Into the West: Prelude

I fell in love with the landscapes of the American West in the latter half of the 1980s. Several times during those years when I worked as a songwriter, I would cash my monthly paycheck, throw my guitar in the car and, as Huck Finn says, "light out for the Territory." I found a couple of towns that I liked (Missoula, Montana, especially), but for the most part the wide open spaces were what grabbed me. I was reading a good bit of Texas writer Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove and others) and Montana writer Ivan Doig (This House of Sky and others) and listening to a lot of American composer Aaron Copland and songwriter Bruce Hornsby, whose first album The Way It Is featured several tunes that seemed to capture the wide open feeling of the plains. Anyway, I left Nashville headed west every time I could until I headed east in 1989 to get married. Since then, I've traveled west only once, sometime around 1992, I think.

My dad's brother JC served many years at Ellsworth Air Force Base in Box Elder, South Dakota, just east of Rapid City. Before my first visit to JC's, I'd never been further west than Memphis, Tennessee. Dad's family has never been very good at keeping in touch with one another, not in comparison with my mom's family, at least. From the time JC and his wife Sonya and two sons Paul and Bob lived briefly near us in Marshall, North Carolina (probably sometime in the years between 1966 and 1970), and then returned to South Dakota, I don't recall seeing them again until my brother Jerry and I traveled to the Black Hills around 1985 or 1986. Afterwards, in those last few years of the 1980s, I saw JC, Sonya and Bob fairly often. Paul lived in Australia--still does, I believe.

Early in the '80s, JC had been diagnosed with a bad case of lung cancer and given some six months to live. I remember praying every night for his health and healing. The cancer never went away, but miraculously, JC outlived my dad, who died in November 1996. But die JC did, eventually, a couple of years after Dad, I think. (For whatever reason--probably PhD studies--I wasn't able to go to the funeral.) JC's death left Sonya and Bob there in Rapid City, far away from Paul, from JC's family in the North Carolina mountains and from Sonya's family in England.

Now we seem to have lost touch with them. Letters and cards to their longtime address come back as undeliverable. The email address no longer works. Telephone calls have gone unanswered.

So, I'm going into the West to try and find them. . . .


244.0 NWT