Just Leave Me Alone

This picture was printed in November of 1957. It's difficult to tell how fully the leaves have or have not turned, so I'm not sure what month the picture was taken. I am not quite four years old. The haze behind me and between the leaves is not for artistic effect. It is Smelter Smoke, the generic name give to all emissions in Kellogg, whether from the Smelter, Zinc Plant, or other plant.

I wonder as I look at myself stopped in time almost fifty years ago, whether I was thinking back then what I tend to think now: just leave me alone. My first memory from this time in my life is getting beat up by Mike, one of the boys I get together with at Thanksgiving time in Lincoln City. I remember thinking while he punched me, "Leave me alone." I often wanted to be alone. I used to go out behind our house where scrubby plum trees grew and I'd find rocks and I'd hold them up to my ear and see if they would speak to me. I couldn't do this with friends. I had to do it alone.

It wasn't long after this picture was printed that I started to read. No one taught me to read. One evening my mother came home from teaching school and I picked up a book and started reading aloud from it. About that time my parents invested in a World Book Encyclopedia set. I took a fascination, before I was in kindegarten, in the states and capitals. I didn't set out to memorize them, but I did. I became a little party game: ask Billy any state and he can tell you the capital. To pore over the U-V volume of the World Book, with its list of all the United States and capitals and to find each of the states on the United States map and develop a sense of geography meant time to myself. I often wanted people to just leave me alone.

I did social things. I played a lot of baseball and basketball and football and hide and seek and rode my bike with the Gunderson brothers and we tried to figure out during the height of the Cold War which houses in Kellogg the Russians would bomb first. I once told my mother that I hoped I would be dead before the Russians attacked Kellogg so I'd miss all the bombing. I think I wanted the Russians to just leave me alone.

But even as I did social things, I liked to read and I liked to go by myself and imagine whole baseball games unfolding as I threw hard crab apples softly in the air and sent them over the Lenhart's fence with my baseball bat. To me, it was a lot more fun to march through the Yankees' and Giants' lineups by myself and make the game happen in my head than it was to play out these pretend games on fields with others. I enjoyed doing it alone.

When I leave Eugene and come back to the Silver Valley I enjoy the trip alone. When I leave the suffocating dampness and claustrophic closeness of the Willamette Valley and start east along the Columbia River with the whole basin widening and widening in tans, deep purples, and barren splendor, I feel liberated. The traffic on the Columbia River is light. The landscape is open, barely inhibited by mountains or trees. I want the stretch from The Dalles to Boardman to the I-82 interchange, north to the Tri-Cities and up and down the golden hills of the Palouse into Ritzville and on to the black pines of Cheney to last forever. I am alone with the grand open spaces of eastern Oregon and Washington stretching my mind and giving my spirit room to roam.

Once I've arrived in Kellogg, I stay with my mother and visit with my sisters and see my great friends and I love the company. But almost every day I do what I did when I was a teen ager: I walk, alone (well, with my dog) up to the high school, along the ever more grassy trail behind the hospital and on toward the narrowing of Jacobs' Gulch and remember how often I would slip out of the house at night to walk up to the high school, just to be alone. Back then I'd try to sort out my failures: basketball, baseball, lost student government elections, failed romances: I'd dwell on how I wasn't measuring up to what I'd hoped I would be.

Now, I try to achieve a state when walking alone in which I'm more like the young boy you see pictured above. I try to empty my mind and take in the trail to the high school, the bear scat on the trail, Jacobs' Creek trickling below, the clean, fresh air, and shade of morning and let it work on me innocently, without the interference of my inward voice babbling. My better self turns to that babbling, gabbing, overthinking part of me and says, "Just leave me alone."