I have so much character, it's shooting out my ass

I was reminiscing to my kids about what life was like when I was their age and I got the feeling they think I’m full of crap. I could tell by the way they kept saying, “Mom, you’re so full of crap!”

My kids are wrong.

For instance, I remember rolling down the highway in the back of my dad’s truck. Not in the back seat of my Dad’s truck, sillies. In the BACK of my dad’s truck, with the leaking gas can and the toe-squishing spare tire and the sharp, stabby, dead pine needles.

As strict believers in Darwin’s law of the jungle, the bigger kids always laid claim to the coveted “spot against the cab”, where they were slightly protected from the 55 mile-per-hour, eye-piercing tornado of sawdust, twigs, and dead bugs. The younger and smaller you were, the closer to the tailgate you had to sit. That was the worst spot because your lips were all that stood between you and French kissing some bug guts.

My kids, raised in 3-strap industrial strength car seats until the 3rd grade, can’t fathom it. In fact, I suspect they wistfully think riding in the back of a truck was actually some fantastical form of tingly transportation.

The truth is this:

I was raised in a town called Trail, located smack dab between the Middle of Nowhere and Get Me The Hell Out of Here.

Back in the day, people lived in Trail for a variety of reasons. Generally, they had zero tolerance for a) city life, b) city convenience, c) city people. Some of them were hiding from the law or their red-headed ex-wives. But mostly, they just scorned the city and all its various elements. The population, counting our family, was approximately 16.

In 1987, my parents found their paradise there. Calling it “paradise” was totally subjective - a 30 acre mountain of old growth trees and dense brush and fat rattlesnakes and dusty red clay and hearty poison oak bushes and an enormous willow patch. We called it The Mountain.

Their plan was for us to build a house and some character*, not necessarily in that order. Now, anybody can tell you that building a house while living in said house is like hot pants on a truck stop hooker - never a good idea. But my parents were wide-eyed and square-jawed and determined.

This was a time long before children were allowed their own opinions, so my siblings and I were not consulted about the decision. And we didn’t argue about it either, unless we wanted to have the privilege of picking out The Mountain’s first willow switch.

So, I packed up my pink Rick Springfield t-shirt and my Wham .45s and said goodbye to things like microwaves and Night Traxx on TBS and electricity and indoor plumbing and pavement and you get the idea. (The Wham .45s ended up stuck on the wall for decoration… no electricity meant no record player, silly rabbit.)

We actually lived four miles outside of Trail. If you looked it up on a map, it would be on the meridian of Holy-Shit-People-Live-There?!.

Trail proper consisted of a post office (called Trail Post Office), a tiny market (Trail Market, obviously), and a tavern (named Trail Tavern). Folks in Trail didn’t waste energy coming up with witty names for their businesses. They left that to the folks in the cities.

As a kid, it puzzled me that if a town is going to have three buildings, shouldn’t one of them be a church or a bank or some other fine, upstanding civil institution?

Obviously, I didn’t understand what it must be like for an adult to live in Trail.

That tavern was necessary.

(*This was our parents’ battle cry: it builds character. The harder/messier the wound/work/lesson, the better the character. For example: My brother: “Dad, I cut half of my thumb off splitting kindling.” Dad (slapping a well used back-pocket bandana over the wound): “Scars build character.” If that’s the case, my brother has more character in his thumb than both of my kids put together.)