Far Out: My Life on the Edge

By Rick Sterry

Rick Sterry grew up near the Canadian border in north central Montana and ranked fourth academically in his high school class of six. Following graduation he left for Southern California, confident that he would be discovered as the next James Dean.

When those dreams failed to materialize, he worked his way through college and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to graduate school. While still a student, he published a widely reviewed novel, Over The Fence. He was a visiting professor at a university in Japan, writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Transcendentalism, when a packet of powder arrived in the mail which changed everything: LSD.

Far Out is the witty, insightful and unflinching account of how Rick Sterry dropped out in the sixties to live off the grid for thirteen years with his wife and sons on an (almost) self-sustaining farmstead. It tells again the useful tale that while life doesn't always give us what we want, it often gives us just what we need.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780991669318

Book preview

Sartre

Prologue

THERE ARE TIMES, EVEN IN THE most rational of lives, when an unfolding opportunity will seem so right and fitting that it must be gone along with even if it doesn’t make good sense. That’s my excuse, anyway, for trading Butterscotch, my Jersey milk cow, for a VCR. It was 1984, and I didn’t have a TV at the time, or electricity in the house I lived in with my wife and two sons, so I had no real use for the VCR, but nobody had answered the Milk-Cow-For-Sale-Or-Trade ad until the lady with the VCR called. For her the VCR was a symbol of all that was wrong with her family. She and her husband had decided to get their kids away from town and its pernicious influences. They had just bought ten fenced acres with an old home and barn, and were determined to change things. Would I consider trading the cow for the VCR?

I had to smile when I heard the lady’s story. I knew exactly what she was talking about; I’d been there myself more than a decade earlier, so I took the trade right off, and as it turned out, this event was like a pivot upon which my life swung through a change in direction.

But the story I want to tell in this book isn’t about what happened next; it’s a story about all the other pivot points in my life that led to my living off the grid for thirteen years, trying to become self sufficient, and about how, much earlier, I had the equally unsupportable idea that I was going to be the next James Dean.

And how did it come to pass that a farm boy from up along the Canadian border in north central Montana might think he was destined to be a star?

Read on.

Pivot Points

THERE ARE THOSE WHO LOVE THE horizon-to-horizon emptiness of the northern Montana Big Sky country I was born to, but an event happened when I was seven to make that difficult for me. It was 1945, war time, and teachers were in such short supply that my farmer father, who had a two-year teaching certificate, was sought out and implored to move his family to the Chippewa Cree Indian Reservation in the Bear Paw Mountains and teach Indian boys and girls at a little town named Rocky Boy.

Those two school years living in Rocky Boy provided the great adventure of my youth. Exploring the brushy, fragrant creek that ran below our house with its frogs and lizards and beaver dams, and skating on it when it froze, were endlessly thrilling, but most of all I loved to climb the hills to high places where I could let my vision reach into a far distance. Each year, as soon as school was out, my family and I left the mountains for the tabletop flatness of our farm. Those two school years in Rocky Boy spoiled me forever for the plains.

If my father, Alton, ever missed Rocky Boy he never let on, but then he never let on about anything that I ever saw, not until my sons were born. When he was an old man, still erect and slim, I asked him how he kept his belly so flat. Hold it in, he said, which he did with everything. I didn’t understand my father, and he didn’t seem to understand me or take much interest in me until I got old enough to do field work.

He was never mean or bad tempered to me or anybody else. He did not raise his voice. I well remember my mother insisting that he do his duty to whip me for my bad grades, which he did, but I could see it really did hurt him more than me, lightly as he laid the belt on. To avoid putting him through it again I decided to get better grades. Once when I was a child he asked me to bring him a hammer from where I was standing. I tossed instead of bringing it, and the hammer bounced and hit him on the shin, and he jumped up with a yip and swatted me on the butt and then immediately, I could see, was sorry, though he didn’t say so.

Alton was a gentle man, fair, just and kind, who would never seize an advantage, which was why he was widely admired and elected to the school board, the farmers' elevator board and the Lutheran council. Though I felt wounded by what appeared to be his lack of interest in me, I saw his integrity, as everybody did, and wanted to be admired like him.

My mother, Nedra, was lively, impulsive, creative and witty. She rarely held anything in. She’d grown up in a large, one-parent family through the hardest of depression years, and came out of it trying always to make the best of things and see the sunny side. She was a lover of books who read to me at bedtime from my earliest memory, and she read wonderfully, a skill she’d learned from her own mother, a teacher who’d read her collection of classics aloud, chapter by chapter, to rapt students in country schools across north central Montana through all of Nedra’s youth. In some of those schools my mother experienced mountains and streams and trees, and so I’m sure she too had been nourished by our brief life in Rocky Boy, and felt hemmed in by the big sky.

I knew from the beginning that my mother and I were alike, as my father and I were not, and I grew up loving the sound of her laugh and was proud of my ability to provoke it. When my father laughed it was as if the laugh had gotten away from him, like an unexpectedly slipped clutch would make the tractor jump, before it was quickly controlled. My mother taught me songs to sing and how to harmonize, and we sang together as I helped her in the kitchen in the years before I was old enough to work in the field. When we stood to sing in the Lutheran church, my father’s lips moved, but he uttered no sounds that I ever heard. When I got old enough to count months and wonder about such things, I felt guilty at having been the occasion for my parent’s obvious mismatch.

Our family farm was near Hingham, Montana, one of a dozen small towns strung every five or ten miles along the Great Northern Railroad tracks paralleling the Canadian border, an area called The Hi-Line. School events and basketball games and dances in Hi-Line towns were major social events eagerly looked forward to by the whole community. On Sundays the parking lots of the Lutheran and Catholic Churches were full to overflowing.

There were rarely more than thirty students in the four grades of Hingham High School, but in the mid fifties Hingham fielded the best basketball team it had ever had. Of the eight boys on that team there were three Darryls and two Lowells, and we’d been playing together all our lives. Convoys of cars would drive long distances through bad weather to attend Hingham Ranger basketball games.

Speech was still a mandated subject in Montana high school curriculums in the fifties, and declamation contests were an important cultural feature of small town life. Declamations were long memorized pieces in three categories: humorous, dramatic and original. My mother had won a declamation contest when she was in high school, and so had her brother, my uncle Bill. Since it was in the family tradition, Nedra coached me and later my brother Craig and my sister Sandra for the Hi-Line declamation contests in which the best declaimers from each school would compete. I mainly competed in the humorous division and won first place every year I entered and still have, in my jewelry box, along with unused cuff links and a couple of abandoned wrist watches, a number of medals, including one for First in State in Humorous Declamation 1954. Having the attention of a crowd of people and making them laugh on cue was an experience of great power for me, and being an imaginative child I came to believe I had a future as an actor.My mother supported this delusion. Both she and my father’s mother, Grandma Maggie, clearly thought that I was special, and as I grew up I saw no evidence to the contrary. I was always, it seemed to me, the best at everything, and could do anything I set my mind to. For all of my mother’s and grandmother’s belief in me, though, I doubt their influence alone would have been enough to encourage me to apply to be accepted at the Pasadena Playhouse, a professional drama school. There was a final push, which came from a teacher who appeared in Hingham in ‘54 named Anita McDonald.

Getting a job in Hingham was never a step up on anybody’s educational career ladder. Only desperation or ignorance could have motivated a teacher to apply for a position there, far as it was from any place of interest, yet they did apply, by mail, and were hired sight-unseen by the grateful school board, of which my father was chairman when I was in high school. Applicants were mostly first-year teachers with uninspiring academic records and vague recommendations, or those who’d been fired elsewhere and had experience but no recommendations. Often those new teachers would appear in Hingham for the first time on the first day of school, and remain shell-shocked for days as they absorbed what they had gotten themselves into. These newcomers were watched carefully for signs of eccentricity, which most revealed sooner or later. Single women teachers of any shape, size or religious preference were courted furiously by local bachelor farmers and often joined the community as permanent members, but most teachers stayed a year or two at most before moving on to more appealing vistas and opportunities.

Every year the school board faced the prospect of filling a position or two, and one year my father remarked to my mother the unusual circumstance of a highly qualified applicant who possessed a degree from an East Coast Ivy League college, and who was the wife of a major in the Air Force recently stationed in Great Falls. This new teacher would drive up and stay at Ida Kersey’s Hingham Hotel during the week of teaching and then motor back to Great Falls, a hundred miles away, to stay with her husband for the weekend.

When Anita McDonald turned up the first day of school it caused more than a ripple. We were the ones who were shell-shocked.

She was black, with thick, solid-looking forearms and muscled calves below her dress, like Aunt Jemima on the syrup bottles. Her straightened hair was dyed red and she spoke with an unexpected, lovely lilt. I suspect that no one in the entire Hingham High School had seen a black person except in photographs and movies.

In our first class she leaned casually against her desk and told us that she’d been born in Jamaica but had been raised in New York City and had attended college on a scholarship to a school called Princeton. She said that this was her first visit to the West and her first teaching job as well. Then she invited the six of us in the junior class to tell her who we were and to say what we wanted to do with our lives. She seemed calm and at ease with herself in spite of the fact that she was completely out of place, and I fell in love with her then and there, and when it was my turn to say what I wanted to do with my life I blurted what I’d not told anyone before: I wanted to become an actor.

She taught in Hingham for two years, and for the first time I worked hard to please a teacher. I did the readings and the writings she asked for, and she praised me. I starred in two plays she directed, and she wrote a recommendation for my admittance to the Pasadena Playhouse.

The Pasadena Playhouse

THE FALL OF 1956 I GRAVELY shook my parents' hands and left Hingham, believing that I was destined to be a star. To pay the expensive tuition at the Pasadena Playhouse I spent the college money I’d been saving for years by raising and selling 4-H beef calves.

The report cards I still have from Hingham High show that I was a lackluster student. Academically I was probably third or fourth in our class of six, and I had no summer stock or local theater experience, as nearly all of the other Pasadena Playhouse students did, I discovered when I got there. Anita McDonald’s letter of recommendation must have played a large part in my acceptance to this highly competitive private school, but it may also be that I was admitted to maintain regional distribution requirements.

Anyway, I got off the train in LA and remember being struck by Southern California’s thick, moist air, acrid with pollutants, and the constant noise of sirens in the distance. I remember that the press of so many intense people so close was often overwhelming.

Unlikely as it may seem, I flourished at the Pasadena Playhouse. During that year I took fencing, ballet, elocution and stagecraft. I took classes in Greek and Roman mythology and read and acted in productions of Euripides and Moliere and Shakespeare. I read Stanislavski on the method. I still have my grades and performance evaluations, which were excellent. I later learned that Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman were students at the Pasadena Playhouse when I was there, though I don’t remember them.

When school was out I rented a basement apartment in Altadena with another guy from the Playhouse and got a job working nights at a filling station in Beverly Hills. Both my roommate and I hoped to get bit parts in TV and movies, but to break in a young actor needed to be a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild. You were allowed to apply to SAG only if you could demonstrate that you had previously had a speaking role in a SAG-approved production, and to get auditions for those speaking parts you needed an agent. Before an agent would see you, you had to have a portfolio including professional photographs. I got my mother to send me enough money to have professional photographs taken, and I did get a speaking part, one of the leads actually, in a summer stock production of The Rainmaker. I was finally granted appointments with agents, but I couldn’t seem to make an impression. If asked to show what I could do, I performed the nose scene from Cyrano, or Romeo’s balcony speech, or Biff’s confession scene from Death of a Salesman, or Marc Anthony’s funeral oration from Julius Caesar. I didn’t remember, I guess, that all my acting successes had been with comedy. Most of the agents I was able to meet wanted money up front, and some were clearly predators. By the end of that long disappointing summer of ‘57, having pumped a lot of gas, and knocked on a lot of doors, I began to understand that I was not going to be discovered as the next James Dean.

The Actor

I wish I had the portfolio I carried to my meetings with agents, but all that remain are the photographs my mother paid for. I was eighteen.

My Hollywood dreams came to and end. I kept no letters from that year, nor had I yet started keeping a journal. I’m sure that my return to the farm to help with the wheat harvest was humiliating for me, but I needed harvest wages for tuition and books and rent to enroll in Northern Montana College in Havre later that fall.

Desperate Virgins

HAVRE WAS BUILT DOWN BELOW THE bluffs along the wide Milk River drainage. There were trees and lawns and parks there, and a Carnegie library run by Mrs. Armstrong where we checked out books every time we made a family trip to town during the years I was growing up. Those rare shopping trips to Havre, thirty miles from Hingham, were grand adventures.

By ‘57, when I came back from Pasadena, Havre contained about ten thousand souls, not counting the seven or eight hundred students who attended Northern Montana College during the week. Most of these students, like me, were children of the second generation of settlers and drove home on the weekends to help with the farm work. My father had taken his two-year teacher’s certificate at Northern. Only the most ambitious and well off went to the University of Montana at Missoula or the state college at Bozeman.

After harvest I moved into my second basement apartment, this one with one of my oldest friends, Lowell Severud, and got a job working evenings and weekends at Heltne’s Oil and Service, which sat at a main downtown intersection–my second gas jockey job, and not my last. Lowell was called Squeaky because he got asthma attacks during which his face would get red and his voice squeaky. I may have given him that name.

Of all the kids I grew up with, Squeaky was the one who most tenaciously challenged my assumption that I was better at everything than everybody. I rarely passed up opportunities to measure myself against my peers and it seemed to me that I could always run faster, jump higher and hit or throw a ball farther than any of the other kids near my age—except maybe Squeaky. So throughout our childhood we pushed each other constantly. In an era when the average high school boy’s basketball teams' scores were in the thirties, Lowell and I averaged close to that between us during our junior and senior years, glory days for the Hingham Rangers when we beat all their rivals.

I suspect that in a larger opportunity pool Squeaky and I would not have gravitated to each other, since we were in so many ways opposite personality types, yet we both learned to accept and make accommodations for our differentness, as we did with everybody else in our small community. I like to think that this useful ability, one of the blessings of growing up in a small town, has stayed with me. I may be judgmental, but I’m tolerant.

During four consecutive quarters at Northern I worked evenings and weekends at the service station and partied with Lowell the rest of the time and chased girls. Like almost all of the other young males near my age at Northern Montana College, Squeaky and I were still virgins, desperate to get laid.

Girls had been a difficult prospect for a Hingham boy during high school, because there was something incestuous about having a girlfriend from your own school. We’d grown up with those girls, and they were mainly sisters of our friends. So we couldn’t date a Hingham girl and really couldn’t date girls from the other small towns up and down the Hi-Line either, since those were the sisters of our basketball rivals. That left only Havre, thirty-five miles away, and back in high school, when Squeaky finally got a car, a Fleetline Chevy, we’d head for Havre at seventy miles an hour on weekend evenings to cruise the streets in low gear looking for girls. Stopping at streetlights, Squeaky would gun the engine and the dual manifolds and twin pipes would let out our testosterone-crazed mating call, and then, when the light turned green, we’d leave rubber.

The guy with the car had a big edge with the girls, and so it was mostly me hanging out the shotgun side widow trying to get the cruising Havre girls to stop and talk to us, join us for a drive-in movie or a trip to the drive-in burger joint where our orders would be taken in the parking lot and brought back on a tray that hooked in the window. We met lots of girls this way, though neither of us got laid or even close to it.

It was in the performance of this very chaste high school courting ritual that I met and finally went steady with my first girl, Marge Durkee, from Havre, daughter of the owner of the biggest sporting goods store in town, who was also a Democratic member of the state legislature. Marge sometimes wore my junior class ring on a chain around her neck and sometimes on her finger, taped so that it would stay on. Marge had a sharp nose and sharp chin and sharp tongue. She loved to dance, and we went steady through my senior year, almost always double dating. I was her junior prom date, to which I wore the uniform of the time: charcoal grey pants and a pink shirt with a charcoal tie. Emboldened with the right amount of Lucky Lager or Highlander beer I could gyrate with the best of them to Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis. I remember Marge and I necking endlessly and pointlessly, the radio on, staring into each other’s eyes as Eddie Fisher crooned I Need You Now, lingering in an idling car parked in her driveway as the McQuire Sisters sang "Goodnight Sweetheart.''

Marge was a passionate make-out and encouraged my belief that when the right place and time lined up she would be unable to restrain herself from going all the way, and so every time we were together, for nearly two years, my hopes were high. Alas, the magic conditions never appeared, and through the decades since then I’ve been troubled with dreams in which I am with a willing woman but cannot find a suitable place. I’m sure Marge is to blame.

Marge and I broke up before I left for the Pasadena Playhouse, and by the time I got back she was going with Ben, another old friend and Hingham Ranger, who had clearly found the right time and place, and they would soon marry; but she helped balm the sting by introducing me to Ruby Francis. Later, when I went away to the Army, Ruby and I exchanged letters, which she saved and which, twenty years later, gave back to me.

I’ve written letters all my life, and many of them were saved and returned to me. The earliest letters I have copies of were written to Darryl Patrick. Darryl was another Hingham Ranger and the son of my father’s best friend. He was a year older than me and had also grown up alone during much of his childhood. Because of our isolation, he and I developed a rich life of the imagination as, it seemed to me, none of the other Darryls and Lowells had. Darryl Patrick and I would have found our way to friendship, I suspect, from a very large opportunity pool. As soon as we were old enough, we began a correspondence, and it was a wonderful event when the mailman brought a letter from Darryl addressed to me. Our exchange of letters only occurred over the summer months, since every school day when the bus arrived, there would be Darryl, having saved me a seat, already having ridden for half an hour from his farm up on the Canadian border. A few years ago Darryl also gave me back letters he’d saved.

During my year at the Pasadena Playhouse I wrote frequently to my parents, and my mother religiously saved those letters, which exist today in the collection of my papers at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Library at Boston University. How this collection came to be established is a story for a later chapter, but the point is that I have some real records from that time. I continued to write letters and keep journals over the next fifty years and counting, all of which are also in the collection. I’ve made extensive use of those materials to keep these pages from devolving into the fictive.

I have no letters and journal entries from that wasted Northern Montana year, and I remember astonishingly little about it except the girls I unsuccessfully tried to seduce, all of whom I remember very well. Squeaky scored early in the year, and I hated it that he’d beat me to the punch. Not only that, but his girl, like him, couldn’t get enough, and they were at it all the time. I served as best man at his shotgun wedding that spring, an event which sobered me.

That was when I volunteered for the draft.

Though I have no letters or journals, I do have a transcript of my grades for the four quarters in a row I completed at Northern Montana College. There are a few B’s in literature and history, C grades in everything else though there are two D’s on that transcript along with an F in Freshman English. I got an F because I got caught fabricating an entire bibliography for the term paper on Voodoo in Haiti.

The only academic memories I carried away from that year were inspired by two courses in literature I took from Dr. George Craig, and for which I had written papers that earned his rare praise. I admired his wry humor and breadth of knowledge. He taught literature and philosophy as the highest expression of man, asking the biggest questions and addressing the fundamental issues, and he made me aware that for all my many opinions I actually knew pitifully little.

Last of the Fast Guns

I ENDURED BASIC TRAINING AT FORT Hood, in Texas, then was sent on to Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, for training in radar technology. Across the border in a Juarez bordello I finally lost my virginity in a very unspectacular but nevertheless memorable manner. I was twenty years old. From Texas I flew to Fort Dix in New Jersey where I waited to ship out to Panama. Not far from Fort Dix is Long Branch, where I would one day teach at Monmouth College and break up with my first wife, and suffer what looks, in retrospect, like a nervous breakdown. A major pivot point.

Private Sterry

In Panama I was assigned to C Battery, The Last of the Fast Guns, a remote artillery post in the jungle where my life was comprised of one meaningless activity after the next: mosquito-plagued guard duty, phony alerts and useless training exercises.

There were a dozen of us radar jockeys on the top of a hill in the jungle, and below us were massive 120 and 80 MM guns, manned, for unknown reasons, by crews of Puerto Ricans. These massive guns were leftovers from WWI, when they’d been used to track and shoot down propeller-powered planes. We were supposed to believe that we were somehow guarding the canal, but it was clear that while we boys on radar hill could track a jet, the Puerto Ricans could never in a million years shoot one down.

There was really nothing to do, and yet anyone observed not performing a task or activity of some kind during duty hours was given a paintbrush to put another coat of unnecessary paint on one of the barracks buildings, or a machete to cut brush, so I learned to hide with a book and writing paper and pencil. I spent a lot of time writing letters, making them so entertaining that my correspondent would write back. I read those letters from Panama now and see that I portrayed myself as a hapless, unwilling soldier beset by interesting and humorous events; but in truth my day-to-day life was tedious and stultifying, which is revealed in the journal I started then, full of misspellings and predictable gripes about army life. I kept track in my journal of the letters I received, and what I was reading. I remember ordering a copy of A.E. Houseman’s Shropshire Lad and also Durant’s Story Of Philosophy, since Doc Craig had recommended them. In my jungle boredom I memorized many of Houseman’s long poems and can recite parts of them to this day. For the most part they are poems written from a jaded old man’s perspective, and I wonder what I saw in them.

When I wasn’t writing letters I was reading. I’d decided I wanted to be a well-read, articulate professor like Doc Craig, and so for the entire eighteen months I was at C Battery, I read my way doggedly through everything I thought might be a literary classic in the little Fort Clayton library. There was a fifty-four volume set of The Great Books of the Western World there, and while I did not read them all, I gnawed through a lot of it, sometimes through things I had no real taste for and couldn’t digest, bagging titles and authors against the day when I would return to college and be the best-read person in every class I was in, and never get another C or D for the rest of my academic career.

I wrote my first short stories hiding out there in Panama. They featured a wise-beyond-his-years young soldier trying to relate to the inanities of military life and the squalor of Panamanian culture. In one, A Tube of Pusillanimous, he achieves a love relationship with a naive young prostitute only to betray and desert her. In another, The Winning Ticket, he befriends an ancient lottery ticket seller, attracted by the saintly purity of her misguided belief in a just and compassionate God and in her certainty that she is destined to win the lottery. Neither of these stories has an uplifting ending.

Marijuana was raised by the battery shoeshine boys mainly for some of the Puerto Ricans, but we radar boys were all afraid of pot. No one gave us