One morning six years ago, my father sat quietly in his living room, watching the automobiles drive past the house. They were headed for the freeway, moving west toward San Diego. Many of the automobiles were Japanese- built, and a lot of them were driven by women. Even a small house in a modest suburb requires two salaries in the Golden West.
”It was a mistake, moving here,” he said. ”There are too many people here.”
It was the first time I ever heard him complain about anything. But then, it was the summer he learned he was going to die, the first time his destiny was not his to control. I said that I knew what he meant, which was almost true then, and is becoming truer.
We had never been very good at talking to each other. For a long time I thought it was my fault. After he died, I began to ask other men my age if they had talked much with their fathers. I suppose it was easier to face the question after it was too late to do anything about it.
I have yet to meet a man of middle age who can say, ”Yes, we had wonderful talks, Dad and I.” Surely there are some, out there somewhere. I salute them, fathers and sons, for breaking the taboo.
Long before I understood any of this, I memorized a passage from Alexis de Tocqueville`s ”Democracy in America.” It is about the effect of democratic individualism on the soul of American men, and one of only a few things I can actually recite.
The first part I always have to look up: ”The Americans owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands.”
The second part I memorized, although I did not know why: ”Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
For some number of years I believed that Americans must suffer that condition, but I was not acutely aware that this extended to my father and his son. So, I suspect, it may be with you.
I think that most of us have some quirky bit of knowledge that represents, for us, a fragile link across the generations. Sometimes it is the self-conscious ”as my father used to say . . .” Perhaps it is a prayer in a foreign language, a fairy tale not learned from a book, a rule of behavior that is hardly universal but never questioned. Somehow, I ended up with the definition of Portland cement. It is another of the few things I can actually recite.
My father was a civil engineer, artificer of tall buildings and long bridges. I was totally incompetent at anything more mathematical than long division, and so he could not teach me anything of his craft. But once, even before I reached the age of long division, he taught me a textbook definition of cement, the gray powder that is mixed with water and stone and sand to make concrete: ”Portland cement is a mixture of argillaceous and calcareous substances, heated to incipient fusion and ground to a palpable dust.”
He might still have thought I had the makings of an engineer when he taught me that. It simply means that Portland cement is a mixture of clay and limestone heated until it melts together and then ground into a powder so fine that, like ashes or baby talcum, it will float when you sprinkle it on water. In the Latinate original, it is about as near to poetry as you get in civil engineering.
Well, we all had a father once, and we all learned something useless that we cannot quite get out of our heads, and so we puzzle over it. We know it is a message, and we spend a lot of time wondering what it means.
After it was too late to talk about it, I began exploring in his time and his space, trying to piece together the remnants of old conversations, trying to make a whole out of these disparate parts. I have been back to Montana, where he was born and reared in the small town of Chinook, trying to figure out how we got here, where we came from, who the father was, what the message could have been.
For myself, I use the ordinary methods of history, reading old books and magazines, visiting the places, searching through boxes of old documents for some clue to what his life was like, where it fit in the larger scheme. When any one of us does this it is not just a biographical exercise for a single person, rather an attempt to get some knowlege of what life was like for all our parents, back there in that truly distant past before the age of television and popular psychology and advice columns.
We are from northeastern Montana, one of the least populated areas, and deservedly so, of the United States. It is not the kind of country that the outside world associates with the word ”Montana.” There are no mountains to speak of and little running water.
There is a historical reason for the lack of population in eastern Montana, even beyond the weather (160 degrees of difference between July and January, and not enough rain to settle the dust, most years), as this was a hunting ground for Plains Indians after the Civil War.
After the Indians celebrated the American Centennial with the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, the U.S. government`s policy toward Indians once again turned to genocide. It would be 30 years before the northern railroad route opened the high plains of eastern Montana to settlement.
They were still breaking virgin prairie as the First World War began, founding small towns in this improbable country. The Great Northern railroad came to Glasgow in 1907. Glasgow, where I was born, is the nearest town to the Ft. Peck Dam.
The Ft. Peck Dam was briefly famous. On Nov. 19, 1936, it was the cover story of the first issue of Life magazine. The dam was a Works Projects Administration construction program, and the first dam across the upper Missouri River.
My father rather fancied the cover photograph–the striking concrete towers of the spillway, which is a mile away from the dam proper. There are no pictures of the dam itself in the Life story, for it was nothing but a sea of mud then. Even today, it is almost unnoticeable, a massive earth fill that seems just like the rest of the countryside, only perhaps a little more geometric.
I knew that my father liked the spillway pictures, because he worked on that part of the project, although, for some reason, I never knew exactly what he did. When I was small, I assumed he built it more or less by himself. When I was older, I guessed that he had something to do with managing the construction, but for all I knew, and I am afraid for all I cared, he was just another employee.
The senior supervisors at Ft. Peck were all commissioned officers in the Army Corps of Engineers, and they get all the credit for building the dam in the old newspaper and magazine clippings. For reasons I did not understand but my trip back to Ft. Peck helped me begin to puzzle out, my father disliked the Missouri Division of the Army Corps of Engineers. He could still get mad at them, years afterward.
The old Ft. Peck city, with the exception of the headquarters building, the Ft. Peck Hotel and the Ft. Peck Theatre, has long since been replaced with modern housing for the government employees. Of the 785 government-built houses, only 10 remain. They were built of permanent materials, and occupied by 10 commissioned officers and their families. As you drive across eastern Montana, from Miles City north toward Glasgow, you see little bits of the old town, single buildings that were hauled away and made into everything from motels to barrooms to chicken houses. The architecture is distinctive, with small, sharply gabled, decorative dormers over the two living-room windows, a feature that gives the houses a look of raised eyebrows, of quizzical surprise. There is a bankrupt motel on the highway near the dam. A house just like my parents` is unit No. 3.
So there is nothing else left of the homes and offices of 10,000 people but the theater, the hotel, the headquarters building, the officers` houses and 70 boxes of records and old photographs stored in the headquarters basement.
I thought that 70 boxes, big ones with 2 cubic feet of closely packed paper in each one, should be filled with information, that somewhere in all that yellowing, brittle paper there must be some hint as to what a father did, how he did it, how he was regarded, but that is not the Army Corps of Engineers` style. Most of the boxes are packed with beautifully typed summaries of the different parts of the project, and with duplicated
”Official Histories” written in a style guaranteed to frustrate anyone who thinks history is the deeds of men, not the acts of organizations.
It all read like a Kafka novel; everything was done by an office, not a person; by a title, not a man.
It was hot outside, the weekend I worked in the file rooms, and it was cool and dry in the basement. In a hot room, I would have given it up for a bad job and headed for the Buckhorn Cafe, where they sell beer brewed in Wisconsin. After a few hours, I began to open the boxes with less expectation of finding anything, except another duplicated official history.
There are more than 1,600 photographs of the project, and there are very few people in any of them. They are just vast panoramas for the most part, of very small machines and little, antlike men, carving a hole in the Pleistocene. One photograph caught my eye merely for having a name attached. It was a picture of one of the government houses, and the note on the back said that it was the residence of Mr. C.D. Hurst, first prize winner in the 1936 lawn and garden competition. That would be Charles D. ”Chick” Hurst, a friend of our family who also moved to southern California after the war, but Chick and Gladys and their two children, almost exactly the same ages as my older sister and I, are not in the picture. If the Army Corps of Engineers takes a picture of the lawn and garden champion, it takes a picture of the lawn and garden, period. It was as though the Army had made the grass grow and the flowers bloom.
Toward noon of the third day, a new type of photograph began to appear. As a particular section of the project was completed, the government inspectors would line up and have their picture taken. A half an hour later I saw my father`s face, younger even than I am now, looking at the camera with a small, near-embarrassed smile like the one in almost every other picture of him, being as he was unused to smiling on command. It was titled ”Spillway Inspectors,” and there were dozens of them, lined up in two rows, with a military officer standing at the left, set slightly apart from the rest.
So then I knew my father was a spillway inspector, and since he was only two persons removed from the military officer, perhaps somewhere near the top of the pecking order. But that was pure speculation, just an inference from the military tendency to line people up either by height (which was not the case here) or by rank (which was possible).
In the 66th box, near the end of the day, I came across some curiously disorganized papers. Folded twice so that it would fit in a file envelope was a classic military Table of Organization for the Spillway Section, with Capt. John R. Hardin, Corps of Engineers, in the lonely little box at the top. But unlike all the other TOs, this one had names on it, and annual salaries for the non-Army personnel.
As of Oct. 17, 1936, Maurice R. Montgomery was the Assistant Engineer and Supervisor of Concrete Inspection for the Spillway. Following the branching of the organization table, he was somewhere around third in line, starting with Capt. Hardin in his executive splendor, down through the Resident Engineer to the Assistant Engineer. Based on salary, which is a measure of worth that holds up over time better than titles, he was also third from the top, at $2,900 a year. And there were a few dozen small pieces of interoffice correspondence in the 66th box.
Some were from my father, written in an engineer`s draftsmanship that was a bit clearer than the prose. Some were to him. And there were a half-dozen I particularly appreciated: They were routine questions to the spillway- section military man, Capt. Hardin, and he had written on the bottom:
”Check it with Montgomery.” From what I knew from working for my father, the captain had picked the right man.
The year that Ft. Peck made the cover of Life, my father had made the first move in his plan to escape from the Army Corps of Engineers. In May of 1936, he had been commissioned as a lieutenant (j.g.) in the United States Navy Civil Engineer Corps. He was convinced that a war was coming in Europe, and that there was no way he was going to war with the Army.
Years later, faced with military obligations, I chose the Army without giving it much thought. When I told him, all he said was: ”The Navy`s a good outfit, you know. They take care of their men.”
The comment on the Navy was typical. My father`s stories or statements of fact didn`t take much time to tell, and I could never guess when one would start or why. The stories didn`t add up to anything like a history, anything like a narrative. It was as if you found a paragraph torn out of a book.
One of them goes like this:
”It was 60 below the winter you were born. We had to run the machinery 24 hours a day to keep it from freezing.”
That was the earth-moving machinery at the spillway. They ran the diesel engines day and night; even when it was too cold to work, they kept the engines throbbing to keep the radiators from freezing. I was born at Ft. Peck, as was my older sister. Actually, it was 1936, the winter she was born, that the thermometer stuck at 63 degrees below zero. There is a photograph of the frozen thermometer in the files at Ft. Peck. It was only 40 below when I was born.
Until I saw that photograph I thought I had been born at a particularly inconvenient time.
The objective proof, in our family, that the Corps of Engineers was the wrong outfit centers on the only other event other than the Life cover story that made Ft. Peck newsworthy. That was the Big Slide.
On Sept. 22, 1938, 5 million yards of mud and rock broke loose from the dam and buried eight men. I was 6 months old. Exactly 43 years later, my father died. He was 76.
They dug two bodies out of the mud. Six men are still buried there, somewhere under Ft. Peck lake. One of the lost bodies was that of Nelson P. Van Stone Sr., age 31. It says in the official report that his death was
”unavoidable.” Sixty workers died in the whole project between 1933 and 1939, and the two most commonly listed causes were ”unavoidable” and
”inattention,” with ”disobedience of instructions” a close third. None was charged against the policies or practices of the Corps of Engineers.
My father did not know any of the men killed in the slide. There were 10,000 employees at the Ft. Peck Dam. They really didn`t need that many people, but the whole purpose of the Depression-era project was to make work. Eighty percent of the employees were hired from the welfare rolls, and very few of them could operate the big machinery used to build dams. They did a lot of the work with shovels and rakes and horse-drawn scrapers and small tractors like the ones just coming into use on the local farms.
One day, a piece of the dam the size of a modern skyscraper laid on its side slipped away and crashed out into the lake above the dam, killing Nelson P. Van Stone Sr. and seven other men.
Someday I would like to meet Nelson P. Van Stone Jr., whose father was buried in the lake. He should be about my age if he is still alive. He and I were born before penicillin, so you never can tell.
One weekend afternoon in 1947, I was trying to help my father plant a tree. The hole in the ground was full of water, and the tree wouldn`t stand up in the mud. I was in charge of the hose. This is what my father said:
”We`ll have to wait. There`s too much water, just like the Big Slide.” I already knew about the Big Slide. Everyone who has any connection with Ft. Peck knew about it. ”They built it too fast, and the water didn`t have time to settle out. It felt like jelly when you walked on it.”
”Why didn`t they wait?”
”Because those Army Engineers in Kansas City thought they knew everything.”
Nelson P. Van Stone Sr., whose death was unavoidable, was on the upstream face of the dam when the slide started. Men who were higher up were able to run to the top and ride the slide like a wave. Men who were closer to the edges of the slide were able to run across the face of the dam to a safe place. Eight people were in the wrong place, and the big, wet slide carried them down into the lake and buried them.
This is what Nelson P. Van Stone Sr. said when he realized he couldn`t get out of the slide. Ralph E. Anglen heard him say it. Ralph E. Anglen was washed into the lake, too, but he rode the big wave of mud out into the lake and ended up on a new island. Anglen told the stenographer at the official inquest that he saw ”Mr. Van Stone . . . as he went out of sight, and I heard him say:
”`Goodbye, boys.”`
I take that as a true account. No matter what Mr. Van Stone felt like screaming, or cursing, or begging, he was, after all, a man of his time. He was going to die alone, and there was really only one thing left to say:
”Goodbye, boys.”
When Cpl. Henry Scollen of M Troop was retreating at the Little Big Horn, part of Capt. Reno`s unit of survivors, Cpl. Scollen was shot. The last thing he said was:
”Goodbye, boys.”
Not in control of his destiny, but in control of himself, was Van Stone. He owed no man anything, he asked nothing. I sat for an hour in the basement of the headquarters building, turning the flimsy onionskin carbons of the inquest. That is the way they all talked, the survivors who spoke to the stenographer. No one complained, no one blamed anyone. One of them remembered running across the face of the dam, up to the railroad track that was used to haul in the rock facing for the upstream side of the dam, and the railroad track was twisting like a snake, and he said, ”Had we better cross on it?”
And the other man said, ”Hell, we have to.”
There in the quiet basement, on a Sunday afternoon, I heard my father talking, him dead those five years, but the voice audible from those old pages. What had always seemed to me to be a little curt, too short, was only him talking as a man had to talk, and a man did not have to talk very much.
So I sat there, knowing that outside the building the bare Montana hills stretched away to the horizon, toward Glasgow, where I was born, west to Chinook, where he was born. I leafed through the depositions over and over again, hearing the voices of men talking to men. And then I remembered two things I had not been able to think much about.
Before my father died he decided to be cremated, and to have the ashes scattered at sea by the Navy, whenever the Navy got around to it, without anyone present except the crew of the ship. I met a Navy captain who had performed the brief service on such occasions, and I remembered asking what the ashes were like, and he remarked that they were mostly very fine and very light. ”They drift away and float on the water,” he said.
”They are a palpable dust,” I heard myself saying, and he asked,
”What?”
I said, ”It`s just an odd way to say something floats on water.”
The second thing I remembered was what my father said before I got into the rental car and drove to the airport, the summer he knew he was dying. He gave me a hug, which was unusual, and he said:
”Goodbye, buddy.”
