Everybody Has a Story: Two weeks under the stars was Dad’s farewell before his service

The year was 1968, I was 10 years old and we were going camping! I knew something had been brewing for several weeks, because my mother seemed preoccupied, and my dad busied himself in the garage more than usual. Now I knew the reason — we would spend the next two weeks fishing and camping all over south-central Idaho!

Camping was different in those days. It involved throwing a couple bales of straw, a canvas, some blankets, a beat-up tin coffee pot and one frying pan into the back of our old Ford truck, affectionately known as The Big Green Monster. We knew we would catch plenty of fish, but Mother always packed a grub box full of pork and beans, corned beef, spuds and bacon, just in case.

In an era of big families with numerous children and lots of aunts, uncles and grandparents, we were a family of just three. It didn’t bother me because my world revolved around my dad — my hero, confidante and buddy. Like so many little girls of my generation, I longed to be the son he didn’t have. Oh, so patiently, he spent hours teaching me to fish, hunt, cook over a campfire and handle myself in the woods. My mother was always there, smiling, waving from the sidelines and cheering us on, but she preferred a good book to a fishing pole.

The next two weeks were filled with one adventure after another. Dad would take some dirt road off some gravel road that was an offshoot of a paved road, and we would find ourselves on the banks of some small creek. Out would come the fishing poles, and Dad and I would head out to see if this location would be worth a night or two of our precious time. If the fishing was good, we stayed. If it was slow, well, we just took off looking for another promising dirt road.

Most days, we found the cutthroat trout we were chasing. Every day, we found blue skies, wide-open spaces and star-filled nights.

After one week, Mother decided she needed a civilized meal in a restaurant and a real mattress to sleep on. That afternoon, we rolled into Howe — a wide spot in the road that consisted of a bar, a post office, a restaurant and a hotel, all in the same building. Yahoo! Whether Mother liked it or not, I was going to see the inside of a bar! After a dinner of steak and baked potatoes (what else would one eat in a bar in Idaho?), we walked across the lobby and climbed the stairs to our old-fashioned room above the bar.

There was no running water, just two huge iron beds separated by a muslin curtain, with a washbasin on the bureau and lace curtains at the window. That night, we were all rocked to sleep on feather mattresses by the sound of a honky-tonk jukebox and real cowboys two-stepping in the bar.

The last few days, I noticed my dad becoming quiet, and I even caught my mother tearing up once or twice. I figured we were all a bit sorry to think about vacation’s end. But there were still fish to be caught and trails to be hiked, so we busied ourselves right up to the last night.

Mother went to bed early, leaving my dad and me to keep the campfire going and share our nightly astronomy lesson. The stars once again lit up the night sky, and my dad began by telling me what the stars would look like in the night sky over Southeast Asia — in particular, over Vietnam. He used a stick to scratch the Big Dipper in the dirt near the campfire and told me how the stars would look the same — just as bright, just as plentiful, just as close as they did in the Idaho sky.

He went on to quietly explain that he would be going off to war when we got home — a war that I might not understand, a war a long ways away, but a war that he had been called to nevertheless. My dad shared with me his love for this nation, how World War II had claimed two of his uncles, and the calling he felt to serve to honor their memory.

I would like to say I understood, but I didn’t. Neither of us cried that night — I was, after all, his brave girl. There would be plenty of tears later, but that is another story.

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