Room to Dream - Kristine McKenna

Скачать книгу

I was around ten at the time and we were going deer hunting, so we drive out of Boise and we’re on a two-lane highway. The only light is from the headlights of the car and it’s pitch-black. It’s hard for people today to imagine this, because there are no roads that are pitch-black, hardly ever. So this is pitch-black; we’re going on these winding roads up into the mountains, and a porcupine races across the road. My dad hates porcupines because they eat the tops of trees and the trees die, so he tries to run over the thing but it makes it across the road. So he screeches to the side of the road and slams on the brakes, pops open the glove compartment, takes out this .32 pistol, and says, “Come on, Dave!” We run across the highway and we’re following the porcupine up this rocky mountain, and we’re sliding down while we’re trying to go up this hill, and at the top of this little mountain are three trees. The porcupine goes up one of them, so we start throwing rocks to see which tree it’s in. We figure out which one it’s in, my dad starts climbing the tree, and he says, “Dave! Throw a rock and see if it moves. I don’t see it!” So I throw a rock, and he yells, “No! Not at me!” So I throw some more rocks, and he hears it running, and—Bam! Bam! Bam!—it rolls down out of the tree. We get back in the car and go deer hunting and on the way back we stopped and found that porcupine and it had flies all over it. I got a couple of quills from it.

      I went to the second grade in Durham, North Carolina, and my teacher’s name was Mrs. Crabtree. My father had gone back to school in Durham to get his doctorate in forestry, so he studied every night at the kitchen table and I would study with him. I was the only kid in my class that got straight A’s. My second-grade girlfriend, Alice Bauer, got a couple of B’s, so she came in second. One night my dad and I are sitting there studying and I hear my mother and father talking about a mouse that’s in the kitchen. On Sunday my mother takes my brother and sister to church with the idea that my dad is going to stay home and get rid of this mouse. He had me kind of helping him move the stove, and this little mouse ran out of the kitchen and across the living room and leapt up inside a closet with clothes hanging. My dad took a baseball bat and beat these clothes until this little bloody mouse fell out.

      Idaho City used to be the biggest city in the state of Idaho, but when we moved to Boise there were probably a hundred people living in Idaho City in the summer and fifty in the winter. That’s where the research center was for the Boise Basin Experimental Forest, and my dad was in charge of the Experimental Forest. The word “experimental” is so beautiful. I just love it. They did tests on erosion, insects, and disease and tried to figure out how to get healthier trees. All the buildings were white with green trim, and in the yard there were posts with little wooden houses on top. They were kind of like birdhouses with doors, and when you opened them up you’d find all sorts of devices inside that were checking things like humidity and temperature. They were beautifully made and were painted white with green trim, just like all the buildings. Then you go into some office and there are billions of little drawers, and you open them up and there are insects in there on little pins. There were big greenhouses with seedlings going, and if you went into the forest a lot of the trees had little tags on them for some kind of experiment or something. They’d check them.

      That’s when I would shoot chipmunks. My dad would drive me into the woods in the Forest Service pickup, and I loved these pickups—they run so smooth, and they’re Forest Service green. I’d get out with my .22 and my lunch and he’d pick me up at the end of the day. I was allowed to shoot as many chipmunks as I could, because the forest was overrun with them, but I couldn’t shoot any birds. One time I was out there and a bird flew way up in the top of a tree and I raised my gun and pulled the trigger. I never thought I’d hit it but I must’ve hit it dead center, because the feathers just exploded and it came twirling down and plopped into a creek and swirled away.

      We lived on Parke Circle Drive in Boise, and next door were the Smiths. There was Mr. and Mrs. Smith; the four boys, Mark, Randy, Denny, and Greg; and the grandmother, who was called Nana. Nana was always out doing gardening, and you knew when she was out gardening because you’d hear this little tinkle of ice against a glass. She’d be out there with these gardening gloves on, with a mixed drink in one hand and a little spade in the other hand. She got the Pontiac that my family sold to the Smiths. She wasn’t completely deaf, but she was deaf enough that when she started the car she’d almost floorboard the thing so she could hear that it was on. There’d be this gigantic roar in the garage and you’d know Nana was going somewhere. On Sundays people in Boise went to church, and the Smiths went to an Episcopalian church. They had a Ford station wagon they’d drive to church, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith would sit up front with a carton of cigarettes. Not just a couple of packs. A carton.

      Kids then had a lot of freedom to run around. We went everywhere and we weren’t inside in the day, ever. We were out doing stuff and it was fantastic. It’s horrible that kids don’t get to grow up that way anymore. How did we let that happen? We didn’t have a TV until I was in the third grade, and I watched some TV as a child, but not very much. The only show I really watched was Perry Mason. Television did what the Internet is doing more of now: It homogenized everything.

      That’s something about the fifties that’s so important and is never going to come back: There used to be differences in places. In Boise the girls and the guys dressed a certain way, and if you go to Virginia they dressed in a completely different way. If you go up to New York City they dress in a completely different way there, too, and they listen to different music. You go to Queens and the girls looked like—you’d never seen anything like it in your life! And in Brooklyn they’re even different than in Queens! That Diane Arbus photograph of the couple with the baby, and the girl has a certain type of big beautiful hair? You would never see that in Boise or Virginia. And the music. If you catch the vibe of the music in a place, you just look at these girls and listen to what they’re listening to, and you’ve got a whole picture. The world they live in is completely strange and unique and you want to know about that world and what they’re into. Those kinds of differences are pretty much gone now. There are still minor differences, like there are the hipsters, but you’ll find hipsters in other cities that are just like the hipsters in your town.

      I had a girlfriend every year starting when I was really young, and all of them were great. In kindergarten I walked to school with a girl and we’d carry our nap towels. That was the thing you did with girls in kindergarten. My friend Riley Cutler that my son Riley’s named after—well, in the fourth grade I had a girlfriend named Carol Cluff, and in the fifth grade she became Riley’s girlfriend and they’re still married today. Judy Puttnam was my girlfriend in fifth and sixth grade, and then in junior high I had a new girlfriend every two weeks. You’d have a girlfriend for a while and then you move on to a different girlfriend. I have a picture of me kissing Jane Johnson at a party in a basement in Boise. Jane’s father was a doctor, and she and I looked at medical books together.

      I’ll tell you about a kiss I really remember. My father’s boss was named Mr. Packard, and one summer the Packard family came and stayed at the research station. There was a beautiful girl in the family named Sue, who was my age, and she brought her neighbor boy up and they were having sex. I was so far away from having sex, and it just completely boggled my mind that they were so cavalier when they were telling me about this. One day Sue and I ditched her boyfriend and got off on our own. On the ponderosa pine forest floor are interwoven pine needles maybe two feet thick, and this stuff is called duff. It’s so soft it’s incredible, and we would run through these trees and dive into it and go into a long kiss. It was so dreamy. That was a kiss that got deeper and deeper, and it was lighting some fire.

      Mostly I remember summers because winter meant school, and we human beings block out school because it’s horrible. I barely remember ever being in a schoolroom, and I don’t remember any of my classes except my art class. Even though I had a very conservative art teacher I remember really loving it. I still liked being outside more, though.

      We skied at this place called Bogus Basin, which was eighteen miles away, up these winding mountain roads, and it was real good snow, much better snow than Sun Valley. It was small, but when you’re a kid it seemed real big. In the summer you could work off your season pass by doing a few days of work at Bogus Basin, clearing brush and doing stuff. We were up there working one summer when we found this dead, bloated

Скачать книгу