2000 (1) – Boys in the Woods

The new millennium brought a sense of passing to a new generation, as I prepared to bring my son, Logan, to experience the Bear Lakes for the first time.  I had learned from my failed attempt to instill a love for backpacking in the women of my family, back when Logan was too young to hike.  Now he was going on 10, and I looked forward to introducing him to the wonders of the wilderness.  I planned to make it as easy on him as possible, so he wouldn’t be afraid to blaze his own trails someday.  Certainly, I would avoid the totalitarian approach my own father had used when he brought me to Big Bear Lake years before, after which it was a miracle that I ever wanted to go backpacking again.

As it turned out, Good Ol’ Dad had left me enough money to finally purchase the home he had promised to me and Joy.  Or at least enough to make a down payment for a house.  Actually, it was more like a townhouse; with a very small yard.  It was in Novato (the ugliest city in Marin), but even that cow pie of a town was pretty nice by anyone else’s standards.  We had spent years in a sad succession of dingy apartments, and were thrilled to have more space and any kind of yard in which to plant things.  I was still sorting through piles of boxes full of my father’s belongings in my garage.  Months after he died, I found a valuable insurance policy tucked in a pile of random papers, so I had to go slowly, and inspect everything thoroughly.  There were so many things!  He turned out to be an obsessive-compulsive packrat, and he kept lists and indexes of everything, which had driven the State of Nevada Probate Department to distraction.  Serves them right; those unspeakable maggots that gorge themselves on the life energies of other people.

On this trip to the Bear Lakes, we wanted to go all the way to Little Bear Lake without stopping at Big Bear.  I didn’t expect Logan to carry too much backpacking gear.  He was never very thrilled about physical activity, anyway.  He was a preternatural boy, who enjoyed life internally.  When he got old enough I encouraged him to join Little League, just to get him out of the tiny apartment.  I not only attended every game but was actually one of the coaches!  Logan had good hand-eye coordination and played with skill for his age, he didn’t like it.  Something about having to exert himself physically was foreign to his sense of priorities in life.  He would much rather be engaged in intellectual pursuits like reading a book, or drawing, or playing video games.  I knew that a trip to Little Bear Lake would be the hardest physical thing he had ever done in his life, and as a father I wanted him to have the genuine feeling of accomplishment that comes from giving it a good try.

Judy would be bringing her son, too.  Kevin was 9 months older than Logan, and very different in personality.  Where Logan shied away from physical action, Kevin strode in with head bowed, swinging for the fences in everything he did.  Judy raised him over-attentively as a single mom, and smothered him with a very disciplined exposure to a variety of outdoor activities.  She systematized every facet of his life, and participated in many events alongside him, until he inevitably started to show signs of wanting to break away and do something on his own.  Later in life, he would do just that, but at 10 years old he was wholly dependent on his mother for everything in his life, and he seethed with resentment whenever he was around her.  With his uncle and cousins, he was very pleasant and relaxed.  I liked him enormously, because you always knew where you stood with Kevin.  He was never coy or shy about his feelings, and although he frequently overreacted to seemingly normal guidance, he always came through like a good soldier.

So, this would be a significant rite of passage, as we brought our progeny to the altar of the wilderness for the first time: to give them up to God, and indoctrinate them in the society of the great outdoors.  Judy and I hoped to bond with our sons in new ways, and to introduce them to the vital concept of self-sufficiency.  We approached this in a way similar to our father: by trying to organize everything to the last detail.  I packed Logan’s backpack several times and went on short hikes with him to gauge his tolerance for burden.  He cleverly responded by complaining about discomfort until I reduced the contents of his pack to the approximate mass of feathers inside a pillow.  Kevin rebelled against his mom’s attempts to control the distribution and packing of gear, and threw everything with intentional disregard into his pack, which wound up looking like a load of debris being taken to the dump in the back of a pickup truck.

Two dogs would be making their first backpacking trips, too.  Judy had a big mountain dog cross named James, and Kevin had a lanky pit bull mongrel named Jesse.  Both were strong enough to wear little saddlebag packs, but Jesse was still young and hard to control.  James was the epitome of stoicism and restraint; the paragon of canine nobility, akin to Beauregard, the loquacious hound dog from Pogo.  Jesse was a goofy pup that hurtled through life as if he was going to burst out of his own skin at any moment.  The two of them together formed a hilarious dynamic not unlike Laurel & Hardy, where separately they were funny, but together they somehow transformed into a comic spectacle.  Jesse was normally calm, but around James he pursued a singular agenda: to pester and annoy the Older Dog.  The only way the senior could score doggy points was to do nothing.  As the classic “noble dog,” James usually succeeded, but it was clear he wanted to bite that pesky little pup’s head off several times a day.