The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories (4 page)

Many years later, I was at a dinner for a large number of people and Milt happened to be there, so I told the story about receiving an A-plus in his class. Milt roared out, “I never gave an A-plus in my entire life!” But he had. And he had singlehandedly turned me into a writer.

By my sophomore year I was selling features to the
Lewiston Morning Tribune
. Although I would have a series of actual jobs for the next twenty-five years, my major drive was finally to make a living at freelance writing. This happened in the 1960s, although I would continue with actual employment for a few more years.

My stories in those early years were based on facts, requiring research and photography, but it was all exciting and wonderful. I wrote for two hours a night, seven nights a week. Perhaps the one distinguishing element in my factual stories is that I tried to include humor in each of them. Two of those stories are included in this collection: “Wild Life in a Room with a View,” first published in
Sports Illustrated
, later abridged in
Reader's Digest
, and “There Goes the Indian with the Digital Wristwatch,” published in
TV Guide
. Those two stories formed the pinnacle of my career as a factual freelance writer. I probably could have continued as a factual writer from then on, but a peculiar thing happened.

One night I finished an article in the first hour of my two-hour writing schedule. It was about the use of telemetry in the study of wildlife, hooking up assorted wild creatures with radio transmitters so scientists could study their movements at night. Because I stuck fiercely to my two-hour writing schedule, I decided to write a piece of nonsense to fill up my second hour. My head was already crammed with factual information about telemetry, so I decided to write a piece of nonsense about it, the comic idea being that eventually all wildlife would be hooked up with radio transmitters, which would simplify hunting immensely. I knocked off the piece of nonsense in an hour, stuck it in an envelope, sent it to
Field & Stream
, and forgot about it. I had a rule in those days that everything I wrote, no matter how bad I thought it was, I sent off to a magazine (a confession some critics have picked up on). Weeks passed. And then one day I went out to our mailbox and there was a small envelope from
Field & Stream
. My heart leaped. Writers place major importance on the size of envelopes they receive from publishers. Large envelopes contain the rejected manuscript; small envelopes contain checks. This small envelope contained a check for $350. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it transformed me. Writing factual articles is hard, time-consuming work requiring much travel and research. A factual article I had just published had paid me $750, but I had spent weeks researching and writing it. Now here was a check for $350, payment for a piece of nonsense that had taken me an hour to write. I did some rapid calculations and was instantly transformed into a humor writer. Within a year, I had more markets than I could keep up with, and the rates of payment grew with every sale. Suddenly I had achieved the goal I had set for myself at that little log cabin school in the backwoods of Idaho—freedom! That freedom required that I work all the time, of course, but it was still freedom, and that freedom eventually took me all over the world, beyond anything I had ever imagined as a seven-year-old.

Along the way, I acquired a wife, Darlene, also known in my stories as “Bun.” There is an essay in this collection that tells of my pursuit of her. I was still in high school when I met her, and she was already in college with a boyfriend in the service. The odds were heavily against me, but I've never been good at math and couldn't calculate them. Along the way, we accumulated a huge family: four daughters, five grandsons, four granddaughters, one great-grandson, and three great-granddaughters. The cost of college tuitions has curtailed my freedom considerably, but what's so great about freedom anyway? The family is terrific.

In the mid-1970s I packaged up thirty or so of my published humor pieces and started sending them around to book publishers. As usual, rejection letters started flowing in. Sometimes I would send the package to one publisher and get it back from another. Eventually, I would find out that the editor at the first publisher had really liked the stories and wanted to do a book, but the marketing department had turned it down. The marketing department! And here I thought editors were in charge. The first editor would then send the manuscript to a friend of his at another publisher and that editor would return the manuscript to me, usually with a note saying he really liked it but the marketing department . . .

After several months of rejections, I was offered a teaching job at a university in Guadalajara, Mexico. We packed up the kids and left. The very day after we had a phone installed in our Guadalajara apartment, I got a phone call from two different publishers wanting the book. I took the first one to call, naturally. An hour after the second call, I got a call from an agent wanting to represent me. Someone at the publishers had called him about me. Publishers prefer to work with agents rather than writers, I don't know why. So you see, everything works backward in the publishing world. I think the two books I'm working on now will bring my total to twenty-five, but I'm too old and tired to get up and count them.

And that, in a nutshell, is how I became a writer.

Big

P

erhaps the most overused word in the vocabulary of outdoorsmen is
big.
For example, when you ask how a fishing trip went, the angler replies, “Oh, I caught several small ones, but mostly they were big.” The listener must evaluate this information. “Big,” in this context, depends on the size of the small ones. If the small ones were six-inchers, the
big
ones may only have been ten-inchers, scarcely what we would normally refer to as
big
fish. I point this out not in the way of criticism but in the interest of precision. On the other hand, I would not wish to deprive any fisherman of his use of the vague. A reputation often depends on it, and I certainly don't intend to put the reputation of any outdoorsman in jeopardy. What else do we have?

The use of
big
in reference to any outdoor activity—other than fishing, of course—can actually be dangerous. I remember as a youngster camping out with friends one time on Schweitzer Creek. It was a tiny stream tumbling out of a narrow mountain canyon a couple miles from where we lived. An hour's hike up the canyon took us to one of the world's greatest camping spots. Any kid who grows up without knowing such a campsite is seriously deprived. If I had time, I would get a certain congressman I know to pass a law against such an occurrence. (He no doubt would undertake this chore for me, but I don't know if he has been released yet.)

The unique feature of this campsite was that it required no tent. Sometimes we took a tent anyway, but only because we wanted to. (What's the point of having a tent if you don't use it?) The reason a tent wasn't required was because a high cliff rose up from the ground and slanted out over half or more of the rocky beach on which we camped. If it rained— there was something about our camping trips that triggered rain—we could build our campfire under the cliff, cook and eat our meals there, and spread out our sleeping bags to sleep while staying dry.

The little stream tumbled by the edge of the beach, and for a while at least, we could catch our breakfast right out of the pool that had been formed and stocked with fish perhaps a thousand years ago just for our benefit. An endless supply of firewood lay right at the edge of our camp. It was not quite under the cliff, so sometimes we had to put up with the discomfort of getting damp in the rain while we chopped a day's supply of firewood from a
big
cedar tree that had fallen across the creek. In the ten years or so that we camped at the site, our gathering of firewood did not make a dent in the tree. The last time I saw it, the cedar looked as if it had been gnawed on by a discriminating beaver and then abandoned.

Now, what was I writing about? Oh, yes,
big.
I did mention a
big
cedar, but, of course, you have no idea how
big
the big cedar was. If I said the cedar was as wide as a sidewalk and that you could cross to the other side of the creek on it without being scared of falling in, you would perhaps grasp the concept of “
big
”—in this case, at least. So here we had not only an infinite supply of firewood, but easy access to the other side of the creek provided by a single tree. What more could you ask of
big
?

One extremely dark night—actually, because of the depth and narrowness of the canyon, all of the nights were extremely dark—my friends and I suddenly heard an enormous racket over by the
big
cedar.

“What is it?” I whispered to Norm.

“I don't know,” he whispered back. “But it's
big
!”

Vern nudged me in the back. “Can Norm see what's making that racket?”

“I think so,” I whispered to him. “He says it's
big
!”

Kenny nudged Vern. “What's making that racket?”

“Norm says it's
big
!”

“
Big
? It's gotta be a bear!”

Vern nudged me. “Kenny says it's a bear!”

“Cripes,” I said. I nudged Norm. “It's a bear!”

“Oh, no!” he hissed, which is an expression that is hard to hiss—unless, of course, you have a
big
bear ten feet away from you.

It was a matter of considerable comfort to me that I had Norm between me and the bear. Norm, at the time, was a little fat kid and, I suspected, would provide the bear with a rather tasty hors d'oeuvre. By the time the bear was done snacking on Norm, I could be at the tiptop of the nearest pine.

Suddenly, the racket stopped. This could be a bad sign! Fortunately, for the rest of the night, not a single sound came from the
big
cedar. All four of us could attest to that, because none of us got any more sleep.

The next morning, we discovered that the racket had been made by a chipmunk gnawing his way into and through a bag of potato chips. Not only did one of the smallest of woodland creatures deprive us of a night's sleep, but he also ate one of our basic camp foods! You lose your potato chips on an outing, and you're as good as done for. It was a lucky thing for that chipmunk that he didn't show his smug face around our camp again. He would have been in
big
trouble!

I went to elementary and high school in a tough little logging town. Although it has been some time since I was in first or second grade, I can still recall the dreaded cry issued by one of my small compatriots: “Watch out! Here come the
big
kids!” This warning probably referred only to those male pupils in the fourth or fifth grades, who themselves were probably not all that
big
. Well, some of them were
big
. In those years, you didn't get past fourth grade until you could read, spell, and do fractions. I remember one kid—I'll call him Jethrow—who had been in fourth grade for at least three years. There were rumors that he was already shaving and perhaps dating the teacher, but I doubt they were true. He wasn't her type. But occasionally there was a really
big
kid in fourth or fifth grade. In any case, whenever the “
big
kid” alarm was sounded, we would take off, running for our lives. It was scary. Looking back, I don't recall any of us little kids ever being caught and tormented by a
big
kid. They were simply satisfied to take over the swings, slides, and merry-go-rounds we had so summarily abandoned. Nevertheless, such was the effect on me that the shout, “Here come the
big
kids!” still makes me cast sharp looks in all directions. You never know.

A conservative friend of mine was outraged recently— actually, he is more or less in a continuous state of outrage— by government laws that protect the wimps from the strong. He quoted Winston Churchill as saying, “If we have laws protecting the wimps from bullies, we will end up a nation of wimps!” When I was six or seven years old, I certainly would have supported any law that stated: “Big kids are no longer allowed to torment little kids.” But when my conservative friend raised his objection to such a law, I myself, now an adult, was outraged. I'm a big fan of Churchill and can't imagine him ever using the word “wimps.”

I asked my friend if, whether during his early years in school, he had ever been alarmed by the cry, “Here come the
big
kids!”

“Of course not,” he said. “I was one of the
big
kids!”

I can still recall one of my four daughters, as a child, hopping about and yelling, “You took the
big
half!” As a college English professor at the time, I had worked tirelessly to correct the girls' errors of speech. “There is no such thing as a
big
half,” I'd point out. “A half is a half. You might, for example, have said, ‘You took the bigger piece.'”

“OK, then, you took the bigger piece! How about that?”

“That's much better,” I'd say. “But I deserve the bigger piece because I'm so much bigger.”

$7,000 TV Historical Extravaganza

A

s any TV executive will tell you, $7,000 doesn't go very far toward producing a historical extravaganza. Take, for example, the experience of the special events people at KHQ-TV in Spokane, Washington, who produced
Trailblazers
, a bicentennial series based on regional history.

After they had rounded up their actors and 150 extras; provided horses, costumes, and authentic weapons; built sets; and put on a couple of full-scale battles, there was scarcely enough money left over to buy beer for the cast.

Producer Ivan Munk, known among the cast as “Cecil B. De Munk,” admits that some of the money probably wasn't spent to the best advantage. “That's one of the problems with inexperience,” he says. “But with what we know now, we could probably put on
Gone with the Wind
for a couple thousand.”