown is feeling better, is he? Doing his own shopping?” and they’d cash the check.

Small town life! And now I’ll probably never go there again all the rest of my days.