A necktie. A call home. Dinner. A beer. On the surface, we underplay Father’s Day. It’s muted. Japan’s celebration is even more so. There is something about our Fathers that doesn’t invite spectacle and gushes of overt emotion. Was thinking a lot about that this Father’s Day.
Who is my Dad? Who was he? Will I ever know? And the answer to that is no. I won’t. Can’t.
The stories are so sparse. My Dad was a West Coast timber faller. He cut trees for a living. Got his start right out of high school and is doing that to this day, at the age of 75. Though now he does specialty cuts as a hobby. In his younger days he was well known as a ‘busheler’. A timber faller of the old world, of old-growth timber and paid by scale. When he needed more in his paycheck, he had to cut more. A 48″ bar on an old McCullough was considered a ‘small’ setup in his world. When you are paid by ‘stumpage’, how much wood you get on the ground – there is only one language, power engaged. You kept your saw hot and you learned to work fast and accurate. A 300-foot-tall Douglas Fir was worth nothing if you missed your shot and the wood exploded on the ground. You lost time if you couldn’t hand-sharpen 60″ of chain on the stump faster than you and I can change out a new one. Production was the only thing that mattered and anything that got in the way of that was costing you money. He was good, one of the best of that old world breed.
But….who was he?
Talking to his old friends, here and there as I grew up, you got the impression that the only thing he did harder than work was play. Logging camps and bars were his haunts. His knuckles were flat and wide, crisscrossed with scars long fused into each other. You ask him about them and he would smile small and casually change the subject. His friends told me about more of his bar fights than he ever did. That time he fought another logger for over half an hour, then got drunk with him after they both collapsed, bloody and happy. The hippie who stood in his way at the gas station – that one didn’t last 30 minutes. The handful of pepper he threw in another fight – ending it before the fight got started as his opponent stumbled back with tears, trying to clear the pain.
That wasn’t him.
He was a devout atheist, adroit in the ‘taking down’ of creationists and Christians. Delighted in it. Dad is wicked smart, reads more than you would ever suspect of someone from that world. He could talk circles around your ‘casual’ Christian, and did with a jurist’s delight. In his late 20’s he met an old preacher, a ‘recovered’ atheist and retired biology professor. He had the presence and patience to stand in that young logger’s energy and parry the arguments, patiently and with a quiet strength that Dad alludes to even now. Dad got saved, converted to Christianity, and pursued that identity as hard as he lived his previous life. His brothers and friends always hint at a quiet astonishment at what that conversion worked in Dad. He became a devout, church-going Christian and that is him today. The scar above his right eye, I think, reminds him of where he used to be. The massive fists opened, held new life and his children – all 6 of us.
But…is this ‘him’?
I just had my 7th child, almost 50 myself now. Will they ever ‘know’ me? My athletic career? My Navy career? My travels all over this fine globe? The parts of me that I cultivated into ‘now’? The parts of me that did not serve me, that I was/am ashamed of, that I cut from my soul- and guard against a malignant regrowth. Will my children know that?
My Dad wanted to go to Alaska. Never panned out for him. He started and closed, sometimes lost, multiple businesses throughout his life. Logging companies with million-dollar equipment – he would go from being a multi-millionaire on Monday, to asking for bank loans on Friday. The timber industry was ‘boom and bust’, the very definition of ‘feast and famine’. He started a brick-and-mortar saw shop, not least for the reason of helping HIS father find a retirement job. They worked together for the last 20 years of my grandfather’s life. I don’t think life has that honor for me – we play the hand we have dealt ourselves. When my grandfather passed the shop didn’t last much longer. It was a project between father and son; it played its role.
His children’s adult lives haven’t been uneventful. Hurts, misunderstandings, dreams lost – the accumulated layers of life. It is rare to find the quiet time to just sit with him, be with Dad. Large families are loud, chaotic, so many threads firing all at once. Quiet time to just ‘be’ with each other is preciously rare.
My own story has 25+ years of Navy. Tip of the spear for most of it. I have a lot of salt and sand in my boots. And some blood. My buddies and I can sit and have a beer together and say almost nothing. For hours. You see this in any VFW. Any BBQ. Any place where two or more vets find themselves together. They don’t talk much. But they sit together in a way that discourages intrusion. Stare into their whiskey and are somewhere else.
Maybe that is who our dads are. Not the stories of who they were. Not the sculpting and molding, the beating, that it took to become the man you knew.
Just the guy you sit with.
Who knows where you are when you walk the old paths.
