Low ceilinged log house, headquarters of the STS dude ranch on the Snake river bottoms, a late fall or winter night. These are childhood memories. A crowd of friends, us kids tucked away here and there, a low fire in the cobblestone fireplace, only one or two lamps alight. The dudes and other summer visitors are gone, the cattle shipped, Jackson's Hole natives are free to visit and visit they do.

Tonight the main center of attention is Major Mapes, a world traveller. He is well supplied with tales of adventure. There is his story of falling deathly sick and being nursed back to health by a beautiful "native" woman, out in the wilds somewhere. Buster Estes, dude rancher, formerly a teamster and cowboy from Colorado, loves to get other people to tell their tales. He urges the major on. On other occasions Buster tells stories too, admonishing his wife, Frances, "All right Slim, let me talk." Their daughter, two or three years older than me is somewhere in that warm and shadowy room that's softly limned by firelight flicker, shadows in all the corners, as are my sister and brother and other kids who are not paying much attention to each other, we are listening to adventures, the behaviors of those strange and amazing people, Adults.

The major proceeds. After a while, as climax, he brings out his photo of the body of the "bandit," Pancho Villa. We kids come forward to view the bullet-ridden body, the photo apparently taken by Mapes himself, in 1923, the year of Villa's assassination by government connivance, but we kids don't know that. Maybe Mapes doesn't know it either. Wow! Visions of Mexican bandits! Francisco "Pancho" Villa, a non-smoker, non-drinker who loved to dance. It was said that he could out-dance anyone. A leader of revolution in northern Mexico, allied with Emiliano Zapata hundreds of miles to the south. Villa and Zapata finally met face-to-face in the outskirts of Mexico City during the Aguas Calientes convention, where a big division was clearly evident, the "constitutionalists" afraid of the more democratic tendencies of the Villa and Zapata forces. Bystanders reported a snippet of their conversation:

Villa. "They (Constitutionalists) are men who have always slept on soft pillows." Zapata. "Those cabrones! As soon as they see a little chance, well, they want to take advantage of it to line their own pockets, well, to hell with them!" Time passed, slowly...youth pace. People in the grip of the Great Depression; homeless citizens wandering through, splitting and stacking wood, weeding gardens for a meal. Indian Jack stayed longer than most. He built a shelter at the town dump, on the east side of town at the foot of that high rise of mountains. Some kids burned it down. He complained, no one did anything about it. He rebuilt, and then disappeared. I don't mean he was done away with. He must have figured the winter and hateful kids were too much misery and moved on south. Indian Jack, homeless wanderer. No one knew his real name, no one really gave a damn. Jackson Grade School. We sit at our desks in the two-story brick building that's equipped with a silo-shaped metal fire escape. From Lamb and Reed Lumber across the street comes the occasional mild slap of board on board, or the faint whine of a saw. A lone car passes down the highway, chains thrumming on packed snow. Radiators in the room have their hissing spells. We are listening to the teacher. She's reading to us. We don't squirm, she has us in a spell.

Third grade, fourth grade, long trail awinding ... eighth grade, Mrs. Hattie Erzinger in charge. She's chosen our next reading, The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough. That was my first acquaintance with Jim Bridger who is acting as scout and guide for the train. I remember his telling one of the pilgrims seeking a new start in Oregon Territory that "Ma'm, it's nigh three hundred miles beyond Laramie to the South Pass, an' the South Pass hain't halfway to Oregon. Why, Ma'am, we ain't well begun" But by the time they reached Oregon those naive, tenderfoot pilgrims were well seasoned; they had gone through a transcontinental change, now they were pioneers. Heroes. We Jackson's Hole kids could appreciate that, we had learned from adult talk that pioneers were admirable. Mrs. Erzinger read the ending of the novel with no apparent embarrassment. Here it is, in part: "... oxen stumbling and loose wheels wobbling ... may the picture of our own Ark of Empire never perish from our minds."

I have to say, that went down well; we kids were only a whisper in time from the first settlement of Teton County. On Robert Miller's property rested the first wagon to come over Teton Pass. Our teacher's next choice celebrated the Mountain Men. I've forgotten the author and title, but not the lingo. "Waugh!" and "Thar floats my stick," meaning "'Those are my firm thoughts on such and such." One afternoon our mountain men ride into a valley that could just as well be ours. Suddenly they are attacked by Blackfeet warriors.. End of chapter. Mrs. Erzinger raised her eyes from the book, looked at us. "Shall I go on?"

We whooped and hollered yes. She went on. It was an affair of complicity, the whole roomful stealing time from tasks mandated by the State of Wyoming: arithmetic workbooks, Palmer penmanship drill ... steel pens flicking ink, cramped hands trying to imitate the perfect examples in the text, thereby negating admonitions to relax and get a nice even flow in our motions ... required reading in the thin, green text, Wyoming Agriculture, and spelling. Yes, even in eighth grade we had to keep at the spelling, standing in opposing teams at the front of the room, the teacher reading the words. When you missed you sat down.

Other teachers were also prone to read past the time they had allotted to reading, even the severe seventh grade disciplinarian, Beth Hoffman, who was known for keeping order by occasionally bonking a student on the head with a thin speller. We endured a number of severe crises as Miss Hoffman led us through the long drawn out drama of /Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea/. Once the Nautilus was trapped under polar ice, no way out. And there was the battle with giant squids and the sharks and the secret underwater run from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. Miss Hoffman went overtime for those. She brought us through a Fenimore Cooper novel too, page by page, standing erect, a hanky in one hand, her voice hypnotic, not once turning to the roll-down maps behind her to show us the Mediterranean or Red Sea or Hudson river. Miss Phyllis Boyle, fifth grade, read Smoky the Cowhorse, and Mrs.Saunders (third grade) took us through Ernest Thompson Seton's Wahb the Grizzly and Booth Tarkington's Toby Tyler and the Circus.

Our teachers went with the author wherever he led, never interrupting the flow with an educational aside. Were they totally absorbed in the story? They were, I'm pretty sure, even in that terribly long and tedious "The Crisis," by Winston Churchill, Mrs. Erzinger reading. There stalked the Abolitionist, and the Black Republican and the damned Southern Democrat, the vacillating Northern Democrat and the despicable Copperhead. Who were those folks? Even Abe Lincoln, the great explicator, failed us. "An Old Line Whig, said Abe, "is one who takes his toddy regularly and votes the Democratic ticket occasionally and who wears ruffled shirts." This was worse than nothing to Jackson kids who had never heard of a Whig, let along the Old Line variety, and to whom Democratic Ticket meant FDR.

But we endured and spring came creeping in, sometimes in a grand surge and Hattie Erzinger read the last line, "Abraham Lincoln loved the South as well as the North," and closed the red covers for the last time. Thus ended our years of literature spoken and free of penalty. (1) We acquired a refugee from Nazi Germany, very well educated in the European fashion. He worked at the town laundry and lived near the east end of our street, Lovers' Lane. Our parents invited him to dinner. He could read Russian, a skill my dad, Olaus, was most interested in because he had heard there was a Russian who was pretty much the equivalent of our Ernest Thompson Seton. Charles Huff and I pal’ed around for several years before he was packed off to a military school in Florida. I happened to be in the Huff's living room with our refugee from Hitler Germany, both of us listening to one of Charles’ older sisters, Gretchen, a wonderfully outspoken woman who often drove Charles and me to places in the mountains we wanted to explore. Gretchen was holding forth about the scandalous behavior of Fred Brown, reputed to be a descendent of John Brown of Harper's Ferry fame. Gretchen said that Fred had eaten beetle grubs scrounged from inner bark of rotten trees and he recommended grubs as perfectly good food, loaded with protein. Our refugee agreed with Gretchen. He turned to me. "Martin, Fred's problem is that he is self-educated."

Fred Brown, a tall, husky cross country and downhill skier, also a ski jumper, very much a mountain man. He once gave me a kid goat and later on loaned me a horse for one summer. I wanted to defend him, but stood there spell-bound by this romantic figure from that far-away fascist world, but also astounded by his urbane complacency. Complacency. I guess that trait started riling me early on. There's a lot more I could say about Fred. Maybe later. Senior year in Jackson-Wilson High. The school offered us seniors a series of classes in the technology of radio, or an excuse for downhill skiers to skip classes and join the ski team practice on the recently named "Snow King" mountain, scarcely two blocks from school. My pal, Harold, an avid ski competitor kept urging me to join the team, but I was captivated by a dream: radio operator on freighters. I think all of the seven or eight seniors who opted for the radio training had the same idea. Employment. It was high time for us to think about that. In the introductory session, the two instructors, one a radio repair man for the valley, the other a motion picture projector at the Rainbow Theatre. Both of them told us about Morse Code and how key tappers were needed on ships.

Both men were highly knowledgeable, taking turns at the blackboard, drawing circuits and formulae. We took notes, consulted each other later, discovered that we were all pretty much lost in that sea of engineering expertise. But we stuck with it and one night the film operator invited us to the apartment at the top of the Rainbow where he and his wife lived. He presented each of us with a little metal platform with a hole fitted for a vacumn tube and other holes for wires. He guided us through a bit of wire welding. What a thrill, seeing the results of our inexpert fumbling, the vacumn tube glowing. We hooked up our keys and tapped. Sounds! Wow, we were producing code! di,di,di,dah dah,dah di,di,di.

We carried our little creations home and practiced. Near the end of the course the projector operator invited us to visit Major Mapes, who had a retirement home near the north end of Blacktail Butte. We drove on the snowy highway, parked and walked a short distance to the cozy cabin where Mapes showed us his shortwave apparatus. He fiddled with the set, found a channel that broadcast continuous code. We practiced translation of the random letters. Then our host gave us a little talk about radio, employment opportunities aboard ships, and the opportunity to join the world-wide short-wave fraternity. Little did we know. War and postwar years would bring vast progress in technology, shifting shortwave people into the ranks of mere hobbyists. Those hobbyists are still with us and sometimes they have been of crucial help in emergencies. I have a fond memory of that class, but am grateful that my sea-sick-prone body was never hired as radio operator on any ship at sea, or Great Lakes, or any body of heaving water anywhere in the world. I remember too the kind and gentle ways our two instructors treated us. Signing off now. dah-dah dah-dah (1) This section is adapted from /Teacher's Choice/, in /Teton/, 1987.