In late November, 1985, after 30 years of marriage and life in a small Texas town, my father left my mother and all the friends and family he had in the world.  In a move that bewildered all who knew him, he struck out alone for the northern reaches of Montana.  One must have known him then to understand how wildly radical this move was for him.

My father was not an adventurous man.  He was a man of roots and routine.  Like many poor children of the Depression – he and his two brothers slept every night of their boyhood on cots in the screened porch of the tiny house his parents rented in Palestine, Texas, because so many extended family had taken refuge in their two bedroom, one bath house – he sought security in work, family and community.  He never ventured beyond east Texas until his service in the Air Force, and later for a few days each summer when we took camping trips to Colorado.

That he could deracinate himself from all that he knew was incomprehensible.  By means I still don’t know, he was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to manage the health clinic at the Rocky Boy’s Agency near Box Elder, Montana, a Chippewa Cree reservation about 30 miles south of our border with Canada.  As we say here in Texas, if it wasn’t exactly nowhere, you could see nowhere from there.

Bear Paw Mountains and plains on the Rocky Boy reservation

This man who for three decades shaved every morning before donning a tie and button-down shirt, and had never seen more than a few inches of rare short-lived Texas snow, drove to the Montana plains in a 2-wheel drive Buick (a blizzard in northern Wyoming left him stranded in his car for more than a day), adopted clothing worthy of Jim Bridger, and grew a thick dark beard.

I didn’t speak to my father for almost two years after he left my mother.  That was the only time in his life that I knew him to behave dishonorably.  Mom was devastated; her sons were angry.  Though we had all long since left home and begun making lives of our own, my brothers and I were ripped from the home and family that still rooted us.

Indian boys at the Rocky Boy’s Agency

But I still loved my father.  So in May, 1987, I went to see him, to try to understand why he had left us, and to learn about his new life.  From our drive under the indescribable concave Montana sky to the reservation from the Great Falls airport, through a week at the agency, and the meandering three-day road trip back to Texas (where he had business for a few days), I learned more about my father than I had in all my life before that time.

I never learned why he left my mother and the life he worked so hard to build – and I never completely forgave him for it – but I came to understand why he sought a new life in a strange world, and why he came to love a tribe and people incomprehensibly different from any he had known before, a love and admiration he kept to the day he died.

Annual dance ceremony at the Rocky Boy’s Agency

I have lost every palpable thing from that time – photos, journal, trinkets picked up along the way – gone with the old house in hurricane Ike in 2008.  All that is left are memories as faded as an old photograph and fading still more with every year: walking the silent, green Bear Paw mountains, unchanged for ages; the lonesome winds blowing through the lonely village of Box Elder; the vast expanse of the Montana plains; a haunting visit to the Little Bighorn battlefield; throwing snowballs at each other at the top of Raton Pass after a spring snowstorm.

Highway leading east of the reservation, the start of our road trip

I don’t think of these things often any more.  They came back to me today when I began reading again a book my father gave me on that trip: Son of the Morning Star, by Evan S. Connell.  I was lead back to that book by way of an aimless succession of books about American Indians.  Memories of my father came back with it.

So tonight I toast my father with the best whisky I have on hand (though I also never understood his fondness for cheap blended Scotch) and with a sadness that caught me by surprise.  We lost each other once, then met again.  Through a long meandering drive through the high plains of Montana and the western mountains, we discovered that we were different men than we had ever known.  And we learned again that we loved each other.

A photo of Alan Meyer, as a young man, who I wrote about recently.  He was as handsome as he was dignified; as dignified as he was compassionate; as compassionate as he was wise.  What I wouldn’t give to have a few more hours with him…

Growing up, I was blessed with a great-uncle named Alan Meyer.  No relation – the surname rather gives that away.  But we called him Uncle Alan and loved him very much.  He could scarcely have been more different from my family and boyhood life: he was cosmopolitan, a graduate of Yale, a successful advertising executive in New York and Dallas, dressed with a sartorial elegance quite strange to us, and he was Jewish.

He was the life-long companion – ‘significant other’ we would say today – of my blood great-uncle, Harry Sivia, brother of my paternal grandmother, and a fine man in his own right.

To my parents’ credit, they were the first to welcome uncles Alan and Harry into our extended family, in the early 1960s, as a same-sex couple, with a warmth and sincerity fully equal to the love and hospitality they offered to everyone else.  To my brothers and I, Alan was no less a part of our family than anyone else who sat at our holiday meal tables and drank whisky and told tales with the other Selden men on the porch on pleasant evenings.

Jewish?  Gay?  We little understood what those meant, and cared even less.  Uncle Alan was our ideal of a gentleman (we loved Harry, too, but brilliant though he was, he was a curmudgeon).  I can only wish to possess half the wit, innate kindness and grace of my uncle Alan.

Today I  finally got around to examining a few of Alan’s personal effects that were left to me after his death.  I found a small book of poems that he and a friend published in April, 1945, while Alan was still serving in the U.S. Army.  He never spoke of the book, and no one in my family knew of it or that he had written poems in his youth.

In his honor, I’ll share of few of the poems here.  The first poem in the book helps me understand how this most gentle man could choose to serve in a violent conflict.  Like the rest of the family which adopted him and loved him as one of us, he was dedicated to “the neverdying struggle to be free.”

THE CAUSE FOR WHICH WE FIGHT

(To My Parents)

If it come to that and in the service                                                                                                Of the cause for which we fight I shall indeed                                                                             Be called to sacrifice my life,                                                                                                              I pray That you will hear these things:

I realize my gift cannot compare                                                                                                    To yours who gave an only son you loved                                                                        (However little merited that love).                                                                                                My gift was negative – I ceased to be,                                                                                          And by that action made my life a whole;                                                                                    But yours was positive: you lost what was.

I loved and honored you above all else,                                                                                      And yet I have not honored you enough,                                                                                  Who built me, made me fit to serve – and loved.                                                                      This do I know, and this do I regret –                                                                                            But anguish nor remorse remake the past!

Know you that fact; I’m gone and that is all;                                                                                Be proud you gave whom country could employ                                                                            In her behalf when she had need of men.                                                                                     Of this you may be sure:                                                                                                                     I served my country and my countrymen –                                                                                 And well I served the cause for which we fight:                                                                           The neverdying struggle to be free.

(AHM, Ft. Monmouth, N.J., Feb., 1943)