Gone to Milford

The lonely road, Highway 130, between Cedar City and Milford, Utah.

Several months back, when I accepted an invitation to appear at the inaugural Southern Utah Book Festival, I was excited. My sponsor, Kase Johnstun, has become a good friend these past couple of years, and a chance to do two of my favorite things—travel and talk about books and writing—was not to be missed.

But there was something else, something that had weighed heavily on my thoughts for most of my life. Being in the book festival's host city, Cedar City, would put me less than an hour from a little town called Milford, a place I'd been hoping for decades I might return to, a place that had proved elusive in that it's not really on the way to anywhere else. I've lived in the West most of my life, and save for the summer when I was nine years old, Milford had been vapor trail in my memories, a place I could close my eyes and picture, a place that sometimes slipped into my dreams, and a place that remained out of reach through the 45 years that stood between me and it and our one season together.

I pined for it sometimes, which is strange, because the memories it holds for me are not happy ones. Life that summer in 1979 seemed like the edge of the knife, or a bullet chambered in a gun. The adults in my immediate sphere—my dad and my stepmother and her son and a host of others—were angry and unreasonable, at each other like crazed dogs, wild and vituperative and ugly. And I was just a boy, one who cherished those summers with my dad, away from the suburban life I knew the rest of each year. I sensed the danger around us that summer but didn't know how to escape it.

​We'll get to all that. But first, I had to get to Milford.

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“Where did you meet her?” I nodded at Denise, who was on the other side of the store, looking at eight-tracks.
Jerry smiled. “Nice, right?”
That was one way to put it. Denise—her long hair blonde, her tanned legs sprouting out of short cut-off jeans—was perhaps the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

The Summer Son, Page 38

Upon arriving in Milford around 8 a.m. on October 20, I spun through town, reorienting my memories—and, truly, it was like an unstoppable rush—and then I found the little gas station/convenience store I'd mined in my memories nearly 15 years ago as I wrote The Summer Son and the bit above. The building frequented by my then-stepbrother and the townie girlfriend he met in Milford was still there; I'm certain of that. But time has its way, even in a place as cast in amber as Milford seemed, and that old store had been upgraded and rebuilt, and perhaps given a sense of humor it had lacked 45 years ago when I had nuked a refrigerated burrito into hard carbon, to the ire of the proprietor.

On this day, I found a bored, talkative store clerk named Dayna who wanted to know who and what I remembered. I pitched her a few surnames, and she said, yep, we have some of those. She assured me I'd get no trouble from the locals while I walked around town, as long as I wasn't from California. I thanked her for her time and took off. I knew what I wanted to see.

​Knew what I was a little frightened to see, too.

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She reared back with a haymaker, which landed harmlessly against Dad’s arm. That pissed Marie off more. She shoved past him into the hall and began chucking toiletries. He ducked under a can of shaving cream. It hit the table in front of me and caromed off my forehead.

The Summer Son, Page 61

The motel where I lived in the summer of 1979.

We lived that summer—Dad, his wife, me—in a motel room that was clean and tidy but nothing special, exactly the kind of place Dad preferred when he was on a drilling job and whatever his housing cost was would come off his own bottom line.

Problem was, there wasn't enough oxygen in that little room, not with the way the two of them were fighting. It wasn't particularly physically violent—that's the imagination part taking hold of the memory for fictional purposes—but it was, in its way, almost worse, because it was ceaseless. They knew every button to push with each other, and they did so in a way that seemed to me, even then, to be addictively gleeful. 

I spent a lot of time that summer in the parkway strip across the street from the motel, where I stood again 45 years later as I took the picture above, capturing a motel that's neither clean nor tidy nor recommended, Dayna told me.

Dad and his wife's separation from each other—the first one, anyway—came not in Milford but back at their home in New Mexico, during a weeklong break from Dad's work. He spilled an ashtray and told me to clean it up. His wife told him to clean it up himself. A wildly grotesque fight ensued, with each screaming at the other that it was time for divorce, and all the while I thought it was my fault because I just didn't do what I was told fast enough. 

​That's in the book, too. Sometimes a memory is enough and you can just hold imagination in abeyance. You don't need it.

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This went on a few seconds more, with Toby’s arms flailing and Dad shaking his head. Finally, Toby clearly said “Fuck you,” and Dad dropped him to his knees with a quick, chopping punch to the solar plexus. I stumbled backward at seeing it.

The Summer Son, Page 256

I'm pretty sure this place is where Dad did his drinking each night after work. If I'm right, I'd have been on a barstool next to him.

Things turned dark for Dad when we came back to Milford absent a wife and a functioning marriage. His yearning for drink, frequent back then in the best of times, became unquenchable. He began leading with violence in his encounters with fellow drillers, his stepson, acquaintances, hired hands. I've always said the biggest victory in his life is that he never rolled physical abuse downhill at me after suffering it in his own childhood. But I still took it in from the cheap seats.

The first time I saw him punch a man came in Milford, in an alleyway after an old drunken fool who'd been teasing me in the bar followed me outside when I chased after the bar owner's dog. The old man grabbed me by the wrist, and I screamed, and Dad came flying to where we were, uncuffed me from the man's grip, and deposited him on his ass. Justified, I'd say.

The second time, I didn't see the punch, only heard it. Again, we were back in New Mexico, that same summer, and a fellow rancher with whom Dad had been feuding came to the house to renew the beef. I was in the kitchen with the wife of one of Dad's friends when I heard the slap of an open hand against a soft cheek, then the pathetic sobs of the struck man. I don't know whether he had it coming or not, but I felt the shame that man felt, the emasculation. Dad chased him out of there, into the night, and told him not to come back unless he wanted to know what dead felt like. I'm certain he meant it. I went to sleep that night whispering a silent wish into the air that the guy would have the good sense to stay away.

Again and again that summer, I walked with my father as he plodded to the precipice of rage and violence. Sometimes, I could walk him back without incident. Sometimes, I watched in horror as he plunged in against a world he thought was mistreating him.

​And I never said a thing, to anybody. Whom could I tell? Who could stop it? Had I told my mother in one of our weekly phone calls, there would have never been another trip to be with my old man, and that I could not bear. Little boys love their daddies. So I shut up and took it.

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I could feel the coming freedom of hanging out in the field, guzzling soda pop to my heart’s content, playing video games. The rigid structure I chafed against at home—school, homework, sports—would be thrown off in Milford.

The Summer Son, Page 28

My dad spent that summer digging exploratory wells on both sides of the Ely Highway.

As chaotic and crazed as that summer was, as unhinged from any kind of healthy living as Dad was, he was a worker without peer. I don't recall his missing a single day out in the field, digging exploratory wells. Rides out to work, early every morning, were contented and quiet, with my sleepy head bouncing between the shoulders of my dad and my adult stepbrother as I rode in the middle of the pickup's bench seat.

Forty-five years later, I reveled in seeing that route again, of driving past the ruins of the mining town of Frisco, of looking at and remembering the scrub brush and the rugged peaks, of recounting the particulars of the work at which Dad was so good. He started earlier than everyone else, and he stayed at it later, and that made him valuable to the companies that wrote the checks, until the money stopped flowing. Four years after that summer, in 1983, the drilling economy bottomed out, and by 1985 repossession had come for Dad's drilling rig, casting him into a crisis of work identity that he never managed to surmount.

In 1979, though, he was a deeply troubled man possessed of a work ethic that might have been the one thing that kept him from entirely spiraling away from me. He taught me to drive a stick shift that summer. He trusted me to do it, too, and pressed me into duty after firing a helper in a rage and having no one else to drive the pickup. He sometimes laughed at my jokes. He was usually nice about it when he told me to shut up. Usually.

I deeply admired him. I sometimes feared him. I daily feared for him. And it would be years yet before I felt as though I'd started to understand him, a process that stumbles along even as I lay down these words today. Back then, I couldn't have imagined he'd make it to 45, let alone 85. Sometimes now, I wonder if time has forgotten to swoop in and collect him.

But it hasn't. What's coming for him is coming for all of us.

The long-stilled kilns of Frisco as seen from the Ely Highway.

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I thought of lessons and losses, and of the burden I had taken on. I decided I would carry this alone. I hoped that my shoulders were strong enough to hold the load.

The Summer Son, Page 300

This terrible, beautiful view. That's Milford at the end of the road there, as seen from the Ely Highway as you're coming back into town. This is what I saw at the end of every workday as we returned to hot meals and hot showers and the many entanglements my father could find, even in a town of fewer than 1,500 souls.

The work was rote, predictable, pleasurable in its way. Dig a hole, move the equipment, dig another. Each return to Milford, on the other hand, came as a wild card. Drunkenness? Maybe. Fighting? Certainly. The worst human impulses, on full display, allowing no escape? Yes. I saw things no child should see. I mourn for the kid I was, to have those hard things visited upon him without a choice in the matter, even as I'm thankful for the fodder. Much was taken from me in Milford. Much was given to me that I've been able to lean on in my life and my work, and for that, gratitude sprouts among the shattered pieces.

Two days after I saw Milford again, I sat in Dad's little dining room and asked him if he remembered that summer. He did, but not with the clarity I possessed. Perhaps that's not surprising, given the gulf in our ages and our divergent roles back then. He had a mind for work and a crude method for blunting his pain. My mind, then and now, sops everything up. Pain is the straw I try to spin into...something. Understanding, in the best moments. Acceptance. Empathy. I need all of it.

I told Dad what I'd seen, the town fixtures that hadn't changed much, the highways stretching to horizons, the memories that whispered from every vista. He shook his head. "I don't remember much about Milford," he said. It's the constant tension in our relationship. He leaves the past where it is. I dredge it, looking for lessons and shiny objects amid the wreckage.

Here's one: Despite it all, I wouldn't trade my summer in Milford for something else. There's not enough in anybody's pockets to shake me loose from it now.