Long-time readers of my writing will find familiar material in this entry. It doesn’t mean I’m running out of memories. It means that long ago events are beginning to demand re-evaluation. I hope you’ll bear with me while I bear witness to changes in my life’s meaning. It seems to be what all our lives are going through these days.

In 1953, tired of his life as a hard-rock miner at the Triumph Mine, my father decided to become a fishing guide in Sawtooth Valley. My mother and father put their life savings into a down payment for a small homestead on the Salmon River, nine miles above Stanley.

At the time, the only thing you needed to do to become a guide was hang out a shingle and see if anyone showed up to go fishing or hunting. My father was a good fisherman, and he charged his clients ten dollars a day and, once the salmon were running thick in the river, guaranteed them a fish on the line. By his second summer, most of his clients were return customers. 

My father then put together enough horses for a pack string and started taking his fishing clients into the hills for elk and deer.

The people who showed up at our house for breakfast before days of fishing and hunting included doctors, financiers, politicians, priests and rabbis, pharmacists, junkyard owners, CEOs. I don’t remember any lawyers, possibly because lawyers don’t need guides when they’re fishing.

I do remember a lot of my father’s clients saying they envied his life on a clear river, high in the mountains of central Idaho, not having to go to work fifty weeks a year, not having to report to a boss, not having to deal with routine.

In retrospect, we were, for most of these people, unenviably poor, living on the sheer edge of solvency.

In the fall, my father trapped beaver, mink, coyote, muskrat, bobcat and lynx, and taught me the complex skills trapping required. It prepared me for a bloody and financially useless occupation that he himself gave up when he could no longer stand its cruelty.

In the winter, he drove ski bus at Sun Valley, worked construction, and once, for a year, he went back underground at the Triumph Mine.

I don’t remember my father ever complaining about working, and I don’t remember him ever not working. He always said whenever he needed a paycheck he could have one in a week or two, because everyone he’d ever worked for would hire him back, and he’d worked for a lot of people. His clients who thought he was his own boss were wrong. He had a multitude of bosses, those same clients among them.

I know he could have made more money if he had turned any of his winter jobs into a career, but he wouldn’t have had his summers on the Salmon River. As for wealth, it was more than enough that his kids were raised in statistical poverty but didn’t have a clue that they were poor.

Once he cautioned me not to do anything for money that I did for fun. Another time, when I was in high school and a friend had gotten a job at the Silver Star Queen mine in Bellevue, I talked about becoming a miner.

“Don’t ever go underground, whatever you do,” he said, and he said it with enough conviction that it was advice I took.

 

Not so for his other advice. I liked to ski. I became a ski patrolman at Sun Valley. I liked to hike and backpack, and I became a wilderness ranger in the Sawtooths. I liked to go to bars, and I became a bartender. I liked to write and travel, and I became a travel writer.

Even as I ignored his advice, I remembered it when those jobs turned mean.

 The day I met two hundred tourists on the trail to Sawtooth Lake was the day I realized I wouldn’t grow old as a wilderness ranger.

The day a bartender colleague killed himself because his coke dealer was threatening his family was the day I realized bartending was also drug pushing and, though legal, could destroy you and the people you served.

The season I was promoted to management in the Sun Valley Company hierarchy was the season I realized that ski resorts were managed like feedlots, and I didn’t want to work in a feedlot.

I enjoyed fishing until I spent forty-two days on a gill-netter in Alaska, at the end of which I realized I had caught my lifetime supply of fish and unless I was ever hungry for fish dinner—which was doubtful—I would never need or want to catch a fish again.

In early November, crouching to enter a tiny commuter jet, on the way to Churchill, Manitoba to see polar bears in the darkening Arctic winter, I understood I really wanted to spend the winter on a beach in Thailand and also that the only way to write anything new about staring out the window of a tundra buggy into the mouth of a polar bear involved getting out of the tundra buggy, and I didn’t want to do that.

The real advice my father had given me was nonverbal. He had shown me that there was no reason to keep working at a job that had become problematic. You could always find another job as long as you did your share of the work, were honest, treated your co-workers with respect, and recognized that there was always more to learn than you already knew. I had watched him do all these things. I had understood from watching him that hard work was something you could learn to love, and I had to love it.

I ended up teaching, which has elements of fun, but isn’t fun. It’s hard work—brutally hard, if you do it well—and it can be loved. You’re so much better as a teacher when you love what you’re doing that you have no business teaching if you don’t love it. Bartending pays better, and although it sounds awful to say, it might be better for your end-stage conscience to be a good bartender than a mediocre teacher.

I loved teaching enough that I taught for twenty-five or thirty years, depending on how you count them, and taught writing to seventh graders all the way to septuagenarians. I still love teaching, which means that I got out before it started to resemble gill-netting.

 

Near the end of his time as a fishing guide, my father began taking his clients west of Stanley, down Marsh Creek to below the confluence with the Middle Fork of the Salmon. He had set up a tent camp at the mouth of Fall Creek, above a big hole that was, then, full of salmon. His clients would ride horses the nine miles to camp, go fishing, and my father would cook a salmon dinner and supply whiskey and stories until dark. They’d fish the next day until early afternoon, pack their fish in wet grass and leaves, and head back up the trail to the truck. My father would load the horses in their trailer and they’d drive back to Stanley for a restaurant meal and a soft bed.

I went on these trips a few times, helping with the horses and taking care of the fish, and it was not luxury camping. Nine miles on a horse, if you’re not used to riding, can get painful, and so can sleeping on the ground with only a cold and leaky air mattress under you. In places the trail had been blasted out of cliffsides a hundred feet above the river. People got frightened and had to dismount and creep—one of them on his hands and knees—around the cliffs.

By that time, my father had liability insurance, but the endeavor wasn’t adding up right, and he gave it up after a season.

It was a good decision. A few years later, the runs slowed and stopped coming. Idaho Fish and Game reduced and then ended salmon fishing. By that time, my father had also quit guiding hunters, because, as he said, “They’re not hunting for the right reasons. You tell them the right reasons, and they don’t know what you’re talking about.”

These thoughts had crystallized when he had clients trying to kill mountain goats for trophies, which involved “chasing a poor goat uphill until he runs out of mountain, shooting him, taking the cape and the head, and leaving the meat.” He had packed a carcass back rather than watch it be wasted, butchered it, and put it in our freezer, and that winter, everything—elk, deer, salmon, bread, string beans, chokecherries—smelled and tasted like old goat. Our culinary world got noticeably happier when he refused to guide trophy hunters ever again.

 

After he stopped taking people fishing and hunting, my father started working night shifts on road construction jobs, maintaining the bulldozers and trucks and graders, making sure oil was changed and bearings were greased. It was solitary work, but essential for the success of the entire operation. He had the trust of everyone he worked with, even if they only saw him leaving as they came to work. He made better money on these jobs, which paid union scale, than he ever had as a guide. When asked what he did, he said he was a grease-monkey and a good one.

It’s a shock to young people when you tell them that what they do to make money is never just about making money. Work always has a moral dimension, and sometimes that dimension will begin to give you the creeps, and you’ll have to start over and do something else. When I look back at the times I left perfectly good jobs that promised perfectly good futures, I can see that evil was creeping into the picture, even if I couldn’t say what it was at the time.

(I have no illusions about having 20-20 moral vision. I couldn’t see that there was anything wrong with cocaine until my bartender colleague blew his head off with a shotgun. Then I could see.)

Blind as I had been, I had somehow learned that real evil existed, and that once you intuited it was part of your job, you needed to quit before it got too late.

 

 My father became his own boss at age sixty-two. He was able to retire that early because he and my mother had lived their lives like the depression children they were, saving and scrimping and never buying anything when they could make do with what they had.

I should say here that nothing my father did would have been possible without my mother’s support. She worked as a nurse at the Sun Valley Hospital all the years he had been a packer and guide, and her salary kept the family functioning during some lean years. Her story is just as full of hard work as his is.

Over the years, they began to invest their savings, probably according to the advice of some of the financier-fishermen who had spent mornings on the river with him. My parents did well enough that they could travel—once to New Zealand and Australia, a bunch of times to Canada and Alaska, fishing for salmon in still-living rivers—and move a new house onto their place in Sawtooth Valley. They lived well until they got too old to live here.

You can guess the rest, because their fate was the fate of everybody, of financiers and doctors and packers and guides, politicians, and even of lawyers. You only hope that when you’re living with an end-stage conscience, it doesn’t torture you too much, and that you meet your fate with grace and whatever kindness you can muster for the people with whom you have shared your life.