The Territorial

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, which was a fine time to be alive if you didn’t mind being mostly unsupervised and slightly damp.

I’m still a country boy at heart, and always will be. You can put a person in a city, but you can’t take the redwood shade out of their bones.

Back then, we had landlines. One phone. It sat in the hallway with a cord long enough to stretch into the coat closet for privacy, a thing you rarely got. If it rang during supper, you let it ring. Whoever it was could call back. Supper was sacred. Sunday supper. especially. Roast on the table. Potatoes. Biscuits. Weird uncles arguing about things they half understood. Crazy aunts who laughed too loudly and told stories that got better every year. The holiday table was less a meal and more a competitive sport.

We didn’t have the internet. We had front yards. We had back roads. We had imaginations that worked overtime from dawn to dusk. When the sun came up, we were gone. When it went down, we drifted home smelling like creek water and campfire smoke. Nobody tracked us. If you wanted to find somebody, you rode your bike until you did.

House parties weren’t something you RSVP’d to. You just heard about them. Somebody’s folks were out of town. There’d be a bowl of chips, warm soda, and a record player spinning something that made you feel older than you were. Members’ Only jackets hung over the backs of kitchen chairs like badges of questionable honor. I had a letter jacket once. Thought I was something special in it. It turns out it mostly kept me warm in the fog.

Ah, that fog. Crescent City fog didn’t roll in. It settled. It wrapped around the redwoods and drifted across the Pacific like it owned the place. Drizzle was just the air deciding to be more honest. We didn’t complain. We just pulled our collars up and kept moving.

There was no traffic to speak of. You could stand in the middle of the road and hold a conversation. Snow days were rare, but when they came, they shut the whole world down. Not because we couldn’t drive in it. We didn’t see the point.

We walked to the convenience store for candy, with pockets full of change. You could get a sack full of sugar for a dollar and still have enough left for a soda and a comic book. The clerk knew your name and your parents’ names, which meant you’d best behave yourself or suffer the consequences later.

We had speed skates and scraped knees. We skipped school, which felt like high crime and pure freedom all at the same time. We’d hang out by the creek, wading barefoot over slick stones, or dare each other to jump into water cold enough to make a preacher cuss.

The Klamath River was our swimming hole and our teacher. It taught you about currents and consequences. We’d troll for salmon like we knew what we were doing. Sometimes we did. Sometimes we just enjoyed the quiet hum of the motor and the way the river moved as if it had all the time in the world.

Camping wasn’t an event. It was a default setting. All weekend in the woods. Big fires in the wood-burning stove when we got home, boots drying by the hearth. We’d tell stories that improved with each retelling. Selective memory is a generous editor. By winter, that small fish you caught in July was a river monster.

We plinked rats at the dump, which sounds worse than it was. It was rural entertainment. Nobody wrote a think piece about it. It was just boys and girls learning aim and patience in a place that already smelled like bad decisions.

Independence Day in Crescent City on the Beach Front was something close to holy. Fireworks, cracking over the ocean. Bonfires glowing against the dark. The whole town showed up like we’d all agreed to be neighbors for one night at least. And the Salmon Festival in Klamath, music, laughter, paper plates bending under the weight of smoked salmon. You could feel the pride in the air. It tasted like smoke and salt.

There were skinny-dipping days we never admitted to and stories we swore we’d deny if asked. There were redwood trees so tall they made your teenage problems feel small. I’d lean back and look up until I got dizzy, thinking nothing in the world could ever change that much.

But it did, of course. Time has a way of modernizing things, whether you vote for it or not.

Still, when I close my eyes, I can hear the crackle of that wood stove. I can smell the river. I can feel the weight of that letter jacket on my shoulders and the damp hem of my jeans from walking in the surf.

We didn’t have much by today’s standards. But we had days that started with sunlight and ended with stories.

And if you ask me, we had more than enough.