"A Bonk on the Head Is Worth a Homestead"

A BONK ON THE HEAD IS WORTH A HOMESTEAD

Feb. 11, 2012

Every once in a while, one discovers something about one’s life that prompts a “Hmmm,” or even a “Holy shit!” In my studies of local history, I occasionally stumble over such discoveries, but I’d like to relate two of them that truly helped set the course of my life.

I had the first of those moments many years ago when my Aunt Joyce (my dad’s only sister) showed me a photograph of my father looking rather romantically attached to a woman who was not my mother. I had never before seen such a photograph involving my dad. When she noted my curiosity, Joyce told me that the woman in the photo was her own sister-in-law and that she once had been engaged to my dad. She said that the engagement was broken off sometime after the picture was taken, that my dad would never talk about what had happened, and that he was actually lucky because (as far as Joyce was concerned) this other woman had turned out to be kind of a nut-job. I remember thinking that, although life is a sort of crap-shoot anyway, I wouldn’t even exist if Dad had gone through with his initial wedding plans.

And then about five years ago, while visiting our neighbors, I had another such experience. Dan and Mary France have been our neighbors out here for half a century. They actually moved onto their property in 1959 while Dad was still in the Army, and we moved from a Soldotna trailer court to our place here (which is separated from the Frances’ by the old Dave Thomas homestead) in the early spring of 1962. For years, when I was a kid, I used to roam around in these woods on remnants of a narrow, muddy, twisting old road that Dad had always called Dave’s Road; he said that it was the route into the homesteads before old Charlie Foster built Forest Lane, which is what we all use today.

Dave’s Road is now just pieces of mostly overgrown trail intersecting fields, driveways, subdivisions and powerlines. We used to employ it as cross-country ski routes, but, generally speaking, I don’t think about it much these days. But Dan and Mary started talking about some guy named Stan Nelson and how he’d made this road, and I asked who this Nelson guy was because I’d never heard of him. Turns out that he was the original owner of the homestead on which I’ve lived nearly my entire life. Here’s as much of Stan’s story as I know so far: He came down here from Anchorage in the late 1950s and claimed this place. Then he brought down (according to Dan) a piece-of-shit Caterpillar tractor to build a road in to his property. Since the Frances and Thomases were also homesteading out here, Dan and Dave were on hand to help Stan keep his machine running. Dan said that on one particularly aggravating day the track came off (and had to be put back on) this tractor seven times. But slowly the road was being built—a summer road only, at this point, ungraveled, barely wide enough for a single vehicle.

And then came the event that changed everything. Stan moved his tractor into position to knock over a birch tree that was in his way—choosing to ram it rather than go around it—but when his blade struck the birch, part of the top of the tree broke off and fell on him, nearly killing him, and hurting him badly enough that he needed to be transported out of these woods to a hospital (probably in Anchorage in those days). The incident robbed Stan of all his homesteading enthusiasm, and he decided to sell the place and leave the state. Since there were only a couple hundred people living in Soldotna at the time, since everybody knew everybody else in those days, and since Dan and Mary were friendly with my parents, they went to my folks and suggested that they offer to buy Stan out—which they did. And here I am.

Who knows where—if it hadn’t been for that broken birch tree—that I’d’ve grown up, and who knows what sorts of environmental touchstones I’d’ve had? It’s odd to contemplate.

But, of course, life is what it is. All the possibilities are intriguing to consider, but the mental gymnastics are ultimately meaningless, I guess. Since we are the sum of our experiences, how can we shaped at all by those we never had?