A lot more was to happen in 1969. I had barely survived the defense of my doctorate, when I was offered an assistant professorship right there at Portland State. No matter how I look at it, I consider it a miracle - but a miracle helped along by the fortuitous retirement of a professor of American literature, an amazingly glowing recommendation from my mentor (I hope he still got into Heaven, after inflating my talents so outrageously!), and a couple of very good testimonials from other professors.
Greg was happy in his job, and had come to realize that he was building up a pretty good Federal retirement, for them to use when the time came. He and Vic weren't ready to pursue their dream of having a business together, but Vic was very actively doing the ground work for that eventuality. Mandy was saying "yes" to my marriage proposal, and already planning the transition. (Even though our relationship had been steadily growing for sometime - and her "yes" shouldn't have come as any surprise to me - I found I was both amazed and unbelievably grateful when I actually heard the word.)
With everything looking so good, and with two guaranteed pay checks, we decided it was time to quit apartment living, and buy ourselves a house. We found what we were looking for on the east slope of Mount Tabor, a little volcanic rise in the eastern part of Portland. The house was old, but well kept up, and had enough space for four bedrooms. It had some lovely Douglas-fir trees behind us, and wide open views of the Cascade volcanoes - Hood, Adams, Mt. Helens (as it looked before it blew its top in May 1980), and even a glimpse of Rainier. (If we walked a little ways to the southeast, we could see Mt. Jefferson.) Although a little farther from work for both Greg and me than the apartment had been, it was still a short, easy bus ride, as it was for Vic or Mandy if they wanted to go "downtown" without the car. We weren't worried about the monthly costs, but we solicited the help of our three sets of parents so we could make a hefty down payment. We moved in June.
Mandy and I set a wedding date of September 20, which was enough time to get the house ready for a small ceremony. We just wanted some family and a few college friends in attendance, but also agreed that we wanted all the traditional trappings - wedding gown, tuxedo, engagement and wedding rings, and lots of flowers. Naturally, Vic and Greg were our matron of honor and best man.
We went on a number of short adventures together that summer, most of them to the coast. On one of them, we found a trail we hadn't been on before, and followed it through a lovely forest of old-growth spruce and Douglas-fir. The trail ended on a grassy headland that fell steeply to the ocean far below. It was a beautiful spot, but it seemed to be more than that to Vic and Greg.
"This is it," Greg exclaimed. "This is absolutely, positively it!"
Vic seemed as excited as he was. "I only know it from what you told me about it, but I agree. There can't be another spot like this."
I didn't learn anything more about the spot at that time. They urged us to walk back to the car by ourselves, while they took a few more minutes to look around. They didn't take long, and got to the car almost as quickly as we did. We stayed overnight in a nearby motel, and had an excellent dinner with salmon and a big pot of steamer clams. (We had many seafood dinners over the years. I only remember the specifics of that one because of the conversation afterward.)
"So, what's the story of that spot?" I finally asked, as we began our dessert.
"It's a complicated tale," Greg responded. As he got into the explanation, I thought "complicated" was putting it rather mildly. He told me about a dream he had in Idaho, before he and Vic were married. Something I'd never heard of, the dream lasted over three nights, each night starting up exactly where it had ended the previous night. The content was pretty bizarre, too.
About 100 years ago, a girl had disappeared from the party she was with. Many years after that, a young man felt compelled to clear up the mystery of her disappearance, and he vanished, as well. Greg (in the dream) discovered a cavern, and in it he found both the girl and the man both alive, and apparently the same ages as when they disappeared. They had been happily conversing all those years, but hadn't been able to physically reach one another. They had been waiting for someone (Greg, as it turned out) with power to bring them together. The dream was a little murky about how that was to happen, but it did, and they escaped together from the cavern.
At the end of the third night of the dream, the scene abruptly switched to the headland above the ocean. Vic had joined Greg while he was still in the cavern, then suddenly there they were overlooking the Pacific in Oregon. The dream ended soon after.
What can one say about somebody else's dream? "Very interesting," I said. I had a strong feeling that there was something much more personal in the dream concerning that headland, but Greg wouldn't elaborate. I tried to coax something out of Mandy later (she and Vic always know just about everything concerning each other), but she just gave me a sweet, silly smile.
We drove home the next day, and that might have been the end of the dream story. However, Greg and Vic went back to the coast the next week, found a pretty nice two-bedroom summer cabin, and rented it. It got used regularly, sometimes by all of us, sometimes just by them. They eventually bought it. The kids - theirs and ours - still make a lot of use of it.
***
The wedding occurred without a hitch. My darling Mandy looked even more spectacular than usual, in her wedding attire. How could she not? Mandy's and Vic's parents flew in from North Dakota. We hadn't met, but I had heard so much about them, and Greg and Vic apparently gave glowing accounts to them of me, so it all just seemed like we were continuing on from where we last left off. Greg's parents, Cliff and Merry, also showed up, to support Mandy and to see what kind of creature she was adding to the Anderson-Cleveland coterie (me). Surprise guests were Tim and Rae Johnson, who drove over from Idaho. Tim was the maintenance man at the refuge. He had been Greg's best man at the wedding, and he was a "semi-adopted" brother to Greg and the girls. I never figured out how this semi-adoption worked, and if he had adopted them, or they adopted him. Regardless, they were all good friends, and I found him a very easy person to be friends with. Rae was a newer-comer to the group, but she had been a big help at the Vic-Greg wedding, and was obviously close to official "semi-adoption," also. I liked her a lot.
Merry and Cliff had to return to California right after the wedding. We delayed our honeymoon a day so we could show Mandy's parents a little of northwest Oregon. Chuck had visited Portland and Seattle briefly, but had never really looked around. Alice had never been west of the Cascades. We drove them past the Columbia Gorge waterfalls, returning around Mount Hood. The next day, before putting them on a plane back to Fargo, Vic and Greg took them through the Willamette Valley vineyards, and then up the Valley to Corvallis to visit the national wildlife refuges near there. While that was going on, Mandy and I escaped to Seattle for several days of seeing the sights, eating, relaxing, and spending quite a bit of time in bed. We didn't miss Vic and Greg for one minute.
We newlyweds had decided that we were ready to immediately start our family. To tell the truth, we had been doing some rigorous practicing for several weeks before the wedding. A diligent calendar watcher might have discerned that our daughter, Jeanette Victoria ("Ginny") - after my mother and Aunt Vic - arrived on the scene somewhat earlier than the usually allotted nine months from the wedding. Perhaps it was a result of our diligent practicing.
***
I knew that Greg's and Vic's early relationship involved a lot of what Greg described as "rabbit hole discussions." Vic would start to talk about something (Greg almost always blamed - or credited - her for the onset of the adventure), and before long, they seemed like Alice pursuing the White Rabbit in a Lewis Carroll story. It was impossible to know where they were headed, or where they would end up.
In our lives together, the four of us would sometimes find ourselves in those kinds of discussions. Sometimes they turned out informative, sometimes just plain silly. There was no way to plan them, but I think we all enjoyed them when they appeared.
I remember one in particular that occurred not long after Mandy and I married. Vic suddenly informed me that she had a bone to pick with me. As far as I knew, I was guiltless of any faux pas. I asked her what I had done.
"I find you are regularly referring to Mandy and me as 'the Anderson girls'.''
I wasn't sure if she was joking, but I thought I knew what she was getting at. "You mean, you wish to always be referred to with your married titles?"
"No, no! I'm talking about something more important than that. I spent much of my youth trying to get Greg to not think of me as a girl, but to acknowledge and address me as a young woman."
"She won me over a little later, when our relationship had progressed quite a bit farther," Greg interjected. "It wasn't really the addressing part that won the day. The undressing of a young woman - both the thinking about, and the doing - sounded much more socially acceptable than a similar thought or activity with a girl."
"Gregory! As you are prone to do, you are trying to turn this into a conversation about sex. I am talking about a preferred moniker - young woman, over girl."
"Moniker?" Mandy asked, innocently.
"Soubriquet! Handle! It's just a descriptive word."
"Like cognomen?" I enquired. I couldn't resist.
Vic glared at me.
Greg intervened, but not helpfully. "Please, Brother and sister-wives... Oops, that sounds a little polygamous, doesn't it? Let me start over without the soubriquets or monikers. What we have here is a clash of desires. Vic didn't want to be considered a mere girl by a worldly, mature college graduate - me. She rightly wanted to be recognized as someone old enough for me to be seriously in love with. I was.
"Now, she got to college, and found that all the women in her dorm wanted to be called 'the girls.' What was going on here? Being the expert that I am on women, I can tell you. Women are caught between two desires. They want to be perceived by the world as confident, assured, mature, and - by the men they associate with - experienced. But 'experienced' can mean different things to men and women. I suspect most women would like their men friends to think they'd kissed more than two or three boys, but not 100 men. Similarly, they'd like the men to think that if they went regularly to the drive-in theater, it was usually to see the movie. In short, they might like men to think that they're still relatively inexperienced and 'teachable,' but they don't want to be thought of as 'girls.'
"In the dorm, however, and in the company of women, I think most women want to be 'girls,' in the sense that they want to feel like they're brand-new to life - that true romance is still around the corner, and they don't want to grow old too fast and miss it."
Mandy interrupted him. "I think what you're saying is incredibly sexist, but I think it's pretty much true. Aren't men the same way, though?"
"In some ways, wise sister, you are correct. But boys always want to be older, not younger. When a male calls himself 'one of the guys,' he's almost never thinking about his high school years. 'Older' and 'experienced' are the same word to most males. Boys may start thinking about sex pretty young, but 'romance' doesn't enter their vocabulary for a long time. When it does, it's often a technique, not a happening. That may be one of the biggest problems in boy-girl, man-woman, male-female relationships. Males may get very good at technique, and have some pretty nice experiences with their partners, but it's not the same as falling head over heels in love with someone, and then learning with their lover 'what comes naturally.' I don't think a lot of men can say they've done that. I suspect a lot more women can.
"Now, before we get off this nomenclature business, I just want to say that it's harder than it seems. 'Woman' is used for everything from 'she's a beautiful woman' to 'she's a hard-driving woman executive.' If I say of Vic, she's my woman, I sound like a caveman talking. However, there don't seem to be any alternatives. At one time, we men might have talked about the 'nice lady,' but we've since learned that 'lady' is not a thing, like woman or girl. It's a behavior. She 'acts like a lady,' or 'is very lady-like,' so theoretically there is a real 'lady' out there who is the model for such behavior. However, nobody seems to know who or where she is.
"In our real world, we don't use the term 'woman' all that much. We have girlfriends (of many ages), fiancées, wives, lovers... The 'woman' is assumed. And another thing - in our private life, just between Vic and me, she doesn't mind a bit if I call her 'my girl.' In fact, I know she likes it. I suspect other women in the same circumstances feel the same way."
***
NO, WAIT. I am going to do one of those annoying little things I do - interrupting myself, to explain myself. I'm 82 years old. Although my brain is still sharp, and my mind still active (and you probably think I still remember too many big, obscure words), the conversation I just related happened 50 years ago. Even an erudite scholar of the English language couldn't be expected to remember the actual words of a discussion that happened that long ago. Yet, I have written the above with "quotation marks," like those were indeed the actual words spoken
Usually, in relating a conversation from that long ago (or, even yesterday!), I would write something like "Then, Greg explained," or "Mandy asked if." I'd try to get as close to the actual language as I could without "putting words in somebody's mouth ." I deviated from that usual technique in the above case because - for several reasons, probably - I do remember what must be very, very close to the precise exchanges. The subject matter (kind of a recurring subject with us); the misunderstanding of what Vic was getting at; the silly exchange of big and little synonyms; Greg's sly comparison of "add" and "un;" and of course, his blatant and ludicrous asserting that he could "explain" women to us; all capped by Mandy's assessment that his remarks were "sexist," but probably right.
I won't try any more (or many more) verbatim conversations. The passage of time, and the age of the narrator, cast enough doubt on the reality of the narrative. I really want it to be as close to "fact" as I can write it, and not - to use one of Vic's lovely and descriptive phrases - factual fiction.
So, let's move along. We have about fifty more busy and eventful years to cover.
***
December 1969 saw the demise of the old military draft system - with local boards deciding the fates of hundreds of thousands of young men - and the beginnings of the computer determining those fates. On December 1, they spun the wheel for the first time. The idea was that, instead of a thousand local draft boards having more or less their own rules about who got selected for the draft, every man would be assigned a number based on his birth date. All the numbers would be kept in one central data base and, when the wheel spun, it wouldn't matter whether you lived in Maine or California, or in a big city or a small town. Whether you were drafted or not would be based solely on your draft number.
Some of the old-timers in the military and Selective Service objected to the new system, because it removed human judgement from the process. I think most people liked it for that very reason. Even Greg and Vic - who opposed the draft for reasons ranging from personal to Constitutional - thought it was a much fairer system.
The change didn't make any difference to me, personally. I was older than 26, so presumably I was no longer draft-eligible. Greg had another ten months to go before he was completely "safe" - although with all the changes in the rules over the years, I don't know that any of us thought we could really utter that final, absolutely positive sigh of relief. Actually, even though Greg wasn't quite 27 yet, his chances of being drafted under the new lottery were close to zero. Selective Service had made the pronouncement that the first to be called up would be those men who had just turned 20.
Every young man's reaction to the draft was probably a little different than anybody else's. I guess I was pretty sanguine about it - well, "sanguine" isn't quite the word. I wasn't content, but I was resigned. I didn't know anything I could do about it. I didn't want to be in the Army, and I certainly didn't want to kill anybody. If I was called, I would have gone, and hoped that everything worked out okay.
For Greg, on the other hand, the draft was his bête noire. From college all the way through that final year, it was a constant concern. He didn't want to die or be seriously injured (either a real possibility) in a war that nobody seemed able to explain to him. He didn't want to serve in the military in any capacity, believing that the military method was to dehumanize recruits, so they would obey any order without question. (Having reached a stage in his life at which he thought he finally knew who he was, and who he was supposed to be, he didn't think he and the Army could see eye to eye on anything.) Most importantly, he felt that he was a prisoner of the system, not able to make any decision about his life that Selective Service couldn't veto.
This last circumstance was very much on his mind when he and Vic started to get serious about one another. He wanted to make plans for the future with her. He wanted to make some serious commitments, but he felt he was powerless. Although Vic was just graduating from high school, he told me that she proved to be just the strong, steady shoulder he needed to lean on. They talked out every aspect of the situation. He came immediately to her whenever some new change in direction got reported in the newspaper, and had upset him, again. She couldn't do anything, any more than he could, but they were clearly "in it together." They decided that they were not going to let the Government rule their life - that they would go ahead and plan things the way they wanted them to be. That didn't really change anything, but together they made the decision that they were moving forward, not waiting for Uncle Sam.
Greg's and Vic's interest in the draft had obviously started out highly personal. However, as they looked into their own situation, they began to see the unfairness, the inequities, and the inhumanity in the way the draft was run. Greg became convinced that the draft was unconstitutional, too, amounting to "involuntary servitude" - slavery! - for up to eight years of a man's life. After hours of research and discussion, Vic wrote a long "letter to the editor," pointing out her concerns about the system and - if we had to have any draft - recommending improvements. They sent it to about a dozen newspapers, I think, and provoked a number of editorials and other letters to the papers. A year later, Greg wrote a long letter, covering some of what Vic had included, but mostly dwelling on what he considered the constitutional issues. In one strange moment, Vic found herself listening to her letter being discussed in one of her college classes. The professor had no idea the author was in the room!
Did all of Vic's and Greg's work on the draft do any good? I think they'd say, probably not. They would probably be right, but they got some people to read what they wrote (maybe a lot of people). Some of those people read it with enough interest that they responded. Maybe word got to somebody who was in a position of influence. We almost never know those things.
If that sounds a little platitudinous, I guess that's all I got. As much as we value our "free speech" in the United States, most ideas from individuals are seldom heard as more than tiny voices crying in the wilderness. (I didn't make up that line, by the way. It was first said about John the Baptist, in considerably different context.) I guess we should be thankful that we can at least criticize, comment and recommend. A lot of the world can't.
In 1917, the Supreme Court had ruled that the draft was constitutional, and never revisited the issue. They covered certain aspects - women, homosexuality - but never the basic question: why wasn't being held hostage to the draft for almost 10 years of one's life "involuntary servitude." I think Greg was correct. Faced with a world war and a draft that the Administration had already committed to - and only a matter of days to make their finding - what could the Supreme Court do but acquiesce? The sin was not reevaluating that ruling in a quieter time.
This may seem like merely interesting history, because we haven't had a draft since before 1980. But we've resorted to the draft a number of times in the history of our country, sometimes with Congress approval, sometimes just administratively. With the Supreme Court still on record as having declared the draft constitutional, there aren't any barriers to it being reinstated.
***
The Vietnam war went on and on. The papers were full of it, but I seldom even looked at the headlines. They were always about a battle we won (or maybe won), or a battle we lost (or maybe didn't). Things were getting better, or things were getting worse. You might find all of the above on the same page. How could one really care, anymore?
But then on May 4, 1970, something happened to bring the war back vividly to us. It didn't happen in Vietnam; it happened on a college campus in eastern Ohio. Anti-war demonstrations had been increasing over the years, but in 1969 there were indications from the government that the Vietnam war might soon be over. When, on May 1, 1970, President Nixon announced that our troops were moving the war into Cambodia, protests immediately began across the country. At Kent State College, large crowds of students marched, gave speeches, and sang songs. It seems to have been mostly peaceful, and I don't know if anyone has ever given a satisfactory reason for calling in the National Guard to disperse the students, but that's what happened. National Guardsmen with tear gas, and firearms loaded with live ammunition, tried to break up the gathering. They were met with obscenities and rock-throwing, but nothing very dangerous or confrontational. Nevertheless, someone in the Guard started firing into the crowd, and others followed. In what has been estimated as less than 15 seconds, almost 70 rounds of ammunition were fired. Four students died; another nine were wounded. People merely passing by, and others watching the active protesters from a distance, were among the casualties.
It wasn’t the first time in our nation’s history that protest had been greeted with violence, but we hadn’t yet become immune to weekly massacres on our television sets, particularly of White college students. The coverage of Kent State was horrifying, and sparked major protests all across the United States. I'm not sure as a nation that we ever completely recovered from that incident.
We had our own demonstrations here at Portland State, May 11, 1970, with students, faculty, and local citizens protesting the Kent State massacre, the moving of the war into Cambodia, and a few other issues all ganging up at once. Portland hadn't yet become known for its protests and marches, like it is today, and it was a shock to the community on various levels. Mandy, Vic and I were all on campus then - and of course we just lived a few blocks away - so we had ringside seats for much of what went on.
By today's standards, it probably wouldn't be considered very significant, but students and some teachers did march through town, erected barricades on some downtown streets, and generally disrupted the life of the school and of downtown Portland. There was very little vandalism, but marches and sit-ins get joined by others who just want to make trouble. Some damage occurred, and of course that's one of the things the newspapers and television coverage emphasized.
What became the center of controversy was a large tent that the protestors erected on the Park Block. Called the "hospital tent" - and sometimes, Fort Tricia, because Tricia Nixon had stated that her father, the President, was doing a wonderful job in Vietnam - the tent was a general meeting place for the activists. Although the tent was nothing more than a symbol, and the student protestors were already removing some of their makeshift barriers in the area, the Mayor ordered the police to tear down the tent. The girls and I watched from one of the school buildings as 175 policemen, all in riot gear and swinging batons, charged into the crowd around the tent. There was some resistance, but only after the police reached the tent, clubbing people as they came. The tent was torn down, and 32 students were taken to hospital with bloody heads and other injuries. The press almost unanimously supported the police, and dismissed the injuries as insignificant because "everybody went home." The police were reportedly "just doing their job," but their unprovoked, bloody attack was caught by a number of cameras. The film can be watched today, if you're interested.
Governor McCall said that "the people of Oregon" were outraged by the protest, and had sent him many thoughtful, reasoned letters about how we needed strong police action to stop such violence. An example of one of the "thoughtful" letters, quoted in the newspaper: one woman was appalled that the police weren't allowed to use live ammunition in their guns when they came on campus. And this was just days after Kent State!
The Governor proclaimed that the legislation to lower the voting age from 21 to 19 was essentially dead for the time being, because of the student actions. He and the news media also seemed to forget that over 3,000 Portlanders - of all ages and backgrounds - marched through the city, protesting the police violence. As often seems to happen in such cases, there was almost no discussion of why the students were protesting.
The college was shut down for a week, but then everything seemed to return to "normal." It may have seemed that way, but I think a social scar developed in Portland that has never healed.
The Vietnam War came to an end in 1975. We didn't win, but the Administration claimed we didn't lose, either. We just walked away. At the end, official figures were that 58,148 Americans had died in the confrontation. Among the injuries were 75,000 "severely disabled;" 23,714 considered "100 percent disabled;" 5,283 had lost limbs; and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations. There was undoubtedly no record of the number of men who returned home with what we now label PTSD - shell shock or battle fatigue in prior wars - the debilitating mental disease caused by exposure to the confusions and carnage of war. It left many men unable to readjust to civilian life, resulting in broken homes, vagrancy, and suicide. A pretty heavy cost for a war that Congress never declared!
***
Family matters began to take over the Rafferty-Cleveland household in earnest, with the birth of Jeanette Victoria (aka Ginny) on June 15, 1970. Vic and Greg were so impressed with our first foray into human creation that they decided they were ready to join the "multiply and subdue the earth" movement. Actually, our goals were a little less grandiose - maybe two apiece, and leave Mother Nature some room to do Her Thing. We continued to be good at it, and Charles Clifford ("Charlie") Cleveland appeared on the scene July 22, 1971. On our second trip into Creation Land, we brought back Richard Gregory ("Rich") on April 30, 1972. The arrival of Alice Amanda ("Allie," or "Mandy Jr.") Cleveland on September 4, 1973 completed our "family."
Having four children under the age of five made for a busy, crazy household. We all loved it. We had decided early on that we were not going to be a "Daddy go to work," and "Mommy raise the kids" family. All four of us pledged to share all parental duties, not just in those first years, but as long as we had kids to be parents to. Obviously, Greg and I did have work we had to do outside of the house but, when we were home, we were parents in the most basic sense. If Mandy was busy with dinner, Greg might be changing Rich's diaper. If Vic had to rush off to somewhere for a bit, it might be me giving Allie her bottle.
It was a fun way to live, but we sometimes wondered if the kids knew which of the four adults were their real parents, and which one of their playmates was a sibling and which a cousin. In the long run, it didn't seem to matter. They grew up as a tight-knit group, who stayed "best friends," not just through their youngest years, but all the way through school and to their lives beyond. Their children eventually shared the same bonds.
Our way of life proved to be very good for the romantic parts of marriage. If Mandy and I decided we needed a weekend alone, we left our kids with Vic and Greg with no feelings of parental guilt, and no worries about how they were doing. When it was Greg's and Vic's turn, they felt the same.
They often went to the cabin on the coast, although they occasionally went farther afield or did something "cultural." Mandy and I often stayed in town, got an upscale room in a nice hotel, ate a couple of fancy meals, and sometimes went to a concert or saw a show. All of us came back to reality, refreshed and relaxed. The kids may or may not have realized we were gone.
***
In 1978, when Allie - the youngest - was five years old, we rented a bigger vehicle, piled kids and camping gear into it, and took off on our first big family adventure. We drove over the Cascades near Mount Hood, then camped for several days in the mountains between Prineville and Baker City. None of us had been in that part of Oregon before, and we enjoyed the various little mountain ranges with their evergreen forests, small streams, and occasional lakes and ponds. I think I've mentioned previously that Greg wasn't enchanted with the Oregon Cascades, which he described as a long ridge with volcanoes. He liked these mountains a lot more.
We had two tents with us, a full-sized umbrella tent, and a small two-person tent that Vic and Greg had bought for themselves some years before. Each night, the four kids and one of the adult couples would get the big tent, the other couple the small. The couples changed places on alternate nights. Mandy and I loved the alone time - and made good use of it, as I'm sure Greg and Vic did. But we also kind of missed the nights in the big tent. There were always stories to be told, followed by a lot of general foolishness and silliness until everybody finally decided to go to sleep.
We followed the Snake River across Idaho, stopping near Boise to visit with Cora and Jackson Wentzel, the elderly couple who had owned the diner near the Magic Valley refuge. They were great fun, and they, Greg, Vic and Mandy regaled one another with stories of their past acquaintance, and what had happened since. We camped by their house, and visited long into the night. The kids thought it was nice to have a real, indoor bathroom, for a change.
Jeannie Bryant (I don't think I heard her married name) no longer worked at the jeweler's in Magic Valley, but we found her at home with two kids, a boy and a girl. We didn't get to meet her husband, but had a nice catching-up visit with her. I had heard the story of Greg singing her the "Million Dollar Baby" song, and she attributed her current marital bliss to that event.
We left town on what my adult companions referred to as the "god awful road." The road itself was "okay," but it did seem like it might go on forever, and not get anywhere. We found Tim and Rae at the Johnson ranch, and set up our tents. (More bathrooms!) They were using Tim's place as their main headquarters, but regularly moved over to the Lewis ranch, to take care of things there. Both sets of parents were still living, but Tim and Rae had taken over most of the work.
Tim no longer worked at the refuge, concentrating on the ranch operations and the sugar campaign (processing of the sugar beets in the fall). Tim's brother, Rusty, was now the head maintenance man. Still single, he often stayed in the bunkhouse at the refuge, but regularly came home to help with their parents. He came up that evening. I didn't find him as easy to talk to as I did Tim, but he seemed sociable enough. I knew about his Vietnam war wound, and was glad to see that his "limp" really didn't slow him down, at all.
Next morning, we dropped down off the mesa to refuge headquarters. We met the manager, a young man and his wife, who were doing like Vic and Greg had - living there in summer, then moving to Idaho Falls for the winter. Greg and the girls described their history there, and Vic asked if she and Mandy could take a quick look in the house at their old bedrooms. They did, and both were a little teary when they came out.
We drove through the refuge and out the east gate, so didn't have to travel the "god awful road," again. We saw a lot of ducks, and the kids saw their first porcupine (up close) and coyote (at a distance). At the junction with old Highway 30, we found that the diner was gone, replaced by new alfalfa fields, being watered by huge rolling irrigators.
I had hoped to meet Nancy Williams as we passed through Pocatello, since she had played such a big part in the girls' lives. Unfortunately, Vic had called her from Oregon, and found that she and her family would be away. Mrs. McPherson, the girls' dorm mother, was another one I would have liked to meet. She and Greg seemed to have some good conversations about old novels, and I suspected she and I would do fine, together. But it was school vacation, and she wasn't around, either. As a result, we pushed right on through Pocatello without stopping.
It hadn't been a terribly long day, but the kids hadn't been able to get out of the car much. When we reached the national forest boundary near Ashton, Idaho, we found a campground, and the kids were able to run around for a couple of hours before dinner and bed.
The next day, we would be driving right by the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. We all wanted to visit the park, but it was the height of the tourist season and, even in 1978, the park roads were miles-long traffic jams - or parking lots! You could be in the park all day, and not see more than a few miles of it. It is always "crowded," but I guess it was still pretty good in early summer, just after the roads opened, and in the fall, just before winter weather closed them, again.
We had discussed this before leaving Oregon, and knew we weren't going to do the park this trip. Therefore, we started our drive north through some lovely mountains just west of the park, until we met the Interstate near Bozeman. We had let the kids out of the car a couple times coming north, and let them run around for five or ten minutes. Halfway to Billings, we found a little State area just off the freeway (no camping), where there was an extensive prairie dog town. The kids sat fascinated for a half-hour or so (so did we), as little furry heads popped up out of holes in the ground, and little furry bodies ran from one hole to another. We found a campground of sorts on the Yellowstone River outside of Billings.
It was a long day from Billings to Jamestown, North Dakota, where Chuck and Alice lived on the wildlife refuge. I had never been in this part of the country, generally identified as The Great Plains. I think I pictured it as flat grasslands, stretching to the horizon in all directions. In truth, there isn't a lot of contour, but it's far from flat. Much of the area we passed through had rolling hills, cut by many little canyons with tree-lined streams. There was scattered farmland, more the farther east we went. Mandy said the blooming sunflower fields were spectacular later in the summer.
We had two great days with Alice and Chuck, catching up on all the family news, learning about Chuck's refuge, and meeting all four of Mandy's and Vic's grandparents. When we had to go, it was with mixed feelings - sorry that we couldn't visit longer, and almost dreading the fact that we had close to 1,400 miles to drive before we reached home. We had four people to share the driving, we had a good air conditioner in the car, and most of what we passed through was new country for all of us. None of that was enough to make the trip anything but a long drudge. We took four days to do it.
That was by far the longest family trip we ever took. In retrospect, it was "worth it," but it was sometime before any of us adults could admit to that with any real honesty.
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