Seeing my father more clearly

Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on my father, who died 30 years ago yesterday. Here is the first.

THE 1960s and ’70s were challenging times for my father.

The women’s movement, which broadened my mother’s vision, rippled Dad’s sense that he should be the family provider. When Mom got jobs at Oregon State as a secretary, first in landscape architecture, then in the political science department, I think my father saw it less as a win for her than as a loss for him. A sign of failure — his failure — that he couldn’t keep the family financially afloat on his own.

That, coupled with what he perceived as a failure regarding his movie, Trout in the High Country, which he hoped to find a national distributor for but did not, chipped away at his self-worth. (He had a projection booth on the other side of my bedroom wall, and I can still remember him reading narration for the movie onto a reel-to-reel tape recorder — and exploding when he’d flub a line.)

He and my mother found political accord when the environmental movement rose to prominence. They protested a proposed new dam on the South Santiam. They aligned with Gov. Tom McCall in protecting Oregon’s natural resources and not selling itself to the highest bidder, even if it meant discouraging growth from out-of-staters moving here. They regularly wrote letters to the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

My father hated motorcycles on trails designated for hikers only; when we went camping, the first thing he’d do was drag a couple of logs across the trail behind our camp spot to disrupt their forward progress.

When a motorcyclist — illegal on most Oregon beaches — sped past our family’s gathering on the sand at Yachats and parked his bike to explore some nearby rocks, my father did something I still can’t fathom: he made sure the driver was out of sight, yanked a spark plug out of the bike’s engine and stuffed it in his pocket. Nobody in our family said a word as the guy later pushed his bike back to where he’d come from.

But none of the social, political and environmental changes may have affected my father as much as a traumatic personal event. In 1977, my mother and father were returning from a cross-country ski trip on the North Santiam Pass when he lost control of the car, and it hit a tree at 55 mph. He suffered a broken arm; my mother was critically injured. The priest who called us in Bend from Salem Memorial Hospital didn’t expect her to make it through the night.