The Cabin

My mother, angry as I'm sure she must have been, couldn't stop laughing as I stood there proudly between a dripping wet cocker spaniel and two 5-gallon buckets of bleach.  

It would have been the summer of 1984 or 1985 (yes, we're going back in time a bit from our previous story) which means that I would have been around 2 or 3 years old.  We were at our family cabin near Fortine, Montana and it was a hot day (as Montana summers go) full of hard work.  You see, our primary residence at that time was still in Utah but my parents had purchased a piece of property on a very isolated chunk of a mountain and were determined to build a cabin there.  My father was what one might call a jack-of-all-trades but rather than fitting the rest of the adage – master of none – he had the somewhat jealousy invoking habit of mastering nearly every trade he set his mind to.  I'm sure he had a great deal of help from my two older brothers but I am also equally certain that my mother probably didn't get to help as much as she would have liked because she would have been too busy chasing my sister and I around trying to keep us under tow.

When I say that the location was isolated, I'm not exaggerating.  There was one other family on the mountain that we were aware of, with a cabin of their own and two little boys close to the same ages as my sister and I, but we were still the new kids on the block so I don't think we'd properly introduced ourselves to them quite yet.  There was an old abandoned shack of sorts nearby, one or two rooms at most, no bathroom of any kind that I can recall, and bead curtains hanging over a couple of the doorways which is why we referred to it as 'the hippy shack'.

It was an unbelievably beautiful area with massive pine trees everywhere, so thick that you could barely see more than 10-15 yards in any direction.  Every spring we would trample a small footpath from the 'main road' (I use quotes because it was really just an overgrown, one lane, dirt road seldom used but more than once or twice a week by any vehicles) to the cabin and every fall when we left to return to Utah it would grow over again as though we'd never been there at all.  There were wild strawberries and onions growing on and around the path and we used to love snacking on them as we caught them peeking out at us from beneath the undergrowth.  There was also a small babbling stream nearby, not wide enough to even prevent one from stepping across it in a single stride without getting their feet wet, but the water was clean, clear, and colder than a witch's titty in a brass bra in February year-round.  Sometimes it would even develop a layer of ice on the top toward the end of the summer or early part of the spring.  We depended on this stream a great deal for our hygiene and that sometimes meant breaking the ice so that we could wash our hair – definitely a character building exercise, to be sure!

Our other main source of entertainment and cleanliness was a small private lake that we called Deep Lake.  I say it was private because, for all the times that we went there to swim or fish, I can't recall ever seeing anyone else there at the same time!  I vaguely seem to recall my brothers using M80's or cherry bombs at that lake, lighting them and then throwing them into the water right before they got to the end of their fuse so that they would explode under water and cause a bunch of fish to float belly-up on the surface.  Actually, I do recall one time that we encountered a stranger at that lake but it wasn't a person, it was a big angry looking bear on the opposite bank.  I remember my brother was holding onto a piece of deadwood like a float and letting the current casually carry him toward the center of the lake when the rest of the family first saw the bear emerging from the trees behind him.  Again, it wasn't a very big lake.  There was frantic arm waving and calling out to him, getting him to notice the danger and start working to swim back toward us.  That wasn't our only bear encounter in those woods either, if I'm not mistaken.

In fact, it was probably the very real threat of bears and possibly wolves or mountain lions that inspired my parents to make a rule preventing us kids from going down to the lake without a grown-up.  On the particular day in question I remember bugging my mother about wanting to go to the lake and she'd told me no.  I'd probably bugged her about going the short few steps to the stream but she'd said no to that as well and I was probably getting on her nerves by this time.  I'd finally found a way to satisfy my need for cool, clear liquid, when I discovered the two 5-gallon buckets.  It was pungent and funny smelling but apparently, I didn't care because I tipped my head right upside down like Tom Selleck at the end of Quigley Down Under and stuck my head inside the bucket until my whole scalp and all of my white-blond tresses were thoroughly saturated.  Once I'd cooled myself off I must have decided that the dog looked hot too because I dunked her, carefully, in one of the buckets as well.

It didn't dawn on my mother at first what I'd done.  She probably thought that I'd disobeyed and managed to meander over to the creek and back without her noticing but I put up a defense, insisting that I'd done no such thing and then pointed at the buckets of bleach.  That was when the laughter had started.  You're probably wondering why my parents had 5-gallon buckets of bleach just laying around, right?  Well, they were bleaching the logs on the cabin that day, that's why.  While everyone else was using heavy scrubbing brushes and breaking a sweat – I was giving myself, and Shasta, gorgeous summer highlights.

Many good memories came from that cabin and though my dad had completed the walls and floors and even the framing and some of the planking on the second floor, things got complicated somewhere along the way and we stopped visiting for a while.  I only remember visiting one time after my sister and I recovered from our accident and every time we made the trip we slept in our family camper.

The word camper can mean a lot of things to different people and this particular camper will eventually become a rather significant component in later stories, practically a member of our family (with love/hate relationships all around) so I feel like it's important for me to establish the proper visual.  It was a nice camper with a proper door and a screen door as well, a small kitchen and fridge, a little dining table, a minuscule bathroom, and a big queen-sized bed.  A fully-grown adult could easily stand upright in it but it wasn't the kind of camper that you tow behind a vehicle and it certainly wasn't a motor home.  This was the kind of camper that sat in the bed of a pickup truck and the queen-sized bed extended out over the top of the truck's cab.  We had a set of metal steps that detached, folded up, and tucked under the table while we were traveling, and when we stopped they would hang precariously from hooks on the back of the camper so that you could easily get in and out but you had to step lightly and check your balance as you went.

At night, the table would fold out into a small bed for my brothers to share and there was a cupboard over the table that swung down into an even smaller bed where I slept.  I couldn't get up into that bed on my own, nor could I get out of it most of the time which meant once I was in bed and tucked away, there I would stay unless I could wake someone up in the middle of the night to get me down again.  My sister must have stayed in the bed with my parents but I honestly don't recall for sure and I barely even remember the cubby-bed as we would both become far too acquainted with the table-bed in later years.

Looking back on those days I can't help but wonder if the Montana cabin had been intended as a summer vacation home, as I'd always believed it to be back then, or if it had been the very earliest stages of my dad's eventually intense desire to escape civilization and live a simpler yet, in many ways, more difficult life.  I don't think he felt quite so strongly about the government then as he would eventually become but perhaps I just wasn't old enough to understand those sorts of things yet.  There are other reasons that a man would want to buy a piece of land on a mountain so isolated that it remains virtually untouched even to this day 30 years later, right?

In 1984 and even in 1989 at the time of the accident my father was a long way from being the type of person that anyone who knew him would have classified as controversial, isolationist, a 'prepper', or a Constitutionalist (according to society's definition of that last term, anyway).  Throughout the 80's and into the early 90's he worked as a design engineer for companies like Volvo White, DDO, Morton Thiokol, and eventually Morton International.  He contributed to projects as varied as designing the truck featured in the movie Over the Top starring Sylvester Stallone to working on life saving projects such as seatbelts and airbags.  In fact, it can easily be said – and without rebuttal – that his work has quite literally saved millions of lives.  There were loads of other projects as well such as waterslides, homes, a themed restaurant in northern Utah that remains open and operating to this day, and even those jet walks you used to easily board and depart the plane the last time you traveled somewhere.  However, his greatest achievement, in my opinion, was when he was one of only seven men that were hand selected by Morton Thiokol to redesign the O-Ring for NASA after the space shuttle Challenger tragedy in 1986.  For his efforts on that project, my father was awarded a Silver Snoopy "for outstanding performance, contributing to flight safety and mission success. Fewer than 1 percent of the aerospace program workforce receive it annually, making it a special honor to receive this award" (source: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/sfa/aac/silver-snoopy-award).

At various times during that period he also served his religion by accepting and performing several purely voluntary, unpaid positions as a teacher and counselor.  He taught us kids, girls as well as boys, how to play baseball and he came to all our games.  When my mother returned to work she took a position as a weekend EEG Technician at one of the local hospitals and my dad took over expertly as the homemaker for two days every week without ever failing to provide cold pizza for breakfast (we could have asked for it warmed but we actually preferred it cold because we're strange like that).  He would also do our hair all pretty, ensure that we were presentably dressed, take us to the hospital to visit mom for lunch, and keep us otherwise entertained and educated while she saved lives (everyone in the medical profession contributes to saving lives in some way).

He taught me how to ride a bike, taught the family dog (a Dalmatian) to stop digging holes in the yard (I don't remember what happened to the cocker spaniel), repainted the house, picked the apples and grapes and raspberries out of our back yard for my mom and sister to make jam and bottle juice with, took care of his parents who only lived a few miles away (especially his mother after his father passed away), and painted beautiful landscapes in oils.  By all accounts he was normal in the most exceptional way for such a long time.

The changes were quiet and gradual.  They actually began with my older brother who was around the age of 16 at the time and had started attending meetings with a group called Youth for America or YFA.  This group is still around today and I am in no way blaming my brother or the group for the events that come later in the story, but many of the pamphlets and articles that he started bringing home with him from those meetings did end up impacting my father in a profound way.  I think the first significant changes were the increase to our food storage and preparedness plans.  Having a 2-year supply of nonperishable and reliable food for each member of the family was something that was very strongly recommended both in our religion as well as in much of the American culture in general.  You must remember that for part of this period we were either very much still in, or just wriggling our way out of the Cold War as a country and the threat of nuclear war with Russia had made an immense impact in many people's lives and psyches.  

It wasn't uncommon at all, at that time, for families to have 72-hour kits, a supply of candles, and kerosene lanterns and many families even still had full bomb shelters and bunkers to protect them from fallout.  But it seems like one year, things escalated.  We'd had a particularly good harvest from the grapes and apples but there was more to it than that.  My family must have bottled hundreds of full-sized Mason jars of grape juice and apple juice and when we didn't have enough left of either for a full batch we combined them and made several cases of grapple juice, which actually turned out to everyone's favorite!  Suddenly in addition to the 72-hour kits there were 5-gallon buckets of whole grain wheat, 50lb sacks of flour and rice, giant restaurant sized cans of powdered eggs and milk, entire cases full of unmarked 2-liter bottles of drinking water, and big 5-point backpacks that could carry a week's worth of camping gear as well as a bed roll, a sleeping bag, spare shoes, a first aid kit, and a small grandmother in them.  One day it seemed like we were attending Monkeys concerts at Lagoon and seeing John Stamos in concert at the state fair and the next we were campaigning for Col. Bo Gritz, frequenting preparedness expos, and attending Lindsay Williams seminars.

When I was 8 or 9 years old I held three capsule shaped microchips in my hand at one of those seminars and listened as the speaker explained that the large ones would be implanted into large animals such as horses and livestock, the medium ones would be put into household animals such as dogs and cats, and the smallest were for humans.  He spoke of them as 'The Mark of the Beast' and predicted that someday no man, woman, or child would be able to buy, sell, or trade without a microchip implanted in their right hand; that we would go to the grocery store and instead of breaking out our checkbooks and wallets to pay, we would simply wave our hands over the barcode scanners and the money would be automatically withdrawn from out bank accounts.  He sounded insane, even to an 8-year old, but also terrifying.  It would be nearly 2 or 3 more years before the advertisements for microchipping the family pet in case they were ever lost or stolen began and when they did they felt like doomsday prophecies coming true before our very eyes.

We started eating MRE's on occasion here and there because my dad wanted us to get used to them and because he wanted to know which ones we liked the most for when he went back to buy more.  Also, because he needed to cycle them to keep them fresh and edible.  One year there was a massive power outage due to unusually heavy snowfall which was an absolutely dire situation for much of the area!  My parents came and rousted each of us kids from our beds and shepherded us into their room in the middle of the night; they fashioned bedrolls all over the floor with sleeping bags and every blanket in the house and set up a large kerosene lantern in the room with us to keep us all warm without any heat.  The lantern, like all my dad's preparations eventually would at some point, became an obviously valuable and utterly precious object that night.  It was one of the rare moments in life when you buy something you hope you'll never need but then when you do need it you find yourself infinitely grateful that you bought it.

The biggest changes came when the arrests started but those stories, dear reader, are for another time.