Oscar
Kittredge, my father, was living in Bookings, on the
southern coast of Oregon
when I was trying to cook up a story to follow on a title I fancied, “One of
the Seas is Called Pacific.”
Oscar
was eighty, long divorced from my mother, Josephine, who lived in Eugene, enjoying concerts
and traveling. And we’d liquidated the Warner Valley Livestock Company, which
owned and managed our ranches. For a long stretch it looked like Oscar was near
the frayed end of his lifetime rope, out of purposes.
Then
he married again, and he and his second wife, Francis Reynolds, deserted the
lava-rock distances of the Great Basin country in southeastern Oregon to finish their
lives overlooking the Pacific. A yearning to live on a seacoast often comes
over people who’ve spent enough decades in the dusty interior.
A
hundred years before, the tiny outpost of Shaniko, on
sage plains out in north-central Oregon, was
the most active wool-shipping center in the United States. Each April, the
brickwork hotel in Shaniko was filled with wool
brokers, and dozens of immigrant sheep shearers put up tents and got down to
work. When the wool from the hundreds of thousands of sheep had been clipped
and stuffed into burlap bags and was ready for shipping, frozen oysters arrived
by fast rail freight from Seattle. The oysters were taken from bays and inlets
on Puget Sound and sent in barrels filled with
seawater and frozen hard as stone. Citizens took those barrels off the railroad
cars, and ate those oysters one by one as the seawater melted and they enjoyed
the reeking salt odor and primal taste of oceanic tides and shallows while
encountering slippery ripe rawness. Who could blame them?
Francis
and Oscar bought a fishing boat to handle the ocean and caught salmon after
salmon. They had those great fish canned and gave the cans away to visitors.
Over coffee in the early morning they shook dice and played Yatzee.
In the evening they poured Scotch and bourbon ditches and shook martinis for
once-upon-a-time livestock buyers and Chevrolet dealers and their ironic wives
who went to the hairdresser every week, good people who had also retired and
come to the coast.
They
called the inland flatlands they’d left “east of the mountains,” and recalled
“back when” and said “enough for another night” as darkness descended out of
the east. They were old and calm and it was time for bed.
It
was my thought that “One of the Seas is Called Pacific” should be about
tranquility that could result from giving up on ambition. But an editor told me
such stories never sell. “It’s hard to dramatize what’s at stake.” So I gave it
up.
In
a Portland
hospital, when Francis was dying of cancer, I visited again and was moved and
persuaded by their dignity and humor as their time with each other slipped
away. After Francis was gone, Annick Smith and I and
her twin boys, Alex and Andrew, who were just into high school, visited Oscar.
He promised an ocean trip and the next morning loaded us in his fishing boat.
We shoved off in heavy fog. I don’t know if that voyage was a matter of
refusing to give in to the rapaciousness of fading life, but it was a mistake.
We
were enveloped in mist and couldn’t see over a dozen yards. After an hour of
compass reading, we heard waves breaking on the rocky cliff-line north of the
harbor. “The son of a bitch should lift,” Oscar muttered. The sea was calm and
we had gas for hours, but damn it all.
Oscar
had always been a paragon of confidence because he never took foolish chances,
and believed in high-jinks combined with safety. Horseback and alone as a boy
on isolate deserts, he’d learned that lesson early. Take unnecessary risks in
that territory and you’ll eventually end up crippled or dead or anyway broke; it’s likely there will never come a time when you’ll get to
live a life of your own choosing. But here he was old and those waves
continuing breaking on rocks, unable to swim the length of a bathtub. Neither
could I. Annick and her boys could swim like seals,
but even they seemed concerned.
One
more time, the ten thousand things let us get away with it. The sun cut
through. A channel of light led us through the mists to the harbor. We would
all live forever.
Over
the next years, Oscar showed up in Missoula
once a summer. On his way from Oregon, he’d
stop for a visit in Grangeville,
Idaho, with Francis’s son, Gary
Reynolds, who worked for the Forest Service. Then Oscar would appear one night
unannounced in the Eastgate Lounge where Jim Crumley and Jim Welch and so many others tended to gather.
If I wasn’t there, someone would call me.
Oscar
and I, we learned to enjoy each other. We’d drive up the Blackfoot River
to Annick’s house, sit on the porch and sip bourbon.
Then one afternoon he said “This is the last trip to Montana. I’ve got too old for the driving.”
“Desert
rats,” Oscar would say of his friends in Brookings. “There’s a den of us.” He
laughed about being too old for Alaska,
where he could catch a grayling on a fly. “But we anyway got the top fishing in
the world out in the Pacific.” Then he did make a trip to Alaska with an old pal, and they did catch
grayling on fly.
Best
was high on Oscar’s agenda. He loved hunting ducks and geese and their presence
in the skies above the meadows in Warner
Valley, where we lived
when I was growing up, and he tried to save the eggs of Sand Hill Cranes in
ditch bank nests from being crushed by mowing machines. But he refused to
notice the discouraging news in Silent
Spring. “It’ll cure,” he said of a semi-ruined world and that was all right
with me at the time. Over eons all things cure. Meanwhile he liked to keep
things ordered, useful, profitable, and thus enjoyable.
No
matter their irresolvable trouble, it was a way of going at the world he’d
learned from his father, who thought nature and the rest of us should be
controlled.
What
did they want, my great grandfather and my great grandmother and my
grandparents and my father and my mother
and women I married and women I lived with and my sister and the men she
married and my brother and the women he would marry? Seems we were all
determined to rise in the world while fashioning lives of consequence. I’ve not
improved much since. I grew up in feudalist enclaves, those ranches, distant
from thoughts about the workings of economics, giving no mind to profit but
otherwise agreeing that it was a fine life throughout my younger days.
By
1949, as I drove off to college in Oscar’s black port-hole Buick, everything our family seemed to want was
before us – fertile fields, vast herds of cattle and hundreds of horses and the
knowledge that we were respected by people we admired. With my brother and
sister and cousins, as small boy, I hid high up in blossoming apple trees, safe
in that valley where my family seemed to think it was all ours. But keeping
track of what was invaluable proved endlessly tricky. We lost count.
Sunlight
transforms us. It’s a main reason for getting out of bed and continuing. I was horseback by daybreak those summers on the ranch, herding
work teams out of the willows and off island meadows in the Taylor Field. The
huge horses breathed mist and their hooves thudded on the sod as I drove fifty
or sixty to a willow-walled corral where a hay-camp boss waited with a
sea-grass rope. Teams with baits of grain waited to be harnessed as we went to
eat. The early light would come up forever. That was what I learned to believe
in, ranch boy holiness in the hayfield.
Norman
Maclean, in the opening sentence of A River Runs through It, wrote “In our family there was no clear line
between religion and fly fishing.” He told me it was a truth he came to while
writing and that it was the last sentence he wrote for his story. Admiring
intelligence, fine fly casting, competency, and calmness, Norman wrote that “Grace comes by art and art
does not come easy.” What did each of us in my family, on the sage flats and in
the flood irrigated barley and alfalfa fields, in our various never discussed
ways, think of as grace or art?
One
day in my childhood, Oscar tapped a pack of Lucky Strikes (“Lucky Strike Green
Has Gone to War”), and shook out a smoke for each of the men he’d given the job
of falling a rotten Lombardy poplar from the row in
front of the house he’d built for us in the old orchard in Warner Valley.
He crouched to my level, and as he grinned I studied his eyes for signs. What
did I read there? The same message I found sixty years later. “Take heart.”
It
always works, recalling his resilience while trying to imagine what he took to
be losses – no more catching horses at the River Ranch while getting ready to
lead his young sisters to grade school out by Schoolhouse Lake, and no more
poker in the Elk’s Club in Klamath Falls, and no more shaking off a ten-below
day spent moving cows on the Klamath Marsh with shots of bourbon, and no more
cavorting with rich pals in the Palace Hotel on Market Street in San Francisco
where one night when I was sixteen he accompanied me to a jazz club across the
street where they’d serve me gin fizzes with no questions asked. I was leading
him to hear a saxophone man I’d discovered, the redoubtable Wingy
Manone. After the first set, Oscar ordered drinks for
the house, doubles for Wingy and the side men in his
trio. “Sir,” Wingy said, smiling big. “What would you
like?”
“About
twenty minutes of silence.” I was mortified but Wingy
was amused. “Wondered about you,” he said to Oscar. “Every time you come up
with a double, you get some silence. But not twenty minutes. They’d can my
ass.”
“Can’t have that.” Oscar grinned at me, like this was our secret. I’m
reminded of that moment by recalling the last time I saw him, eighty-nine and
enduring the wait for death in a nursing home but still joking.
I
didn’t credit his condition as I should have. Oscar always survived and I
thought he would go a few more years. A nurse let me into a little room where
he was emaciated but dressed in gabardine slacks and a wool shirt and asleep in
a wheel chair. When I spoke, he woke, startled. “Bill’s coming.”
He
studied me a moment. “Who the hell did I think you were?” We laughed – wish I
could remember what we said – and then it was time to leave. “I’ll be back on
the streets,” he said.
Days
later, Oscar died in that nursing home. It’s easy to think, though I have
excuses, that I could have hung around and helped him see it through. But maybe
he didn’t need any help. There must be a point where the dying are in charge.
On
my visits to the coast, I watched him rock in his chair and gaze over the
ocean, and thought I might write a story in which characters age and lose loved
ones and find a way to view death with tranquility. But that notion was walked
by ghosts. This is meant to be a story about people making it easy for one
another – a tall order in my family. That wasn’t the way we did things.
The End