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Consider this page a ‘stub’. The story of how my Dad and Mom met, married and honeymooned is…well…epic. They met at a dance on Dad’s eighteenth birthday, when he snuck down from his post at a fire lookout to celebrate. After leisurely planning a wedding in July the following year, they married in a rush because fire season started early. They honeymooned on top of Triangulation Peak, above the tree-line and at an elevation of 1+ miles. So many stories, told so many times. I’ll build these stories out in the days to come, but here are some photos to give you a taste.

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My brother Craig moved to Canada in 1969, a Vietnam-war draft evader. He was the first in our family to leave the fold. For a number of years he couldn’t come home to visit without risk of capture at the border, and this was hard on everyone, especially on my mother (though she supported his decision and cashed in a Folgers coffee can full of loose change to help get him across the border) and especially at Christmas. So for several years in a row we took Christmas to him. My parents, their other six kids, in-laws, grandchildren, a stray aunt or uncle, a couple of dogs – four or five carloads – would make the trip caravan-style up I-5 from Portland OR to Vancouver BC. Nobody had any money, so we’d rent a string of cheap motel-six-style cabins, and my mom and sisters and in-laws would fix a feast with tiny chickens and frozen pies roasted in five or six tiny ovens. My dad would scrounge up a fallen branch from the neighboring woods, cut some ornaments with his tin snips, and the kids would decorate the tree with popcorn and cranberries. Any gifts we had were mostly ‘found objects’. I was just a kid; I thought these were the best holidays ever.

One year my dad brought a tape recorder and left it running for most of the three or four days we were there. You can imagine what these recordings sounded like: someone (usually my dad) telling a story, a TV going, kids squabbling, a baby crying, a dog barking. And laughter. Laughter, laughter, laughter.

Years later – after Carter’s amnesty allowed my brother to return home, and a few deaths, divorces, and other irreconcilable family differences – I came across my dad, sitting in the dark, smoking a cigarette, listening to those tapes. “How can you listen to that, Dad? It’s nothing but white noise.” “I love it”, he said. “It makes me feel like you’re all right here in the room with me.”

Picture above from one of the Christmas in Canada trips.  There’s my mom, two sisters, a niece, a nephew, our Cowboy Ex-Pat, and me.

Dad grew up in the small town of Detroit, OR. In 1952 the town of Detroit was inundated when the Army Corp of Engineers finished the Detroit Dam on the Santiam River.

Per his request, we spread his ashes on Detroit Lake, shown above.

More on Detroit from the Oregon Historical Society.

And more about the underwater ghost town, visible in a drought in 2013, here.

(Photo: Dad and his first born)

Dad loved babies. He loved them when he was young (just 21 when Sherry was born), and he loved them when he was old (he wrote a poem for a great-grandchild just a few months before he died). He wrote the piece below after he received a dunning letter from the hospital where Sherry was born.

SHERRY

                She isn’t paid for, but she’s ours.  She’s little and fat and she has dimples.  She has funny little wisps of hair and eye lashes that women dream about.  She’s an angel.  She’s a little devil.  She’s ten months old.  Only ten months and we can’t remember when we didn’t have her.  She keeps our house in an uproar.  She’s bold and brazen.  She’s coy and demure.  She’s ours.

                The world is her oyster.  She thinks we are here only to please her.  I guess we are.  She has an enormous appetite.  She tries everything she finds including cigarettes and bright green June bugs.  She can’t understand why or how her daddy could grow tired just playing piggy back.  She talks in a soft sweet little voice.  She screams like a banshee.  She can walk six steps, and does—when she feels like it.  She looks like her mother.  She looks like me.  We don’t know who she looks like.  She can do more in less time than anyone I ever saw.  She’s ours.

                When she smiles, and she’s always smiling, she shows two tiny white teeth.  They’re very sharp—believe me.  She loves her mommy very much and gives her big wet kisses.  Then she sticks her finger in her eye.  When I want to listen to the radio she has loud stories to tell and emphasizes same with violent gestures.  And I have to listen.  She has no respect for the integrity of my magazines.  She tears up my Sunday paper.  She blithely pulls the pages from borrowed books as though they were petals from a daisy.  When scolded she sits up very brightly and patty-cakes.  She waves bye-bye when no one is leaving.  She refuses to do so when they are.  We could never do without her, and she’s ours.

                She climbs as high as she can.  She bumps her funny little nose and tells her mommy in no uncertain terms what she thinks of such a cruel old world.  She takes her bath in the kitchen sink and drinks from the faucet.  She takes her shoes and socks off and immediately tries to put them on again. She wakes every morning with the dawn.  So does everyone else.  She likes to dance.  She sings very sweetly with an accent that sounds slightly Scandinavian.  She croons very softly to her little black cat.  She kisses the top of his head.  She pulls his tail.  She minds very well.  She sasses.  She leads us around by the nose and we love it.  No, she isn’t paid for—yet—but she’s ours.

                                Her Daddy

Dad and Mom both worked in the shipyards (as welders) during WWII. After the war Dad went back to work in the woods with lumbering crews. In about 1945 he was severely injured when a tree being felled struck a log he was standing on. He was catapulted into the air, crashed down, and ended up with broken ribs, a few smashed organs, and a kidney that had to be removed. (Always included when Dad told this story was the part where he woke up on the operating table, startled his doctors, and asked for more anesthesia.)

He spent a year or so in a wheelchair and unable to work. But he put this down-time to good use. First, he read the bible–old and new testaments, cover to cover (“Just wanted to know what all the fuss was about.”) Though he was never associated with any organized religion, before or after, he was an extremely well-informed agnostic.

After that project was completed, he taught himself photography, built a darkroom, and opened up shop as a family photographer, using pictures of his own kids as advertisements. Photo above is a self-portrait–note his signature above his right shoulder.

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I think it’s common in many families to see multitudes of photos of the first kids and not nearly as many photos of the later kids. That was certainly the case for me. There are exactly two photos of me as a baby–the one below, and a similar shot taken on the same day–a double exposure with brother Gary, holding the BB gun he got for Christmas, superimposed over the top of me.

Photo: Dad and Uncle Bob, each on one side of the Continental Divide in Wyoming, peeing.

In the winter of 1948-49, Dad and his brother Bob took welding jobs in the oilfields in Wyoming. Mom, with three kids and the fourth on his way, stayed behind in Portland. Dad and Uncle Bob told stories about their wild days in the oilfields forever after, including the tale of being (briefly) arrested because they were mistaken for some escaped convicts–the “notorious Jones brothers”.

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Dad and Bob were still in Wyoming when my brother Craig was born on New Year’s Day, 1949. Dad sent a letter welcoming him, promising to be home to meet him soon, and adding, “Kiss your momma for me. This is one New Year’s resolution we’re going to keep!”

Ed. Note: Here are the wonderful words my brother Gary wrote and delivered at Dad’s funeral.

Dad was so many different things to each of us that I will not try to mention them all. I just want to recall some of what he was for me while I was growing up as his oldest son, and perhaps remind you of how he affected you and your life.

A few days ago, Sherry remarked on the fact that, when she and Ray go hiking in· the Cascades along the Santiam River, they are almost certainly hiking on trails that Dad constructed during his CCC and Forest Service days. And that reminded me that, in my earliest memories, Dad was always the one who made things–and fixed things–with his hands, with his tools, and with the things he said. When I was about 5 years old, he made big murals on my bedroom walls–a cowboy on a bucking bronco, an Indian chief, a wagon train crossing the prairie. Below the murals, along one wall, there was a big sheet of plywood fastened like a table to the wall, where my electric train was set up. The tracks ran around the table, through a tunnel in a mountain, then past a water tank with a boom and spout I could lower with a little chain, and then a red brick depot with shrubs around it. I remember Dad making the mountain and its tunnel out of papier mache, and the water tower out of a small Crisco can, which he soldered onto some scrap metal for legs. To make the depot, he cut up a Folders coffee can and straightened it out and soldered it back together, and then painted it brick red–he put sand in the paint to give it texture–and he made the shrubs out of steel wool painted green.

In those days, when I woke up in my room, I was in the middle of a little world that Dad had made for me with his own hands.

He made things for all of us–Stick horses for Craig and Kirk, handsome wooden beasts to replace the lamentably inadequate makeshift ponies they rode. Craig rode a broomstick, I think, but poor Kirk didn’t even have a stick at all. He rode a short piece of rope. I can never remember whether it was the broomstick or the rope that was named Prigger. And he made penny banks for each of us, made them out of coffee cans cut up and soldered together and painted with fancy pictures. Dad and Mom drank a lot of coffee in those days. And for Lisa and Kim’s dolls, he made wooden cradles that Mom decorated with folk designs she found in a library book; and later he made a doll house for them, an exact replica of the house itself, complete with lights that worked. A flashlight bulb inside a ping pong ball hanging from the cathedral ceiling–just like the spherical white hanging fixture in the real house. And bunk beds with desks underneath for Craig and Kirk, and coffee tables and television consoles and kitchen cabinets for the house. And concrete patios and wooden decks and landscaping. (Ed. note: And a figure-eight goldfish pond with a fountain, embedded with rocks he had collected and polished!)

And at Christmas time Dad would buy a tall tree for the living room, get it home and look at its oddities of shape and stance, and then get out a saw and a drill and rebuild it – sawing off limbs and drilling holes in new places and sticking them in, until it was a new tree.

And we decorated it with ornaments that Dad had designed and made-cutting up coffee cans, of course, and painting them and sprinkling glitter on them, and folding them until they became bells and Santas and angels and such.

So when we came into the living room on Christmas morning, we found a Christmas tree that Dad had made, decorated with ornaments he had made, and a lot of presents that Dad had made.

Among my early memories is this one: At the Veda’s place in Jennings Lodge (Ed. note: we named our houses after the landlord). I wake up late at night and go downstairs to the bathroom, and Dad is sitting in the kitchen, poring over some Heathkit diagrams, soldering resistors and capacitors and such. He was taking classes in television and radio repair, and he needed instruments, so he was building an oscilloscope.

When we first moved to Jennings Lodge, he sent away for Department of Agriculture pamphlets on raising chickens and rabbits, and with their advice he built chicken coops and rabbit hutches out of scrap materials he found in the barn in Jennings Lodge. They were made of scrap lumber, not quite what the pamphlets specified, so he apologized and said they were only temporary. But of course they were still standing when we moved away years later. And in front of the house, across the lane, he made a huge garden. -We didn’t have a tractor, so he had to drag the ancient harrow behind our big black square 1939 Chevrolet – I can still see him bouncing in the front seat of the car as it lurched and lunged across the ground, smoothing it out so he could plant peas and beans and corn and potatoes.

And so as we were growing up, we were continually walking out into a world that Dad had made for us–gardens and barns and patios and landscapes that we had watched him build.

At some point he began to go prospecting during his vacations, looking for lost gold claims and the Blue Bucket Mine – if he found them he never told us – but eventually he found some peculiar rocks in southern Oregon and spent a winter or two studying geology until he was certain they were jade. So he staked a claim and went down there and dragged boulders out of the wilderness using cables and winches that Lisa swears he made himself out of coffee cans, and then bringing them home and tearing apart a washing machine for its gears and motor, and commandeering some bicycle wheels until he had made a saw that would cut the stone. And then learning the ancient craft of lost wax metal casting and making rings for everyone in the family.

So on my hand I wear a jade ring my father made for me.

When manufactured things wore out or broke down, he usually did not buy replacements even when they were available and cheap. He preferred to rebuild them, making the necessary parts himself. I have watched him rebuild broken gears on a washing machine-drawing a template and making some kind of mold and melting some metal (was it coffee cans?) and pouring it into place and filing the teeth to the right size and shape. Lisa has watched him make a fuse for her television–not out of coffee cans, but out of a light bulb and some aluminum foil.

When he fixed such things or made such things, he almost always said that they were only temporary. But I don’t remember any of his contraptions wearing out. They’re still out there somewhere, I suppose, still working.

When he wasn’t making temporary replacements that lasted forever, he was often working on some highly improbable dream. I remember him in the basement in West Linn, fiddling with some magnets and motors and wire, trying to make a perpetual motion machine. It would have no practical value, of course, but he thought he understood how to do it, and so he was trying to do it. I asked him about it, and he explained how one magnet could be suspended without friction in the magnetic fields of two others, and a motor would turn the suspended magnet in such a way that a current would be generated in its coils, and the current would turn the motor, generating more current. Forever. I could clearly see that it SHOULD work. He never got it exactly right, but in principle, he understood it and explained it to me.

He also invented other devices–one that would attach to the car’s carburetor and add a spritz of water, and make it run better. He had noticed that the car ran better on rainy days, and so this device was a way of creating that damp air right in the motor. And he showed us how to build a yellow jacket trap, which we never got around to producing but which someone else also figured out and is now making for profit. The best thing about those inventions was not so much the device itself as his explanations of the principles behind them. Explanations of how things work and of how things OUGHT to work were another of the great things he made for us.

Often his explanations contained more information than we wanted, or more than we could absorb, or maybe even not quite what we asked about. When he built those rabbit hutches and got some rabbits and mated them, he invited me to watch. And while the rabbits were–engaged–he was saying something about how male genitalia are external and female genitalia are internal, and I was scarcely listening at all because the rabbits were acting extremely weird and I wanted to know about THAT.

But he could explain anything. Even when he didn’t know the explanation, he’d hazard a guess. We’d ask him why the sky is blue and rain clouds are black and he’d say “I don’t think even Leonardo da Vinci figured that out, but let’s see. The specific gravity of the clouds should be about 1, and the atomic weight of oxygen is 16, so … ” and we’d have no idea whether it was right or not, but it sounded right. And partly because of those explanations, I awake every day in a world that seems explainable, a world that even I might be able to figure out.

And besides making things out of coffee cans and explanations out of thin air, he made music and songs on the guitar and the banjo and the fiddle and the harmonica and the concertina. And he made lots of paintings for our walls. And he made poems about life itself and about his children. And he made stories. Millions of stories, most of them just like his explanations–maybe they weren’t quite true, but they should have been true, and after he had told them a few times they were true. Stories about growing up in the Cascades with his brother Bob, or about working with Bob in the Wyoming oil fields, welding storage tanks and getting arrested because someone thought they were escaped convicts–the notorious Jones Brothers. When the two of them got together and traded stories the house would rock with laughter all night long. He told us stories about things that happened before we were born, stories about things we had seen him do, stories about things we ourselves had said and done. Even when we remembered the event itself, the stories Dad told about them made our lives more interesting, more funny, more rich and meaningful–and more permanent. Some things are not made simply out of coffee cans, but also out of love.

(Ed. note:  I think the photo above is the one he used for his passport.  It’s how he looked for the last twenty years of his life, and the face I see in my dreams.)

Dad’s parents: Lalon Ira Jones (1901-1934) and Gladys Pearl Johnson (1900-1972).

Calvin Marshall Jones was born October 9, 1919, in Clarkia, Idaho. He always liked the symmetry of his birth date: Ten, nine, nineteen, nineteen. He liked to use those numbers when playing keno or the lottery, and often won with them (or so he claimed). I imagine he got a kick out of his death date, too: Fourth of July, 1997.