Here’s the Story: He Always Did Like an Adventure

Among my earliest memories is one of a glowing cigar in the darkened corner of my bedroom and my father’s voice.

“Well, me fellow, me lad, where would you like to go tonight?”

The choice was never limited. He’d tell me stories about China, or Celtic chieftains in Northern Europe--or of the sea, or Eskimos or the Yukon or about his own father, who ran away from home at 12 to be a drummer boy in the War Between the States.

But the stories I loved best were about the travels he and his boyhood friend, Bill Cassidy, had taken in their youth.

I liked the Bill Cassidy stories best because they made us laugh. They would always start the same way. “My boy, one summer Bill and I rented a couple of mules down at the coal yard. Fifty cents a week. It was because in the summertime, coal-hauling mules don’t have a whole lot to do, which is why we could rent ‘em so cheap.”

Then he and Bill would head west, out of town. But until they were “out of town,” I never knew which adventure it would be. The suspense was part of the fun.

The Miner’s Cabin

The story we both loved best dealt with the time he and Cassidy, after two days on the trail, came on an old, abandoned miner’s cabin. They’d unloaded the mules, “skinned down to their ‘long-handles,”’ crawled under their blankets, and “just about died” in that miner’s decrepit old four-poster.

About the middle of the night Cassidy sat up in bed, moaned and started shaking my dad. “Art,” he moaned. “Oh, lord, Art, a bear’s got us. We’re goners, for sure. He’s gonna eat us up.”

At this point in the story, my father would start to break up. He’d laugh and I’d join him because we both knew what was coming.

“Well, sir,” he’d say. “We looked down toward the foot of that bed, where Cassidy was pointing, and there was the biggest, meanest bear that ever was, his head kind of tilted to one side, staring at us with great big shining eyes.

“Well, sir, I was closest to the old shotgun we always took along for emergencies, so I grabbed it up, pointed it at that old bear and gave it both barrels, but that bear just kind of reared back and then started to come at us.”

At that point both of them had screamed and each thought the other’s screaming was coming from the charging bear. Both of them then jumped through the window into a blackberry patch, tearing up their long-handles, and ran off into the woods, where they spent the night freezing and peeking around trees at the cabin, waiting for the bear to make his big move.

At dawn, having heard nothing more from the bear, they sneaked up to the window and had a look inside.

At this point my father and I would be laughing so hard, I’d be rolling around on my bed and we’d both be almost in tears. My father’s voice would go up about an octave as he tried to finish. The “bear” was Bill Cassidy’s big overcoat which he’d hung over the bedpost at the foot of the bed. The eyes had been the moonlight shining through the two top buttonholes. My father had shot a hole through the coat “you could have passed a head of cabbage through.”

He’d repeat the last line a time or two and we’d laugh some more. Then it would kind of run down and he’d wipe his eyes and say with a sigh, “Oh, dear, the old stories are the best, my boy.”

I remember one time it was just at that point that my mother peeked into the room. “Art, you and your bedtime stories. I swear you’re stimulating the boy.”

“Oh, Marie,” he answered, wiping his eyes, “I hope so. I devoutly hope so.”

My father always promised me that when the time was right, we’d go into the world, like he and Bill Cassidy had, and have us some adventures together.

But it seemed like the world and the Depression conspired to keep the time from ever being right.

Then one summer day he came home from the office depressed and sat in his chair for a while. Suddenly he slapped the arm of the chair and announced we were going on vacation to the Rockies.

“But, Art,” my mother said, “we can’t afford it.”

“We’ve got to. We can’t afford not to. I want these kids to remember us for something more than hard times.”

We went.

There were no coal yard mules anymore, but there was the old Essex Super-Six, so the family loaded up the car and took off for the mountains.

About the second or third day, just the two of us were fly-fishing when we got caught in one of those sudden afternoon storms, with almost no cover.

He and I tried to hide in the willows at the river’s edge, laughing and yelping while hailstones the size of golf balls knobbed us all over.

I know it hurt, but I can’t remember the pain itself, only that there was plenty of it. I can close my eyes and picture my father and myself, sharing the misery, hugging each other huddled under his old corduroy fishing coat, trying to make a smaller target for the hailstones.

I remember catching one right on the bridge of my nose. It was the kind of blow that makes your eyes water, and mine certainly did well up with tears.

I wanted to explain that I wasn’t really crying, but when I pulled back a little and looked up into his eyes, it seemed like the same thing had happened to him. So I said nothing, just hugged a little tighter as we waited for the hail to either kill us or move on.

Sunshine After the Storm

Twenty minutes later it moved on, the clouds parted, the sun came out and we went back to our fishing. I think I hurt all over and I was cold and I could see a bump rising on the bridge of my nose.

My father waded out into the river and, standing in a patch of bright sunlight, began his casting again. Steam was rising out of his jacket. He let the line settle and drift past a little overhang.

“Hey, pop,” I called out. “We had us an adventure all right, didn’t we?” He didn’t answer, probably because he didn’t want to scare the fish, but he grinned at me around his cigar for a long time and nodded and then looked away.

I don’t remember any other time in my boyhood when I felt better than I did at that moment.

That was a long time ago and I’ve undoubtedly forgotten a million things, and a lot of other good memories have grown dim, but those scenes with my father never fade.

He didn’t have much of a formal education. As was the custom then, his father took him out of school in the 10th grade to work in the family business, but my dad read everything he could get. And though he never really got to do much traveling, except for the trips he took as a boy with Bill Cassidy, he always encouraged his children to travel.

Not just for the traveling, but because he wanted us to experience the world, to have the adventures the world offered.

“A suitcase can travel,” he used to say. “Get out there in the world, look into things, talk to people. Open yourself up and you’ll have adventures. Then, my boy, you’ll find the world is your oyster.”

My wife Joyce and I got a letter from one of our children the other day. John teaches in an English language school in Cali, Colombia, and spends all his free time exploring. There were some pictures with the letter, some he took at Machu Picchu in Peru, and a couple of him and an Indian guide, standing waist deep in a muddy jungle river. Both he and the guide are grinning like they just couldn’t be having a better time.

Who knows, maybe my father’s advice played a small part in John’s experience. His expression in the pictures suggests that he too has found that the world is his oyster.

I do know, for certain, that I can’t wait for him to get home and tell me about his travels. I love a good adventure story.