On the surface, my memories of childhood seem idyllic. Summers in our neighborhood were long days of darting through the woods that surrounded us, undeveloped land filled with alder and cedar perfect for nailing salvaged plywood and pallets into a crude fort. Sticks were guns, pinecones were grenades. We came home when our mother yelled for us, hands covered in pitch that would have to wear off in its own time. Our summers were more or less a predictable montage of weekend camping trips, hikes to the nearby lake and—one highlight—the annual Welco Lumber company picnic.
The gathering normally held few surprises. We kids would be free to roam the park near the lake where we could keep busy all day and out of our parents’ hair, darting back and forth to and from the red plastic treasure chest of normally forbidden sugared drinks. My father appeared in cameos on these days—this, the one day of the year that I ever saw him drunk. He’d disappear into the crowd of men holding brown bottles, the swoop of a red R on the labels; we’d see him pop up between the shifting shapes of his buddies, shades of red growing deeper in his face and eyes by the hour until at last my mother would gather us kids and help him into the van as he happily channeled Johnny Cash. Strangely enough, those moments in my memory are calming, my father happy, silly, no risk of him suddenly losing his temper and angrily swinging his arm at the passengers behind him.
* * *
July of 1978. I had turned eleven years old three months earlier and this would be the last summer of my parents’ marriage. Everyone at the picnic knew that my father and Kelly, a nineteen-year-old coworker, were having some kind of intimate relationship. About four days before the picnic, a friend of my mother’s who worked at the mill confided that there was indeed “something going on” between my father and a woman on his shift. That night, my mother drove to the mill and confronted my father. He denied it, tried desperately to explain it away as just a rumor, but when the lies finally collapsed under their own weight, he had no choice but to admit it was true.
I remember seeing Kelly for the first time at the picnic, though I wouldn’t realize her significance in my life until much later. I noticed her at the picnic because the coziness, the familiarity she seemed to share with my father was something I’d not seen before, not even with my own mother. A laugh, a playful sock to the arm, a gentle touch to his lower back. She didn’t look like the kind of person my father was typically with. A woman in Levis, flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, no hips, long stringy black hair, she was a tomboy who looked like she had more in common with my brother than my father. I gravitated toward the two of them where they stood surrounded by men from my dad’s crew and my father introduced me. I was excited to finally meet the man I knew over the CB radio as the Great Pumpkin, and when my father drew my attention to Kelly, his tone changed. It was softer, expectant, as if he were showing me a new car he’d bought, something of which he was supremely proud and would likely be using with care for some time. She said “hi” in a quiet voice, stealing a look at me and glancing around nervously, as if the two of us were doing something horribly wrong. I heard my mother call my name and her voice was completely the opposite of Kelly’s, stern and direct. I turned and hustled away, understanding that I had intruded on the adults long enough. The jungle gym was calling me now.
* * *
“The picnic was at Lake Goodwin that weekend,” my mother explains. Understandably, the last thing she wanted was to go to the picnic that day and she didn’t see the need for the family to make an appearance. “I think it’s stupid,” she’d told him. “I don’t want to be there.”
He pleaded with her, telling her he had to be there. “I’m on the planning committee and they’re expecting me,” he said, and it became clear to her that if she dug her heels in too deep, he might go on without her. So she relented, agreeing to go on the condition that my father do absolutely nothing that might humiliate her.
“The first thing he did was start drinking beer from the keg there, which was unlike him because he didn’t usually hit it so hard so fast,” my mother recalls. “Then Kelly showed up.” The other picnickers had noticed Kelly’s arrival too, and a portion of the crowd became like spectators at a rumble, nervously looking between my father, Kelly, and my mother, waiting for the shoe to drop.
At some point my mother began walking toward the lake, passing Kelly on her way down. “I want to talk to you,” my mother said sharply. She walked on with Kelly a good twenty feet behind her. When they were a safe distance from the crowd, my mother turned around to face her. “You need to know that if he leaves, we don’t have the income to support two houses,” she said. “And then there’s child support. I only have a part-time job.” Kelly looked over my mother’s shoulder and my father suddenly appeared, seemingly from nowhere.
“What’s going on?” he asked. My mother glared at him, turned and went back toward the picnic.
As the day went on, my father continued nursing the keg. “I was standing around, trying to look like everything was great,” my mother says. “The Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners had come and most everyone was sitting down at picnic tables, eating. Suddenly, I looked up and there was Kelly leaning against someone’s pickup truck with a beer in her hand.” My father stood between my mother and Kelly, facing his new young girlfriend with a beer in one hand; the other was planted against the truck, next to her head.
“I guess I just lost it,” my mother says matter-of-factly, and the rest I remember with an oddly muffled clarity. I don’t recall seeing her run at him like a linebacker, her arms stretched out in front of her. Nor did I see her slamming into his upper back, pushing him right into Kelly. But I do have a distinct memory of the crash, the yells, and beer flying in all directions. Across the table from me was an older gentleman with bushy eyebrows and thinning hair slicked back over his head like a scarf and he was frozen mid-motion, his fork halfway between his plate and his gaping mouth.
“I told you not to embarrass or humiliate me!” my mother screamed at my father. Whirling around, she stomped over to our table, where my sister Karen and I were eating. “Get your brother and sisters; we’re leaving now,” she ordered.
We left the picnic with two empty seats in our van: my father’s and my fifteen-year-old brother Brad’s, who had been nowhere to be found (he’d be dropped off later at the house, stumbling and retching from the effects of too many stolen beers). As I quickly packed clothes into a brown paper shopping bag for a long weekend at my grandparents’ house I heard a car door slam. I pressed my face against my bedroom window just in time to see my father walk sheepishly through the gate. The front door opened and my mother stepped out on to the porch.
“I don’t think you have a clue what you’re doing,” she told him. “But I want you to get your shit out before I get back on Tuesday.”
* * *
Like logs turning into lumber, what has once been viewed as sturdy and reliably forever often finds itself carved into something completely new and different. The massive red cedar, towering, majestic, and seemingly eternal ultimately finds itself lying flat on a hillside, limbs being methodically torn from its sides, its bark eagerly stripped away. Change can cut to the quick in a dangerously sudden motion; the spinning blade of the band saw shapes a massive trunk to fit other needs—studs for a house, a row of fence posts, the beveled frame for a cherished family portrait. I could never have fathomed the significance then, but as I returned