Reflections on The Landscape of A Heritage

As I noted recently, I am the only son of an only son, born midway between my dad and his first granddaughter but as hard on him as he was on his father.

If he were still with us or if he is looking down now, he would be even more proud of her than he was at her birth, now a single mother, lawyer and chief privacy officer for a major healthcare concern spread over dozens of cities and towns across our ancestral landscape.

I was the end of the line of more than a hundred years of ranching but in the late 1840s, these ancestors didn’t begin as ranchers.  They came to the Rockies as carriage makers, saw mill operators, molasses manufacturers, cavalry troopers, miners even a dirt farmer or two (smile – rancher humor.)

But collectively they understood that settling and homesteading and building communities from scratch involved commons such as that where his granddaughter ranges in another way.

He’d also be the first to remark at what a perfect blend she is of each of her parents, but equally important would be what she has done to express those equal sets of genes including molding a career blending law, management, technology and innovation.

My dad also would give a smiling nod at the pride my urbanite grandsons and daughter take in our Idaho ranch heritage.

On our final leg to an annual lakeside family rendezvous in the northern Rockies last month at the hospitality of my youngest sister and her family, they took delight when a cowboy hat they picked out for me turned out to be identical to one their great-great grandfather wears in family photographs.

Already with enough cowboy hats and boots to last several lifetimes, I couldn’t help but wear it as we rode up into the Bitterroots that day, smiling at how frustrated my dad—their great-grandfather—appears in that same photograph at having to dismount.

Not yet 30, in an act of defiance, he refused to keep his hat on, revealing a rancher tan and a look of disgust I’ve seen in the mirror from time to time.  I see far more diverse evidence of his nervous system in his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

I wish I could tell him every day how much I love and miss him and how I know I was hard on him.  We both eased up as I turned 30 years old, but we didn’t really clear the air until I was nearly 40 and he was a year younger than I am now.

My emotions were ambushed a few day ago when I first heard a new hit single by Garth Brooks interpreting a brilliant composition co-written by Marc Beeson and Allen Shamblin entitled “Send ‘Em On Down The Road” as I recalled that day when we too “…just threw that baseball back and forth till dark…:”

“he wanted to protect me but somehow my father knew

that you can cry for, live and die for,

you can let them find their wings but you can’t fly for

cause if they are not free to fall

then they are not free at all

and though you just can’t bear the thought of letting go

pick ‘em up, dust ‘em off and send ‘em on down the road”

Some of my favorite Garth Brooks’ songs include references to rodeos such as the iconic “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old),” echoing a variation of a quip my dad would repeat in the 1950s whenever he was greeted with, “How are you?”

It was co-written with a friend and rodeo rider Randy Taylor in Stillwater, Oklahoma where Brooks first performed it in 1986 at a club called Bink’s with his band Santa Fe.

Less than three years later, it was the singer’s debut hit single, just as I relocated to Durham, North Carolina in 1989 and where I still live in retirement.

But historically, true cowboys, aka Bedouins of the American West, were fast fading when Prescott, Arizona staged the first rodeo in 1888, inspired in part by the success of the Wild Bill Cody shows.

Until then, westerners viewed tourism as a way to recruit settlers and investment.  But Cheyenne, inspired by the “potato days” celebration just south in Greeley, created its Frontier Days Celebration in 1897.  By 1901, Denver added one to its local celebration.

By the time Pendleton, Oregon created its famous rodeo in 1910 and Idaho’s first rodeo, the War Bonnet Roundup, was organized in 1911 fifty miles south of our ranch, a circuit was forming.

When Tucson started its rodeo during the Prohibition, it was a tourist event, and when Old Tucson Daze began the year before I was born, it was, ironically, held on an old movie set.

The father of one of my classmates in high school is hall of famer Deb Copenhaver, a contemporary of my father, who won back to back world championships in bronc riding in the mid-1950s when I was 7 and 8 years old just younger than my grandsons now.

Rodeos are emblematic of the time when Westerners began to reflect what visitors from the East expected.  By the time I was born, it had become firmly embedded in Western identity, reinforcing that authenticity is a negotiation.

My parents married young at just ages 22 and 16, eloping over the Bitterroots to Bozeman, as my dad left to join a tank battalion propelling across France.  Initially, his dad had held him out of the war as an only son so the ranch could aid the war effort.

But when his same-age cousin and best friend, a tail gunner in a B-26, was shot down over northern Italy, my grandpa finally relented and allowed the ranch to go fallow as my grandparents put their only son in harms way.

Dad’s unit was part of Patton’s third army sweeping into southern Germany, liberating Dachau, the first concentration camp established leading up to the war, then changing to horses and spotter planes to patrol for Nazis fleeing into the Alps.

Coincidentally, one of the prisoners liberated there handed a young soldier from North Carolina what looked like a rock, and told him never to forget what happened there.

It was actually molten ashes from human beings incinerated in the huge ovens used by the Nazis to cremate prisoners who died or were gassed because they were unfit,

The day before this past Memorial Day, those ashes were laid to rest in a Hebrew Cemetery here in Durham where I live, which dates to the 1800s.

By the time I came along, my parents were still kids too at just 25 and 19, and they had grown incompatible in some ways while apart.

They were still “two hearts on fire,” to borrow a line from a Shenandoah song written by Hugh Prestwood, but researchers now know that what held them together for more than thirty years was a shared style of parenting.

Its something researchers have just found in successful parents that is “distinct from their romantic relationship.”

In the typology of four parenting styles, my parents were “authoritative,” the mix of “authoritarian and responsive” practiced by 32% of parents.

I know now that researchers find that this style correlates to the “concerted cultivation” common to middle class parents or parents who successfully keep or move their children up into the middle class.

More wealthy parents are often negligent or permissive including many so-called “helicopter parents” today who mistake over controlling and frenetic hyperactivity with cultivation.

Researchers have pinpointed that a natural or more free-range style or permissive style of parenting found among many who are poor is one of factors that perpetuates poverty in their children and differentiates them from poor parents intent on breaking that cycle.

One of my siblings seems only to recall my parents as “authoritarian,” perhaps because she didn’t witness the differences two of us saw in the parenting styles of parents who truly were.

Regardless, I am incredibly grateful and credit my parents for any success I enjoy as well as the legacy I see in their grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Learning From My First Failure

My first ski lesson at age five was a disaster, maybe my first real failure and a decade passed before I tried again.  Doubtless this Skizee would have come in handy.

But that disaster may have had more to do with Dachau, Germany than with that frozen hillside that rose just across the “crick” below the barn and corral behind our ranch house on that late afternoon/early evening in the waning days of 1952 in the Teton-Yellowstone nook of Idaho

My instructor for that disastrous first lesson was my then-just-turned-30-year-old rancher Dad, only seven years removed from World War II and the indelible memories and stench of that 12 year-old facility where his unit stood guard.  Dachau was the first to be officially labeled a “concentration camp” by the Nazis.  It was the only one located in U.S. occupied Germany and only the second to be liberated by the Americans.

I had begged him repeatedly to take me on his Saturday ski excursions but his condition was that I first learn to snowplow and, with only a five-year-old’s perspective, I didn’t understand my Dad’s  intensity, determination and impatience juxtaposed with the frequent periods when he would sit alone in the dark, for hours and sometimes days, without speaking a word to anyone.

Snow skiing was Dad’s release.  He had learned in his teenage years before the War when Bear Gulch Basin opened up above Warm River just a dozen miles from the ranch my great grandparents and grandparents had homesteaded.

During almost daily Q & A tours through family photo albums and artifacts in the years before and after that failed ski lesson I learned that Dad (shown in the image in this blog if clicked to enlarge) and a couple of friends from his unit, had skied the Swiss Alps during a few days of Army leave just prior to being shipped home.

Long-since burned down, Bear Gulch at the time of my first lesson was a very simple rope-tow, t-bar kind of place, just a few miles up-range on the Idaho side of the Tetons from today’s world-class Grand Targhee Resort , which opened 17 years after my failed lesson.

I learned a lot about Dad from not only those photographs but also when going through the collection of European coins he kept in a yellow, plastic, water-proof case he once used for packs of cigarettes and  my Mom’s ultimatum when he got home that he give up drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

While handling a hand-made dagger with a handle carved from an antler, I learned it had been given to him by a Communist prisoner at Dachau, and I learned that Dad’s hatred of the Soviet Union and Communism in general came from the fear he witnessed in that man’s eyes as he was liberated, so to speak, and put on a train to return home.

During frequent handling of a J.P. Sauer & Sohn officer’s pistol given to him by an SS trooper imprisoned at the camp, I learned from Dad that not all Germans were evil and that the soldiers who, had been summarily executed by American soldiers who were angered at finding a train full of dead bodies in the camp as it was liberated, had themselves been prisoners at the camp until ordered just hours before the liberation to guard the camp as others retreated.

I also learned that the prisoners found dead on that bullet-ridden train had not been machine-gunned by guards, as those who executed them had thought, but killed when the train was strafed by Allied fighter planes as it neared the camp.

In his description of photos of the gas chambers at Dachau, I learned how, in the 1930s, our Congress, along with other countries, refused to accept Jewish refugees being deported from camps like Dachau, leaving the tiny Dominican Republic one of the few that would.

Even from Dad’s always Spartan, emotionless, one-two- or three-word answers to my incessant questions about the photos and artifacts, I gleaned information that over time gave me insights into why, below the surface of my Dad’s can-do determination and passion and ultra-conservatism, he seemed bitter and cynical and conflicted and always more than a bit sad and alone at some level.

His marching me up and down that hill as a five-year-old in the dark, wet and cold may have turned me off of downhill skiing, which I eventually came to learn and enjoy for a 15 year period ending in my 30s. Boy my Mom was pissed but Dad did successfully breathe into me the will power and fiery determination noted by people during my successful 40 year career in community/destination marketing.

He also taught me how to think and the fact that things are rarely, if ever, clear cut and also to be wary of broadly labeling things such as good or evil without knowing the full story.  He taught me how to argue both sides of an issue, usually by seeming so stubbornly wedded himself to only one.

He taught me that things are never as simple as people make them seem and that even when you’re right, you can be partly wrong and that people who are often wrong, can often be somewhat right.

I just wish that somehow, before he passed away ten years ago at age 77, having skied well past age 70 when lift tickets were complimentary at most resorts, I had tried harder to lift his burdens the way he and Mom always lifted mine, and somehow replace memories such Dachau with those of skiing in the Alps.

I wish in my youth I hadn’t judged him so much or argued with him so often or let my hurt feelings and pride get in the way.  I wish I had told him more often how much I admired and appreciated everything he did for me and for my sisters and for this country just a handful of years prior to that failed ski lesson.

I wish I had told him that everything was okay.  But somehow I think he knows that now, and he’s free from the pain and he’s smiling about the fact that, at a much older age now, it is all making more sense to me.

I also bet he’s still skiing.