In the fall of 1958 my family went up to a Salt Lake valley canyon to go rock collecting. I think it was for granite crystals. We parked the new Chevrolet Yeoman station wagon at the mouth of the canyon and took a trail across the creek and up to the south onto the sunny west facing hill. On the way up we passed a steep stream cut and I said to the group at large that it would make a nice short cut on the way back. My father responded “Don’t you dare! That’s too steep and dangerous. Promise me you won’t think about it.” I probably agreed. We went on up and scattered around, each of us looking for the speckled fragments. I was a wimpy 9-year-old and although I liked looking for stuff I got easily bored and tired and soon wanted to go back to the car to sit and cool off. I was allowed to go down alone. It probably wasn’t more than a quarter mile and after getting out of sight I came upon the tempting short cut again. I picked up a milkweed pod and casually tossed it down the slope and watched it bounce from rock to rock, thinking that’s what I would do if I slipped. I wasn’t planning on slipping but I did on the very first step off the edge. A loose rock gave way under me and I began summersaulting down the slope, landing with one good leg and one broken one in the creek. Blood from a gash over a cracked skull spilled into my mouth. I couldn’t move but managed to scream after I’d come to rest. If it hadn’t been for a man who actually saw me fall I probably would have gone into irreversible hypothermia in minutes. He pulled me out and laid me on the bank. Somehow an ambulance of the Ghostbusters type appeared after a while, along with a newspaper photographer, my mother and father, some search and rescue people, some of the other friends on the trip, and an onlooker or two, not necessarily in that order. The one thing my father didn’t say, and never said later, was “I told you not to take that short-cut.” Maybe most parents would be too caught up in the trauma of seeing an injured child to think of something like that but I was feeling too guilty to let the absence of the remark go unnoticed. I don’t think either of my parents was tempted to chastise me under the circumstances. Later on it would be a natural thing to bring it up in asking for compliance with some safety precaution but it never happened.
We went on a lot of other rock collecting trips. Places that stand out were Topaz Mountain, Antelope Springs (trilobites and geodes), some badlands near Vernal where we found gastroliths and a few dinosaur bone fragments, and a ranch near Salina where we hunted Indian artifacts. One trip was especially memorable for a little kid because my father allowed us to shoot off some firecrackers. He thought it was the biggest waste of time and money there could be but we pestered him until we each got a full string of lady fingers. They would have been the eqivalent of about two months of allowances. I couldn’t decide between getting the longest enjoyment out of them by taking the string apart and lighting each one separately or getting the most exciting effect by lighting the whole string. I think my brother lit the whole string and I was disillusioned by having some of them get blown off the string without lighting. I must have opted for the one-at-a-time method, although I was a bit miffed that my father wouldn’t let us light them and throw them. We had to put them down and light them and run. It was still acceptable as memory material. We used old tin cans but found that a lady finger doesn’t lift them very far. We had a campfire and real wool GI blankets from an Army-Navy store to sleep under. After the fire died down the view of the Milky Way and shooting stars was far better than the firecrackers. That particular trip was a quest for snowflake obsidian. My father always did sound research on exactly where to go so we were usually quite successful. One trip to Topaz Mountain involved success in the rock department but we ran out of gas and had to get a sheepherder to syphon some from his truck. I think that trip was pre-Yeoman so we would have been in a 1947 Chevrolet sedan with a water bag on the radiator and some really scratchy seats. We tied a belt between the front seat belts so three people could sit on the single bench-type front seat with an illusion of safety. We sometimes had one of those tube-type air conditioners that mounted in the window and forced air through a wet burlap mesh or something. We also had to make occasional stops to let the car cool down. It’s been over fifty years so some of the details may be a bit off but I know my forearms had rashes for a day or two after every trip in that car from scraping on the arm rests. Also under my knees if I was wearing shorts. I usually had a headache from all of us shouting to be heard over the noise of the wind in the open windows or just the noise of siblings trying to out-do each other. The shouting was often an exclamation at spotting a new state on a license plate or some unique product on a sign or a Burma Shave rhyme. Another instance involved an electric fence which my father insisted on touching before we could to see if it was live. It was.
My uncle Heber had a black and white pony that he kept in Paris, Idaho. I was allowed to ride it once and was immediately reprimanded for letting it go under some trees which could have knocked me off but I had no idea that I could make the horse go where I wanted it to. I thought it was in charge. My father had a chance to ride it and jumped on it like a cowbow, instantly at ease and in control, which shocked me. I’d only seen him casually walking off toward campus or toward an interesting rock outcrop or mowing the lawn as his outdoor skills (or that one occasion where he took off running after my brother for an improper remark). He didn’t say much about it, probably because we were seldom around horses, but he once mentioned that he’d grown up on them. Eating dinner in a cafe once in Salt Lake we saw a team of draft horses pulling a wagon down Main Street, an unusual sight in around 1980 or so. I thought it was just interesting. My father commented that they were working way too hard for such large horses on a hot day.
