BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 59

APRIL 2012

DAVID

As kids we were all magicians. So we thought. When we discovered a new trick we shared it and the resulting amazement bound us together. We used looseleaf binders as frisbees before they were invented. We threw tin can lids salvaged from the school garbage pile in the same manner, until teachers, fearing limbs severed by sharp, flying discs, banned the practice. We put playing cards in our bicycle spokes. And we turned notebook paper into the equivalent of felt by wadding and re-wadding it.

The first stage of that metamorphosis yielded a noisy crackle that angered the teachers, but subsequent stages grew quieter. We conjured a new product we were quite proud of, if perplexed by: certainly it was good for something, but what? Ever the amateur scientist, I tried to record the creases that erupted from each act of crumpling, hoping to detect a pattern, but every page was a snowflake with its own identity.

Wadding up paper might serve as a metaphor for the effect of aging—we start with a clean sheet, crisp and lined, and every time we handle it the creases multiply, the texture keeps softening, until we end up with shreds that bear little semblance to the original. If you don't use your memory, don't handle that paper? It becomes brittle. Edges might curl, mold might occur. Henry's papers show elements of all those kinds of wear. They may have been old even before he collected them.

What Henry left after his death mostly went to my dad: old surveying equipment, these papers, a harmonica, odds and ends—some metal scraps with Japanese or Chinese characters on them, fishing lures. His nieces, the twins, sold his truck, which was just as well, since while I liked the idea of having it I couldn't have fixed it—I was never mechanically inclined.

My encounters with Henry numbered few, but he shows up in my dreams as a kind of landscape fixture. He was often in the background, driving the backroads, fishing in one hole or another. So was my father and other old timers, their pickups parked on the roadside to stake their territories. When we drove by he waved the same way he spoke, so slowly he couldn't finish his gesture before we were gone. If it can be said we live at a faster pace than back then, it can also be said even then Henry lived at a pace far slower than the norm—though it wasn't a result of a personal choice.

I've been looking through his papers. They include a lot of government survey maps and engineer reports. I recognize our ground, soon the County's, in one map, and Henry has marked it with a big red X on the west side, not far from the fence. Attached to the survey map with a paper clip are other papers. A list of stage robberies on the Virginia City to Salt Lake route, a similar list of the holdups on the Kelton to Twin stage, and yet another from the Mackay-Salmon line. He's put a number in front of each event, and then made a file detailing what was found (or if it was), where the robbers went and where they were apprehended (again, if indeed they were), and possible places any unrecovered treasure might be found. There are newspaper clippings in poor shape, some parts underlined.

There was a sizable holdup south of Pocatello in 1865, two million dollars worth of gold taken and most of the men and passengers killed, and Henry has put stars on that particular event. Another, smaller event occurred two years before, with the two bandits heading to Almo, the other leg of the stage line that headed Boise way. They were apprehended there, at what is now City of the Rocks, one of them being killed and the other, named Ed Long, never revealing where the stolen loot was. Henry had asterisked this one, too. Still a boy at heart, I felt the stir of elation for just a second.

That little burst, when combined with its rapid quelling, angered me. Anguish rose from a well of seemingly infinite capacity, common for me to re-experience since God knows when. If a single thing can stand for a life, that process—the eruption of eagerness, exuberance or hope and their subsequent withering—stands for mine.

I am tired of it.

©2025 Ralph Thurston