Autobiography

             My mother kept a baby book for the first few years of my life, and in it I have read, in her handwriting, that I was a quiet little fellow who liked dogs and horses.  My father also told me that I never minded playing by myself and that I got along well with dogs no matter where we went or how the dogs might have taken to other little kids.  As time went on, I was also the kid who liked to read and who liked to learn things.  Somewhere early on, I acquired a fondness for poems, songs, stories, and books.  Now that I am in my fifties, I see that, in spite of being roughed up by life in general, I am pretty much the same person my parents got to know so long ago.

            I grew up in the country, mostly in the farm and ranch country of northern California, where at an early age I learned to do field work.  I also sorted soda pop bottles, delivered newspapers, weeded people’s flower beds, cleaned mink cages, and the like.  Later, while I was in college (a long stretch, getting all the way through graduate school), I washed dishes, worked at construction, and did landscaping and gardening.  The work I always liked best was outdoor work in a natural setting, around plants or animals.  Some of the work I liked the least was in that setting as well.  Some farm labor tasks, especially in the 1960's, were dreary, torturous experiences consisting of long hours, hot weather, relentless mosquitoes, and unrelieved monotony.  By the time I was fifteen or so, I realized that it was building character nevertheless, and I was glad to learn to do work that other people were either too proud or too afraid to try.  To this day, I still do manual labor, except that I do it on my own place, at my own pace, on my own time; and when I pick up a hoe, a rake, a pitchfork, a shovel, a pick, or an ax, I often think about how well I learned some of my lessons and how valuable it is to stay in touch with the earth by doing things the old (hard) way.

            In addition to carrying on many of the tasks I learned, I recovered a few things that my father didn’t have the time or money to allow me to learn but that he enjoyed when he was young.  I learned to handle guns and to hunt, and I learned to ride and take care of my own horses.  And to go along with those two things, I learned to get along in the mountains and on the plains.  All of these things go together for me.  I like to gather firewood, raise a garden, pick wild plums and chokecherries, hunt pheasants in the farmland, hunt deer and antelope on the rangeland, hunt elk in the mountains.  In between and around these activities, I like to go on walks, go camping, observe nature, cook over natural coals, and cook with Dutch ovens.

            Somewhere in there, also, I try to find time to read and write.  Those are both time-consuming activities, as are many of the old, slow skills I try to practice.  When people ask me how I find time to write (I also have a full-time job as a college instructor), I say (with truth and pleasure) that I quit watching television in 1964 and I quit bowling not long after that.  In other words, I have done what a lot of people have done as time goes on, and that is to decide which activities to pursue in life and which ones to let go.  I decided (coincidentally, at about the time I bowled my last game) that I wanted to be educated and well-read and that I wanted to write if I could.  There have been times in my life when I might have devoted more time to those pursuits and less to more frivolous ones, but I have never lost sight of what I wanted to do and what I needed to do in order to achieve it.

            I have read accounts of other writers (even in Wyoming) who write for a couple of hours, go out to get the newspaper, drink coffee in a café or shop somewhere, visit with other writers, go to artistic events, and so forth, all in a typical day.  I think that even those people have found ways to make their recreational and social activities coincide with their interests in writing.  I don’t go out for the newspaper and read it in a coffee shop.  Instead, I go to work, teach my classes, grade papers, and do office work, all as efficiently as I can, and then I go home.  In warm weather I work in the yard or garden; in cold weather I go on walks, maybe with a shotgun or rifle in my hands.  In the evening I read or write.  Sometimes I work on a scene in a story I am writing, and sometimes I write about what I saw or did in the world of coyotes, deer, pheasants, and hawks.

            One other area of interest I have is in foreign languages and cultures.  I have studied Spanish off and on for most of my life, and I studied French for several years in undergraduate and graduate school.  In the past fifteen years, as I have been teaching Spanish in addition to my duties in English, I have taken interest in traveling to Spain and Mexico.  I try to make it to Mexico at least once a year, and again, it is natural for me to fit in my visits with the rest of my interests.  When I go to Mexico, I like to spend time at my wife’s family’s place in the country, where I go on walks, ride horses, observe the landscape, chop wood, feed calves, and jot down my impressions in a notebook.