Who Was That Masked Kid?

By Dan Neiser

Ralphie might have wanted a Red Ryder B B gun in Jean Shepherds A Christmas Story, but the kid in this story wants a lot more. He fantasizes about becoming the Lone Ranger, the Masked Man himself, but is thwarted at every turn. Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when the Masked Kid tries to realize his dreams, only to discover they may be harder than he thought.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: May 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512775778

Dan Neiser

Dan Neiser is the author of 'Who Was That Masked Kid', and 'Return of the Masked Kid'. He lives in Southern California with his wife.

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Copyright © 2017 Dan Neiser.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-7576-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7578-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-7577-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017902176

WestBow Press rev. date: 4/19/2017

Contents

Chapter 1   Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Chapter 2   A Need for Adulation

Chapter 3   Whaps against the Wall

Chapter 4   A River Runs Through It

Chapter 5   Meet the Neighbors

Chapter 6   Bright Days, Black Nights

Chapter 7   Who Was That Masked Man?

Chapter 8   Winter Coming On

Chapter 9   The Dark Side of the Moon

Chapter 10   The Winding Road to Kindergarten

Chapter 11   Skeletons in the Closet

Chapter 12   Guns of the Lone Ranger

Chapter 13   78 RPM and Other Marvels

Chapter 14   First Grade

Chapter 15   Meanwhile Back At the Ranch

Chapter 16   Christmas and Cowboy Boots

Chapter 17   Who Is That Masked Kid?

Chapter 18   Cold and Wet

Chapter 19   The Lost Christmas Outfit

Chapter 20   The Ooze That Crawls Down Your Throat

Chapter 21   Butch Cavendish Becomes a Hero

Chapter 22   Mysteries in the Month of June

Chapter 23   Speck and the Voice of Donald Duck

Chapter 24   Varieties of Religious Experience

Chapter 25   Floating Upside Down

Chapter 26   No Longer an Only Kid

Chapter 27   Goodbye to Paradise

Chapter 28   Our Miserable Night

Chapter 29   The King of the Cowboys

Chapter 30   Dark School

Chapter 31   King of the Hoffman Television Set

Chapter 32   Death and Passage

Chapter 33   Welcome to the Neighborhood

Chapter 34   Cowboy Wars

Chapter 35   Television at Last

Chapter 36   The Agony and the Ecstasy

Chapter 37   The Old Fredon Place

Chapter 38   You Can Fly

Chapter 39   You Can Do Anything

Chapter 40   Tom Sawyer Days

Chapter 41   Baseball and Suckers

Chapter 42   Pollywog

Chapter 43   Theater Wars

Chapter 44   It Looks Like You Are On Another Planet!

Chapter 45   From Smelly Banks to Saturn’s Rings

Chapter 46   The Universe in 3D

Chapter 47   Climbing the Lutheran Church

Chapter 48   Miscellaneous Weird Stuff

Chapter 49   I Find an Odd Friend

Chapter 50   Peter Pan Didn’t Bawl On His Ninth Birthday

Chapter 51   The Road Out

Chapter 52   You Will Find Him in the Forest

Chapter 53   Across the Wild Country

Chapter 54   The Captain’s Spot

Chapter 55   The Evil Purple Sky

Chapter 56   The Infamous Grandma

Chapter 57   King of the Wild Frontier

Chapter 58   The Evil Weed

Chapter 59   If You Can’t Lick ‘Em

Chapter 60   Worshipping Sixth Grade Deities

Chapter 61   Off To Church Again

Chapter 62   When The Going Gets Weird

Chapter 63   Brain Dead in the Garden of the Gods

Chapter 64   The End of Happy Valley

Chapter 65   A True Robot

Chapter 66   Mrs. Harkhurst and the 3D Dinosaur

Chapter 67   The Trip to Mars

Chapter 68   The Plodd Brothers

Chapter 69   Summer of War

Chapter 70   The Rest of the Neighborhood

Chapter 71   Adventures in Time and Space

Chapter 72   Four Miles to Hornby

Chapter 73   The Cross Across the Way

Chapter 74   The End of Summer

Chapter 75   Junior High

Chapter 76   The Hardest Kick

Chapter 77   End of the World at the City Dump

Chapter 78   The Fight in The Park

Chapter 79   The Dark Side Arises

Chapter 80   The Dark Side Part 2

Chapter 81   Through the Lens and into the Darkroom

Chapter 82   Woodshop and the Flopped Cake

Chapter 83   Mr. Snooze Shows Us the Stars

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Chapter

1

Part 1: Heading West

S ee that kid riding a red and white tricycle down a cracked side walk in front of a three story Victorian house? Do you hear the silence of the tree shaded street broken only by the rumbling engines of a round backed ’38 Ford coming this way and a Stutz Bearcat going that? Do you smell the aroma of the planted summer flowers, slightly tainted by the exhaust of the light street traffic?

Nothing unusual about that scene, and if you didn’t know what is to follow you might yawn and return to your business…whatever it is you were doing before you noticed the kid.

But take a good look at those rich green, well-manicured lawns covering this upscale neighborhood, circa 1946. That’s where you’d expect a kid like me to live who has a father ascending the tiers of middle management of Corporate America.

But faint voices tinged with desperation emanate from that Victorian home. If you listen closely you can hear them…

(I have to get out of here, I can’t stand it anymore. They are so phony; I hate their socialite parties most of all. Their smiles are disgusting…just veneers to cover their rotten horse manure, and I hate it…I hate having to wear a suit every day, sit in an office, it drives me crazy….

Most of all I’m scared.

Scared of what?

"Scared of what they threatened to do if I ever…"

We both belong, it’s just a ritual.

Is it? Why did I get into it? How do I get out?)

Take a good look at that scene. Despite the bright sunlight, the verdant grass, the hot quiet sidewalk, there is darkness lurking behind it. And sometimes, when you try to escape that darkness, you only exchange it for a different one…a different darkness that still hides behind a scene illuminated by white, bright sunlight.

I was destined not to see the like of this…civilization…for years to come. My father was at heart a country boy who was one of nine children born to a German immigrant that grew up on an impoverished dirt farm in the Midwest. City life was slowly killing him. He was fifty pounds’ overweight and hated this white-collar job that severely taxed him with the strain of supervising the harvest of tomato crops to be canned. He was desperate to break out of it and find a simpler life…the kind he had known when he was a kid.

My mother hated the hoi polloi, as she would put it–the upscale, upper middle class snobs with their hypocrisies and cliques…and secret societies that threatened death if their secrets were revealed.

Like the American pioneers of old who took Horace Greeley’s advice: Go West Young Man, my father finally decided he’d had enough of life in corporate management, sold everything and ‘pulled up stakes’.

(If you don’t do it, my mother had threatened after a year of waffling, I will.)

He did it. He actually did it. He went West.

Part 2: The Lost Bucket

I was born an only child in the Midwest. I was probably the first (and last) son in my family…although rumors came much later in life that I might have been just the first surviving son, if you know what I mean.

Perhaps some of you know my home town. I don’t. I wouldn’t know it from a hole in the ground. My parents must have stayed there long enough to have me, and then beat it for more lucrative pastures. I’m not knocking it, you understand. How could I since I have no recollection of it?

In the same vein, I have no recollection of the Northeastern states my parents moved around in before and after I was born. I do remember, vaguely, one of the Great Lakes where I lost my toy bucket. I was sitting in the bow of a rented fishing boat, watching my father nurse a balky outboard engine through white caps that splashed water over the transom onto the deck. Dark clouds were growing steadily blacker with the threat of rain. Within minutes, rain materialized and totally obscured the hint of land in the far distance.

The wind ripped my new toy bucket out of my hand as I dipped it in the water. I lost my grip on the handle, and it was gone. I immediately burst into loud caterwauling, as my dad would put it, which resulted in an exasperated response from my father, Well, what do you want me to do, dive in after it?

Now, I thought that was a very reasonable offer. But when he didn’t do it, I continued to loudly bemoan my loss, learning a lesson at a very early age: In the middle of the highest ecstasy, you can be sent to the depths of the despair of loss, and that loss is irrevocable. Nobody will dive in after your bucket and get it back for you.

Perhaps a corollary to this lesson is that, yes, your actions have definite results, and nobody can undo them or return to you what you once had.

Well, not to put too fine a point on an incident that occurred at the ripe old age of three, I also do remember that paved sidewalk—pavement I would not see again for many, many years because of my parent’s decision.

Part 3: Facing the Dogs

And because of my parents’ decision to move west I found myself lying down and getting carsick in the backseat of my parents’ ’41 Buick at the age of three and a half. What did I know at the age of three and a half? Well, not much. I knew I was sick to my stomach because the car kept twisting and turning. I was lying down on the back seat because I was sick…which, of course, made me sicker.

Beyond the rear window above my head, I saw an intensely blue sky; harsh white light regularly dimmed by dark shadows, an action that makes the inside of the car appear to flicker. Occasionally I caught sight of the tops of dark green trees, and, when I got to my knees, I saw a brilliant rushing river beyond the gaps appearing between their trunks.

I heard the low tones of my parents’ voices. They talked to each other over the hum of the engine and occasional bumps that bounced the Buick.

I sat up and said, I’m really sick, Mommy, and my mother said, We’re almost there, honey. That was the fifth time she’s said that, but I had no idea where there was. I’d been rolling around in the back seat in a hot car for a long time.

And then we rounded the last bend of the narrow, twisting road. I looked off to the left down at a swirling, foaming river and, up ahead, a white bridge crossing it.

The car slowed, and I was thrown to the side as it turned. Thumps came from under the wheels as we crossed the bridge and were followed by a crunching noise as the car came to a stop. My dad got out and Mom pulled back the passenger side backrest. Feeling nauseous as I did, I didn’t exactly jump out. I crawled out, and when my feet touched solid ground I almost vomited.

I stood for the first time in this western state. My eyes were squinting painfully in the harsh sun at a mountain slope gloriously covered with yellow and purple wild flowers spreading upward to the edge of a dark forest. The fresh mountain air and scent of the pines revived me, and my stomach settled down.

Sickness forgotten as it does sometimes suddenly for us in our childhood, I started running up the slope but froze, my mouth falling open in horror. At the top, where the meadow ended at a ridge, far to the right, two large dogs separated themselves from dark houses and, barking vigorously, raced down the slope directly towards me.

A Need for Adulation

Chapter

2

I ’ve got an old picture of my dad and myself taken behind the house he built in Jim Bridger Canyon about four miles downriver from Arapahoe City, the town located at the end of the road we’d been traveling on. It’s a picture of him in a formal business suit, and you could tell he was unhappy. He kind of stared out into space directing a grimace at whatever he was staring at.

He hated to dress up. He hated a lot of things that had to do with civilization, but dressing up in a business suit ranked at the top of the list. As far as that list goes, any formal dress-up situation also qualified: dances, plays, dinners—all shared the number one position. But number two was reserved for one thing: Church.

You can stick number three in there while you’re at it: Preachers. There was no easier way to get him red in the face and shouting at the ceiling than to bring up church people and their shepherds, and my mom had an easy way to instigate it, mainly by taking me to church on Sunday. I don’t think she had any idea of the fuse she lit the day she took me to my first church service.

Dad was a country boy, born on a rented farm to a poor German farm family descended from immigrants who had become Southeast dirt farmers. Fred Neiser (obviously an adopted name made up by somebody who tried to hide his German heritage and failed), moved to another rented farm in the Midwest, and Dad became one of nine children brought into the world for the primary purpose of serving as unpaid farm hands.

He refused to talk about himself, and everything I learned about him came from my mother. These are some of the stories she told:

He was driving a team of horses when he was old enough to walk. One of the stories has it that he was feeling lonely and unloved out there plowing the North Forty at the age of five. He stopped the team and went into the kitchen, hoping for some love and tender care. His mother shouted at him: What are you doing in here with those dirty boots on? Get back out there and get your chores done!

So much for love and affection from good old Mom.

He and his brothers slept in an attic with one broken window that nobody fixed, side-by-side crossways on the only bed in the room. In the winter, he’d wake up to an inch of snow on the bedcovers. I suppose it served as insulation.

In the summer (hopefully the only season of the year they did this) his parents would wake the kids up to a day’s work by throwing a bucket of water on them.

After a hard day’s work, he and his three brothers would run to a swimming hole and dive in. I kind of doubt they were provided with swimming suits. It was one of the perks of a hard farm life.

One Christmas all he received in his stocking was a lump of coal. In case you don’t know it, in those days that was the sign of being a bad boy for the entire previous year. Maybe he had complained about waking up wet and cold.

Who knows?

Come to think of it, he did tell me a few things. He did make all his own toys. He made sleds for himself in the winter, and put together a crystal radio to listen to the first broadcasts back in 1915.

He was half German and half Swedish, and by temperament a Stoic, a man of very few words on any subject, and even fewer about himself, but nothing about Grandpa and Grandma. He’d get a hard, bitter look on his face if my mom was foolish enough to mention his parents. Only occasionally would he mention one of his siblings.

With the pleased look that flushed his face whenever he thought of something he liked, he’d recount how his sister Ardys was such a bad cook she baked an Apple Pie without peeling and coring the apples beforehand and how the family had spit out seeds for the rest of the day after eating it.

Another favorite story was about an unnamed sister who would fix dinner, put it on the table, and then when everybody sat down to eat it would discover something she had to do, like wash the kitchen floor. Everybody had to sit and let the food go cold until she was finished.

Later in life, after I traveled through his home state on my way to the funeral of Dan Brandeis, I wondered how my dad found a hill to slide down on his homemade sled…considering the entire state was flat as a desktop.

I’ve got one old picture of Grandpa Fred which is located on the back side of a portrait of Dad and Mom (pull the picture of them out of the frame and you’ll find it behind it). Fred looks like a skinny Adolph Hitler, but Grandma looks like she spent her life making great cookies (and ate a lot of them herself).

Fred, however, looks lean, tough (and mean). I guess you had to be to brave dirt farming in the bleak Midwest in the early 1900’s.

On the other hand, I’ve got a 78 rpm voice recorded of Grandpa and Grandma Neiser wishing me a Merry Christmas and expressing how much they want to visit me. I think it was made around 1945 or 46, a couple of years before Dad and Mom bolted for the Rockies.

There’s a tremendous wistful sadness and yearning in their voices (which I discovered when I found it and replayed it later in life), and well there might be. My dad cut them off and never saw them again after he left his home town. That’s the way it was. You crossed the line with HIM, and that was it. You would never see him or talk to him again.

Which, later in life when I was trying to cut the apron strings, made things just a bit difficult—and dangerous.

But, Dad was a kind and faithful man. There was never a night when he wasn’t home; there was never a night when he didn’t let me sit on his lap, singing a mournfully sentimental song like Down in the Valley or reading me a story. And as you will see, he wanted me to be with him…to share his life and share mine. But tender mercies can often be cruel, and he did some damage to my psychological make up, unwittingly and not intentionally.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a cat that wasn’t weaned properly. If they didn’t get enough nursing from their mother, they turn into vampires. The cat will jump onto you and start sucking your skin, trying to make up for the fact that their nursing time with their mother got cut short. They can never make up for the loss though, no matter how much they suckle; if they don’t get it when they are young…when they need it.

Further suckling as an adult will never be enough.

My dad was like that. He didn’t get noticed enough when he was a kid, and from the stories, didn’t get enough love. (That is probably a gross, and major, understatement). He spent the rest of his life trying to get attention from people around him. No, ‘attention’ isn’t exactly the right word. ‘Adulation’ would be more appropriate. In any event, he needed…he really needed…an audience to feed a bottomless well that could never be filled.

As I said, he was half German, dominant, intelligent, and a powerful man, who had built everything he owned from the moment he stood on two feet, giving him a vast mental and technical skill, but…

The major question: where did he get the knowledge to do what he did? Where did he get the know how, as he would put it, to leave a middle management position in the Midwest, load his family into a black ’41 Buick and head West to build a complete house on a vacant lot he purchased at eight thousand feet in the Rocky Mountains? How did he do it without subcontracting the electrical wiring, the concrete work, the plumbing, the framing, the roofing and everything else that goes into a building a house?

How did he keep his family alive through two bitter high altitude winters while nailing shingles on the roof in an icy wind with a forty degree below zero wind chill factor?

I don’t know where he got the ‘know-how’—but he did it all, while my mom and I shivered in a tar paper shack built just above the raging Jim Bridger River—a river that would one day destroy everything he built.

Whaps against the Wall

Chapter

3

Part 1: A Bird Sings

B ack in the days when people married for life, my mother and father married for some reason known only to them. From an outside standpoint, they were total opposites in just about every way you can think of.

While Dad was raised on a farm as an outdoors farm boy, my mother grew up in the city, her father a banker. He probably spent all his free hours in his den in the basement of his urban house, when he wasn’t at work in a downtown office.

Of course, as the story goes, he never left his basement den because his wife was crazy. Like really crazy. Later, when the word ‘psycho’ was made famous by Alfred Hitchock, it might have been applied to her.

The story continues (scraps and sketches come from both Mom and Dad) that Grandma had a white-hot temper instantly ignited by the most minimal of provocations.

It’s like something grabs me, she once said. Grabs me and takes over.

Something grabbed her so many times that her husband spent half his life locking himself in the basement where she couldn’t get to him, having been inspired by an incident in which she chased him through the house with a wood cutter’s axe.

Grandma kept my mother, metaphorically speaking, in a small, cramped cage, carefully insulated from all knowledge of the ways of the world at large. Mom had little outside input except what Grandma allowed, and she didn’t allow much.

In other words, Mom accompanied Grandma everywhere she went, listened to everything she said, and had little or no interaction with anything else. She grew up with a hyper intensified sheltered and stunted view of the world. One experience I was privy to was the Singing Bird spiritual epiphany. It seems that Grandma and Mom took a trip to Cold Water Springs, a city on the Eastern side of the Rockies which was Grandma’s favorite escape from flat farmland, and both found themselves in the center of town sitting on a park bench.

My mother later described the experience: A bird sang, and suddenly we were transported into a Nirvana I’ll never forget. Everything suddenly became crystal clear. We heard angels sing and we ascended far above the clouds of everyday life.

Or something like that.

She never forgot this experience that occurred when the bird sang, and spent the rest of her life trying to get back to Coldwater to recapture it. This would have an impact on the rest of us in the family, who would one day also be physically transported to Coldwater Springs in search of the mystical bird and the heavenly experience.

Part 2: The Unpredictable

She was a short woman, about five feet tall in contrast to my dad’s six foot two. She had brown hair and hazel eyes and carried an expression that conveyed either practical, down-to-earth common sense, or complete incomprehension of anything going on around her. Sometimes these were coupled to give her the appearance of somebody with a perpetual toothache. The moments creating that expression occurred to the detriment of all concerned.

She was beautiful in her youth, and photos of her with her clear skin, red lips and hazel eyes peering from behind a net veil attached to an elegant hat upon which was fastened a rose, revealed her to be something Humphrey Bogart might have wanted to meet in Casablanca, if he hadn’t run into Ingrid Bergman first.

Photos taken in the ‘20’s and 30’s show my parents to be a very handsome, though mismatched, couple. Dad was at least six foot two, weighed around 280 pounds (before he went West), had jet black hair and a light Germanic complexion. He sported wire rimmed glasses which were popular at the time. Together they looked like the giant who had chased Jack down the beanstalk, except that the fairytale had gotten mixed up and he had missed Jack and ended up with Jill instead.

I got bits and pieces of how they met–in a bank where my mom worked as a teller. She said she took one look at him and thought to herself, Now here is a real man.

Throughout my early years I blamed the fact that I had not quite attained the height of six feet on the fact that she was short. Most of my other qualities were inherited from her, rather than my dad. In fact, they say that characteristics skip a generation, and I looked more like her grandpa, based on pictures I’ve seen of him, and had a temperament more suited to sitting around a bank office smoking a pipe than one that ran around in the woods like Smoky the Bear.

On the other hand, to contradict her complaint that she was dragged into the sticks, she would tell the story of how just before my dad left the Midwest and the Ketchup Corporation, she was the one who told him that if he didn’t go, she was going to.

Go figure.

She was an unpredictable woman, and I never knew whether she was going to laugh and think something was funny, or get mad at the same thing, and the oddest things would make her mad, especially when trying to explain to her what was going on in the world or what was happening to you.

I do remember, when I got older, that she would make my bed and clean up my room herself twenty-five days out of the year, and then for five days go on the warpath, as my dad would say, and run around yelling at me and my sister about how we needed to straighten it up ourselves. I never could figure out why she went berserk for that five days.

Oh well, I thought, maybe someday I’ll figure it out…

Part 3: Boy or Girl?

When she gave birth to me I think she wanted a girl. I was too young to be suspicious in this regard when she put bows in my hair at the age of two, made me wear a pink dress, or give me dolls to play with. My dad put a stop to it one day when he found me in that state when he came home from work. I think later he had to fix the ceiling after the plaster fell, but it was worth it. No more bows and pink dress. The thunder of God from Mount Sinai remains in my memory, ordering her never to do that again. When he spoke like that, you stopped…and never did it again.

As a youngster, I vaguely knew there was a war going on between my parents as to whether I was going to be a boy or a girl. This was manifest by the fact that at the age of five my room was full of dolls. I remember beating them up. I bashed many a doll around the room. One day they all disappeared, mainly because I think somebody heard the whaps against the wall.

Part 4: End of the War

My mother believed that a Christian turned the other cheek. Since by her definition I was pronounced to be a Christian, I was supposed to go and do likewise. This created a lot of problems for me in the real world, since older boys more than enjoyed helping me practice my new-found virtue.

My dad, however, believed that if you were provoked, you fought, and spent time trying to teach me how to fight. He was good at that, but not as good at counteracting my mother’s turn the other cheek philosophy. This managed to put me in a strait jacket of conflict when confronting bullies and anybody else that wanted to fight.

The intra family war over what sex I was supposed to be ended with finality when my mother, at the age of 44, gave birth to a baby who was, thank God, a girl.

It is possible that the birth of my sister may have had more to do with the removal of the dolls from my room than all my dad’s efforts: I was decisively declared to be a boy and officially my father’s child by that one blessed event. From then on I belonged to my father, and my sister belonged to my mother.

A River Runs Through It

Chapter

4

Part 1: Meeting the Neighbors

S ee that kid getting out of the black 1941 Buick Sedan? He’s been riding in the backseat of his parent’s car for the last one thousand miles or so across wheat fields and through cities, and for the last three or four hours up a road winding like a snake between shear canyon walls on the right and a raging torrent of a river on the left.

The car pulls across that white bridge on the left that spans the river, and stops on a bare spot in the lot my dad purchased. He’s going to build a house there; he has no experience building houses, and he’s going to subject us to brutal winters eight thousand feet while he does it.

But I didn’t know that, so never mind the house for now; I’ll get to that later. Just look at the kid, overwhelmed by the shear awesomeness of the mountains in June. He’s small for his age, with blond hair cut straight across his forehead–an artifact produced by a deep mixing bowl, which his mother places over his head whenever and cuts around the rim. Fortunately, he isn’t wearing the Dutch uniform with a flat hat, red scarf, black pants, and wooden clogs he had to wear during Dutch Days back East, not too long ago.

No, he’s wearing ordinary clothes, a blue shirt, darker blue jeans, and a pair of brown shoes of indeterminate style. More importantly, he was the first to leap out of the car after it passed bumpily over the bridge spanning that raging river, and is now standing petrified in the bright sunlight, gazing up the slope covered in the riot of blue, purple and yellow mountain flowers at a pair of dogs that have detached themselves from a house located at the base of the dark tree line far above his head and are racing toward him.

And here come those two barking dogs, racing down the slope with absolutely nothing between themselves and him to stop whatever they intend. He grows more terrified as they approach, their barks growing steadily louder and more menacing. He watches transfixed as they separate and surround him, barking on both sides.

Get the out of here! A rock sails passed him and hits one of the dogs in the hindquarters. It yelps and runs back the way it came, the other one giving out a couple more yaps then following close on its heels. Naturally, the kid, being not quite four years old, runs back for the protection of his mother. The first impression has been made.

This place definitely isn’t as safe as the place he left..

Two figures detach themselves from a house off to the right, near the one from which the dogs came. They are a little too far away to make them out clearly, but they look like three kids, one much smaller than the other two.

I think I’ll start here, my dad says, standing in an open flat spot near the dirt road that hugs the river and climbs the side of the mountain. I glance behind and see him pacing out the lot, as my mom moves around, stooping over to pick some wild flowers.

Meanwhile I’m confronted by the kids that had come down the hill. One of them was a large boy, and had I been able to evaluate such things, I would have estimated his age at around eight. He was taller than the other two. The second and third were girls, one of them about his age but the other closer to mine.

Get back up to the house, the boy said, turning to point back the way they had come. She started crying, turned and ran back up the hill, falling a couple of times. He turned to look at me again.

From under a mop of black hair, the boy’s black eyes regarded me with an expression that, coupled with an unpleasant twist to his mouth that resembled a triumphant smirk, I would have found disconcerting, had I been older.

The girl who had stayed with him had an expression that was almost a mirror image of his. They gave each other a look, and something seemed to pass between them. They turned to regard me again, the unpleasant smiles growing slowly wider on their faces.

I would get to know these two well.

Too well.

Part 2: Setting Up

Dad opens the trunk and pulls out an army-green bundle and some long sticks, rolling the canvass out on the ground. With my mother’s help, he erects a tent. Carrying more bundles out of the trunk, he puts up three cots inside the tent and unfolds a camp fuel stove which he places on a rock under the awning.

This will be our home for the next three or four months while he builds something that will keep us from freezing to death in the icy winds and heavy snow of a deep winter high in the Rockies.

We are going to live here for the next four years beside the raging, white capped river with its continual roar, the white bridge spanning it, the shear rock face on the other side of the highway across the river, the gently sloping mountain that increases in steepness up to the dark, almost black, pine forest. Farther up, the sky is an intense blue broken by white Cumulous clouds, their dark underbellies scudding over our heads and portending the periodic rain that falls almost exactly at four in the afternoon every day.

There is the wind, softly sighing in the pine branches, the heady smell of pine, the chittering of Chipmunks, Blue Jays hopping here and there in search of food and giving off a raucous caw now and then, and the crisp mountain air somehow promising a glorious future.

But all is not perfect in this Garden of Eden, as I would soon