An Old Man Walks and Remembers

The old man walks every day, averaging five or more miles, every season, except when the weather is really bad. He doesn’t walk in the rain. A little dog — a mini-Aussie — is his steadfast companion. She stays at his heels. If the old man doesn’t hear a car approaching from behind, the dog circles the old man excitedly until he stops to see what the fuss is about. If he stops to talk to a neighbor driving by — a regular occurrence — the dog barks, urging him to keep moving. The old man didn’t want the dog, even though he loves them and has had others in his life. When his previous dogs died, a couple of small mutts, he swore he’d never get another. It was too hard to lose them, he said; broke his heart. Then a granddaughter asked him to take the mini-Aussie. The old man was reluctant and initially kept his heart hard. But dogs have a way of melting and then mending hearts. The pair now watch out for each other, depend on each other. Covering miles, they’ve bonded.

The old man is two years shy of his 80th birthday. He was born at home, on July 15, 1940, on land his grandfather homesteaded, then passed on to the old man’s father, who passed it on to the old man who will pass it on to his son who, like the old man, has spent his entire life on this same patch of ground.

His eyes aren’t as sharp as they used to be; the old man wears the large-lensed, metal-framed glasses favored by men of his vintage. Yet his vision is keen: he sees the big and small details of his part of the world — the Payette National Forest, Meadows Valley, the Little Salmon River and all the creeks that run out of the forest down through the valley into the river. He knows them well. He notices the changes from season to season as well as from decade to decade. He’s a naturalist, paying close attention to the flora and fauna of the land he covers on foot every day, grew up exploring.

He fondly recalls a childhood full of freedom to roam. The old man attended first and second grades in a one-room country schoolhouse down the hill from his own home, riding his horse part way, then walking the rest across a neighbor’s land. Most of the other kids there shared his surname — his brother and some cousins — or that of one or two other pioneer families. By the time he entered third grade, the country schools were consolidated and he spent the rest of his…

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