My dad and I live about twelve hundred miles apart, so I didn't get to see him on Father's Day, but it seemed like he was close by. Some friends were visiting from out of town, and we spent the day visiting Snoqualmie Falls, hiking up the Twin Falls trail, and having a picnic -- exactly the kind of day my dad puts together for friends from near and far. I can't begin to add up all the days I've spent in Dad's roadworn four-wheel-drive vehicles, on back roads or dirt tracks that barely qualify as roads, seeing "critters and country", in his phrase.
He worked as a surveyor, and always had a little-known beautiful spot to head out to on the weekends, battered red cooler and picnic blanket in the back. We'd find somewhere in a meadow or by a river, build a fire from dead wood, roast some hot dogs, and explore. It was usually my job to gather kindling for the campfire, and I remember thinking how even chores were fun in the woods -- I still feel that way. One morning on the way up to the mountains, my dad stopped the car and told me and my stepmom he had to "get out and wee." He got out, closed the door, yelled, "Wheeeeee!" and then got back in and continued down the road.
A few years ago, I met some friends in Salt Lake City so we could visit Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, which had become visible as the water level dropped in the Great Salt Lake. This was pre-Google-maps, the directions and dirt roads were both sketchy, and our view was wandering livestock, rusting machinery, and the cloud of dust we were raising. As our rental car juddered over the washboard surface, one of them looked at me and said, "Doesn't it feel weird to be out here? What if the car breaks down? You seem pretty comfortable, actually." I was totally comfortable; it was like a hundred other Saturdays I'd spent with my dad and various friends and family he'd gathered. I realized it was because of my dad that I felt safe out in the world away from buildings and phones and pavement. There's a lot of talk lately about how children in our culture are disconnected from nature. The biggest influences over whether a child spends time outdoors are parents, the first people to help you figure out what's safe and what isn't, where you belong and don't belong. My dad made the big wild world my playground and taught me its rules.
When I was eight or nine, my dad took me up a forest road to the top of a peak, showing me the different fossils scattered there, and explaining how they had once been under an ocean that was long gone, and how the earth had raised and folded up into mountains in the spot we were standing. I remember the feeling of stretching my mind to understand how wide and deep that ocean must have been as we looked across to the surrounding peaks and over the tree-covered valleys between them. Many years after that, when I was working at an engineering company and doing some surveying, I could somewhat understand my dad's daily world. One day he took me out to a piece of land that was about to be gifted as wilderness, and we found the section corner from when the land was surveyed a hundred years earlier. It was a pyramidal stone, scored on each side; there was also a small pit of charcoal. And I remember the same feeling of trying to stretch my mind, back to the person that had walked that land and measured it with chains, burying charcoal and hewing a stone to mark it. My dad's career spanned the time when surveying went from slide rules to GPS and computers; I spent a week working with him and his crew shortly before he retired, and learned more in that week than the previous six months at my job.
Maybe the best thing I can say about my dad is that he's my friend. If we'd met at work or on a trail, I'd think he was a pretty cool guy. He's shown me how to build a campfire, set up a surveyor's tripod, and make an awesome salad. He's taught me, not by words but by how he lives his life, how to truly love the land and water, how to toughen up when I need to, and how to be generous and hospitable. He's made my world bigger. Thanks, Dad. Happy Father's Day.
