“I read a poem that I’ve never forgotten. I’ve looked for it for years, but I’m ashamed to say I don’t even know the name of it. It starts off like this: ‘There is a legend that often has been told; Of the boy who searched for windows of gold; The beautiful windows he saw far away; When he looked in the valley at sunrise each day.’”
Dad had been looking at the ceiling as he recited, but now he turned back to me.
“He had to see those golden windows. One day he climbed up there to see them, but they weren’t gold at all. They were just plain windows. When he looked back across the valley to his own house, though, the windows there had turned to gold.”
Dad paused for effect. “But that’s enough philosophy. Go to it. I might see that big country, after all. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He knew my dream was to make a living with my stories, to be a professional writer. Despite my best efforts, that just hadn’t happened yet. Dad’s eyes dropped for a moment as he made deft strokes to bring out the drake’s crest. “To find it, you’ve got to have some idea what it looks like.”
I was going to miss my visits with my father in his studio, there in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. It was a delightful mess with its paintings, sketches, photographs, carvings, plaster casts, animal skulls, specimens in formaldehyde, driftwood branches, paper wasp nests, birds’ nests, cocoons, swamp grass, reeds, milkweed pods, garlands of bittersweet, bird skins, tubes of paint, and palettes blotched like autumn leaves.
Merle Keith at work in his studio.
The place smelled of linseed oil and the fresh pine shavings that littered the floor. Sayings were tacked on the wall. A quitter can’t win was a saying that rallied his persistence whenever it flagged. Another was the Golden Rule. Yet another read, Don’t wait for your ship to come in. Row out to meet it.
Here was Dad’s escape from the world. His illustrations of my unsold stories were not only reminders of my failures, but endorsements of his striving spirit.
I WONDERED IF EVERY YOUNG MAN was as mixed up as I was. I had taken advantage of the G.I. Bill and attended Cornell University in the fall of 1946. Torn between majoring in English and Wildlife Conservation, I had chosen the former and filled in with the latter wherever I could. It had only been three years since my mother’s death. Her passing marked the end of home as I knew it. Dad had remarried quickly, and my sister, Anna, and her family had moved into the old house.
After graduation from Cornell in 1950, I had boarded with Anna and pounded out articles and short stories that earned a steady income—of rejection slips. A small inheritance from my grandmother and income from odd jobs had furnished the necessities while I sat behind the typewriter and watched the mailbox. My account petered out about the same time Anna obtained a divorce. With three kids and a big house, she needed help.
I had taken a job in a machine shop. It paid more than some of the other jobs available, and a neighbor who worked in the plant provided the transportation.
“A college graduate and you’re working here?” That was a question I could neither answer to my satisfaction nor to the one who asked it. It was a matter of expediency. I was dazed, confused, and even bitter. I was a young Indian brave waiting for a vision. I wrote often in my journal, a habit I would keep up for life and one that helped me sort through colliding thoughts.
Author’s journal, June 15, 1950
I can’t allow myself to fall into a rut, now that I am fresh out of college. I must be on my guard, for pitfalls are numerous. I hear the call of northern places and soon I must heed their pleadings.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION HAD LEFT UGLY psychological scars on my family. How often I thought of Dad being forced to make a living as a laborer, something he despised, because he had a family to support. He was first an artist, but he had only been able to play at his calling. That wasn’t going to happen to me. But what was going to happen?
How I envied the boys in high school and later those in college who knew exactly where they were going. Everything they did was tailored to a pattern. Everything I did was trial and error.
I also had a hang-up about women. I looked upon a woman as doing me a favor to tolerate my attention, and never from the viewpoint that she might be flattered by it. I stuttered. I stammered. I didn’t consider myself much of a bargain.
Neighbors and acquaintances did their best to make a match for me. I was not only cheating myself, they said, I was cheating some nice girl out of the good life. From my warped perspective, marriage was a trap. I regarded it as an ending rather than a beginning, a stifling of the adventurous spirit, a sentence I wasn’t ready to accept.
Dad had made a very necessary adjustment after my mother’s death. He was starting anew. He didn’t have many years left, and he wasn’t going to live them in the past. His new wife, Molly, was good for him, but from my selfish standpoint, she had stolen him from me and remodeled him.
Dad and I had been so close. The canoe was lonesome without him in it. The grouse cover lost its appeal without him along to share it. It became difficult to talk with him. There was always a timetable he had to follow, a call he had to make, a concert he had to attend, a planned interruption. I no longer felt part of his life, but rather an interference. Dad needed Molly more than he needed me.
Even with Anna, the belonging I once felt in the old homestead just wasn’t there anymore. I was intruding in her private life. She washed my clothes and fed me like a lumberjack, but something was missing. Reminders were everywhere of what used to be and wasn’t anymore. They were Nature’s subtle ways of pushing me out of the nest, pressuring me to do my own building, but I just wasn’t ready to pour the foundation.
With my job at the machine shop, I could contribute to the household and put aside some savings, but I loathed the place. What had happened to Dad was happening to me. I looked at the painted windows that kept out the sun. Rooted at my thread-grinding machine, I became a robot with programmed moves. Motherly women in the department delighted in making me a guinea pig for their recipes, and I ballooned from a trim 180 to a paunchy 215. I became restless, irritable, and silently critical of my fellow workers. Many had been in the shop all their lives. No end was in sight other than retirement or death. I saw a life sentence in a world of whirring belts, turning gears, and monotonous repetitions. Not for me.
When Anna remarried, I glimpsed the daylight I had been seeking. Jim Anderson was a good, hardworking man who loved Anna and the kids just about as much as I did. I knew I could trust him to take care of the family. With the yoke of responsibility off my shoulders, Dad’s dreams of the land of the Midnight Sun came back to me. I began to hear the voices that came on the wind and stirred the leaves and furled the surface of the pond on the way to Siberia. Alaska was in the sound of the geese. It was in the first glow of morning, and in the flames of a sunset. It was all I could think about.
I made my plans. Slowly I readied the essentials of my gear. If I needed other things, I could pick them up along the way or send for them when I got settled. I scrubbed the South Pacific out of my seabag. That old veteran was going to be moving out again. I splurged on a pair of custom-made, ten-inch moccasin boots from L.L. Bean, along with some heavy shirts and a pair of Ballard cloth pants. I decided to head for Seattle, Washington. That would be my jumping-off place to the North.
And then it was time to actually say my good-byes. I drove to Dad’s studio the night before I left, my mouth dry.
“I wish I was twenty years younger and a whole lot richer,” Dad said, looking beyond the walls of the studio. “There’s a thrill in heading off somewhere, but there’s a bigger one in coming back. There’s a difference between motion and action, too. I hope you discover that someday.” He squeezed my hand, grasped my shoulder, and drew me into him.