We both believe he likely never voted, and that as he entered his 80’s he began to identify with gun-toting, old, Yuma desert rats from across the country who went all in on Trump in 2016 and post. They laughed to me at climate science and vaccines when I visited because Dad had told them I am a journalist. But our father didn’t dismiss science, respected the education my brother and I achieved and loved hearing about scientific discoveries. He got every vaccine his doctor told him he needed. He got his teeth fixed in Mexico, but took his American doctor’s treatment seriously and felt comfortable in the care of his doctor, young or old.
Our father died four years ago at 87. His way of thinking was out of the early 1900s rural America and were based in what he would consider Old West virtues — protecting your land, home and women folk (whom you don’t cus around) with a gun if need be. “Never point a gun unless you intend to shoot,” he’d say, meaning be sure, don’t threaten but act. In those desert-rat years, he also returned to his Oklahoma country music roots and found campfire circles and bands in which to play old-timey hillbilly music, drink and tell stories of wild times, the women you didn’t marry and so forth.
The federal government or any state/local rules were obstacles to get around. He hunted to feed his family, in season and out, and extensively used public lands where he, as a man who owned merely three acres in flood plain where we lived in rural Montana, could gain unchallenged access. He respected the game warden who told him, “I wouldn’t bother a man for taking a deer to feed his family, as long as he didn’t make a mess of it.” He had a complex relationship with wealthy landowners, to say the least.
On those long desert evenings, he also read books on Buddhism. He didn’t read original Buddhist texts, but he got snippets of them through those secondary books. We talked deep into a 12 pack and the night over its ideas. He also thought about time and the universe.
“If a sparrow flies once a year to wipe its beak on a giant rock. When that bird has worn that rock down to dust, merely a moment of eternity will have passed.” Or, “If there is an end to the universe and you get there then stick your arm out, what do you stick your arm into?”
Never mind the logic problems here, what he was was an arm-chair philosopher with barely a sixth grade education.
When we were young and working in his construction company, mostly contracting to protect river banks with rocks (riprap), driving trucks and running heavy equipment, he would try to avoid the union rules that meant my brother and I had to turn in our Teamsters and/or Operating Engineers. That changed the pay scale, but he paid me well anyway. He would lie to the state’s engineers about how deep he made a river bank footing (shallower than the blueprints called for) or how many truck loads we’d made that day, telling us to lie to them or act dumb say we didn’t know. Then he would lie to them.
But we always ended up doing right by the union, if not the state. And he told me very early in my life that he would never cross a picket line. He spoke of the importance of unions and union membership, which gave him enough pension and insurance to afford his own desert-rat years.
He hated with a fury the taxes he had to pay, but he also told me in more ways than one that if we as a country didn’t keep the rich in check, they would cheat you and take away all you have and laugh at you when you complained.
He was independent and made his own way, as he saw it, but knew the rules of government and law enforcement were powerful tools for keeping a path to his own wealth and freedom open. He railed against fly-by-night companies who would lowball bids without bonds, use crap equipment and underpay workers from god knows where. Those people and companies cost everyone, so some regulations were necessary.
And, he was racist. Mostly, he would tell me, “Remember ‘they’ don’t like you.” I don’t need to repeat all his racist views and phrases, you’ve heard them before. Yet, he would say that he didn’t wish any harm to a “person of color” (my phrase). He hoped they lived well, he just didn’t want to be around them. He grew up literally dirt-poor, meaning the many homes he lived in as a child in Oklahoma had dirt floors “packed so hard, you could sweep them.” I believe his racism stemmed mostly from the power he got as a very poor man from his association with other white men. No matter if you were living in the same dirt-poor countryside where Black people lived, he was white and that was better.
I guess you’d call him an old-school Southern Democrat, I think.
Neither my brother or I hold these views, and my father never demanded that we did. He would politely argue his point of view, but accepted we would makeup our own minds. First and foremost, he wanted us to be unreligious freethinkers. (Religion is another story, I leave it there.) He was dedicated to my mother and spoke daily of loving her during their 50 years of marriage, but he had divorced my bother’s mother and left them basically destitute. He would whip us hard and furiously with a belt if we ever lied to him, failed in our chores or made him late on the opening morning of hunting season.
So, was he a liberal? A Democrat?
Even though we don’t remember him ever promoting any politician (they were full of shit), that’s just the way the world is and you have to make up your own mind. But there were limits. “You can’t live at the fair,” he’d say. “You have to pay attention and always look both ways when crossing the street.” He’d say about what we today call diversity: “It doesn’t take all kinds, we just got ‘em.” Yet he knew local and state politicians who didn’t shy from the company of the lawless men he also knew, and he respected them for that.
He was a wild man, a violent man, a fighter and a drinker. When young, he made a living as a musician and got gigs through unions that protected a player’s wages and music rights. He emptied a .357 at young man who had been courting one of our sisters and was escaping in his car down our country lane late one night. And then called the police for help when that man, a Vietnam combat veteran, set up on a high sandstone bluff overlooking our farm and fired a high-powered rifle at our house. (No charges were ever filed. I’m sure he didn’t admit to firing at the car, and that man married my sister until she escaped him later.)
Anyway, I could go on.
So, as my brother and I talk about my dad this election cycle, we wonder about how he would, as a younger man, think about the candidates and our vehement political divide.
I am a journalist working on a story for a Seattle news organization and am hoping to talk with other men about their fathers’ political views and how they have changed. I would love to talk with a father-son duo living in Washington state who don’t see eye-to-eye politically but are working through those differences to better understand one another and to keep their relationship intact. While my story is from the point of view of a rural, white family, the story I hope to tell doesn’t depend on where one lives or one’s race but on the complexity of the relationship. I am focusing on fathers and sons, just because that’s the story I want to focus on now, though my rural Montana Irish Catholic mother probably inspired me as much if not more than my father.
So, please share your experiences and/or reach out to me at Jakeswork@gmail.com. I would very much love to share your stories.
Soapbox: I think it is profoundly important that we all get to hear these stories and learn to understand each other and accept that while we will think differently, we can keep our relationships. All our views come from complicated lives, and none of us should be defined by who we vote for. But it’s tough in these divisive political times with what feels like so much at stake. Maybe not every relationship can be salvaged, so it would be great to hear about that as well.
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