I wrote the title of this story before I wrote the story, which is always a mistake. You might know what you’re going to write about before you start, and you might even have an outline that you plan to follow to the letter, but something in the writing will suddenly dissolve the solid ground beneath your feet, and you’ll find yourself down a rabbit hole, trying to hang with Alice as she runs faster and faster to stay in one place. That’s what’s about to happen here, and before you start thinking that I’m planning to expose the Rember Crime Family’s many ties to Hunter Biden’s laptop, let me say that the Rembers, as far as I know, did not use Hunter to get to his father.
We also didn’t lie, murder anybody, steal horses or cows, or inflate the value of our properties to get a better rate on bank loans. We didn’t have a lot of property to inflate. Anyway, a loan from the bank was seen as a one-way ticket to legal problems at best, indentured servitude at worst. If you wanted something, you saved up and paid cash for it. If you couldn’t afford it, you found your happiness elsewhere.
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When I wrote my father’s obituary, I kept it brief, emphasizing that he was a good father and friend. I noted he had been a union man and a loyal Democrat all his life. He loved hard work and, I wrote, “His checks were good.”
I received letters about that obituary, several people saying those four final words were a doorway into my father’s character and good words for anybody’s tombstone. I agreed, although I had scattered his ashes over a meadow high in the Sawtooth Wilderness and he didn’t have a tombstone unless you counted the surrounding peaks.
We were poor but honest, and those, too, aren’t bad words for your tombstone, no matter where it is.
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The idea of the criminal side of the family arose when one of my father’s cousins retired to Boise. He was a garrulous man who had spent his life selling cars, real estate, and fishing tackle, and he liked people and making new friends, and as my father said (with some affection), “had a line of bullshit a mile long.”
When this cousin got to Boise, he checked the phone book to see if there were any other Rembers. He found the number of a family who had moved into one of the new suburbs. He called them up. Rember wasn’t a common name, so he assumed that he was related to them in some way. He introduced himself, said he was part of the family, and offered to buy lunch.
“They refused,” he said. “Once they figured out what I wanted, they wouldn’t talk to me. They told me not to call them again and hung up. They had an East Coast accent—somewhere back there. You know what I think? I think they’re in the witness protection program. Somebody took our name out of a phone book and gave it to them. They thought they’d be safe from mafia hitmen in Boise with a new identity. I think I scared hell out of them.”
That was our introduction to the criminal side of the family, and their crime was that they, shady characters that they were, had stolen our name. For a while we half-expected to see opaque-windowed sedans cruising slowly up and down the highway outside our gate, but they didn’t show, and a year or two later those other Rembers disappeared from the Boise phone book. We went back to being an honest bunch, for the most part.
________
You’re probably wondering about the rabbit hole. I started thinking there wasn’t any witness protection program, and that the Rembers who had moved to Boise were trying to hide from family, not the mafia. You hear about men who have a family on one end of the country, and another family on the other end, and neither family knows about the other. Or one family knows, and the other doesn’t. Maybe these people were trying to hide from angry in-laws, or had escaped from a cult, or had absconded with an inheritance meant for a stepmother or an unacknowledged set of children. Maybe they were the unacknowledged set of children.
I know that the Rembers originally came from Canada, and a bunch of them still live around Montreal. They came over from Scotland in the early 18th century to land granted by the British Crown, land stolen from the French, who had stolen it from the Indians. I know this because one of the Canadian Rembers had discovered the Idaho Rembers and had sent us a family history that extended into the 20th century, listing births, deaths, towns, spouses, occupations, and a scattering of personal histories. Rembers had emigrated to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and two brothers had come south to fight on the Union side in the American Civil War. Apparently one of them had come west, although I’m not sure if he was my forebear. I did know, from our own family history, that my great-grandfather had shown up in Hailey, Idaho in 1883, and had prospered, becoming the county sheriff around 1890.
The history sent to us from Canada had ended with a warning: “You’re welcome to come visit us, but don’t try to get any of the loot. It’s been tried before.”
The rabbit hole was deep. In some distant Canadian Wonderland, people lived like royalty on their grant of Crown land, and they didn’t want us showing up to claim any of their ill-gotten inheritance.
They were a crime family by way of settler imperialism. They weren’t about to admit they hadn’t been on that land from time immemorial.
I began to wonder if any of the scattered Rembers belonged anywhere. I imagined that family who showed up in Boise, full of the hope and optimism of a new start, only to find that the people they were trying to escape had beaten them there and they had no choice but to pack the car and become refugees again.
Who were they? What were they doing here? Why weren’t they willing to have lunch with my father’s cousin? There were no good answers to those questions, and no unbroken story that led from Scotland to Idaho.
War, depression, and gentrification have erased my connections with my Idaho ancestors. My grandmother’s house in Hailey was torn down to make way for a McMansion, and the only place you can find the Rember name is in the cemetery. We are gone from the Wood River Valley, thanks to the Great Depression, death from old age, gentrification, the lure of new territory on the Salmon River, and a distaste for crowds. I doubt if we’ll ever call Hailey home again.
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Resort communities in the West have a circular history, one that erodes individual events and identities. A deliberate amnesia occurs every November. The endless repetition of ski seasons focuses on what will occur, rather than what’s already happened, and while the play goes on as always, the cast keeps changing.
People come to the Wood River Valley thinking they’re unique individuals and never quite realize that they’re a type. But if you look at the obituaries of the male octogenarians in the local paper of record, the Idaho Mountain Express, you’ll see again and again the stories of successful entrepreneurs and corporate managers who retired to Idaho with second or third wives and school-age children. They see their new home as a frontier, and their arrival as the start of local history, and they ski and fly fish and dine in local restaurants for a few years until they get too old to navigate icy walkways. Usually they die in warmer places, but they live on in their local replacements, some of whom marry their widows and ex-wives.
Their stories are as carefully crafted as anything a witness protection program ever came up with. But if a crime family is involved, the details never make it as far as the obituary columns.
________
About once a year I think about sending a cheek swab into 23 and Me, to see at which point my ancestors came out of Africa, or if I’m related to any serial murderers, Republicans, or protected witnesses, or if I might be able to launch a takeover of the British Throne by the Plantagenets (who were a crime family).
Thus far I’ve resisted the temptation. It’s better to have sprung from a freebooting Scot who maneuvered his way into a grant of stolen land—no telling why he was in a hurry to leave Scotland, but it might have been more than the climate—than to find out my DNA has passed through fifty or sixty generations of serfs and peasants, the sort of people Thomas Hobbes had in mind when he wrote about lives “nasty, brutish, and short.”
I do know I have DNA from people who were damaged in body and soul by the Great Depression, and to the extent that their trauma has been recorded in my genes, I have a sensitivity to the violence inherent to capitalism, with its depressions, recessions, real-estate bubbles, and illusory dreams. My father was born into an intact family, but by the time he died, that family had been dispersed. They all had recovered, more or less, from the 1930s, but all of them bore the marks of lonely struggle.
I’m incredibly fortunate to have had parents with the superhuman will to make something from nothing. My life, thus far, has been long, pleasant, and reasonably civilized. I haven’t been in jail. I haven’t had to have the FBI invent my life. I’ve tried, with varying degrees of success, not to hurt anyone.
When I’ve had luck, it’s been of the good variety. My line of bullshit has gotten shorter as the years have gone by. When I’ve gone down rabbit holes, there have always been ways to climb back out.
I’m hoping these assertions will be just as true in my obituary as they are now. That’s my story—my history—and I’ll stick to it for as long as I can.