I think I may have briefly found the Christmas spirit in South Dakota in 1974. I had just talked myself into the first real job of my life. And about time, too: at the age of 24, I had a wife and two boys. We’d spent the previous years living in Appalachia’s backwoods trying our hand at homesteading. My job duties had included ploughing with a team of horses, butchering hogs and building structures of logs. We raised most of our food and hadn’t participated in the mainstream economy.
We were making a new start in South Dakota where Sue had grown up. We arrived on the western plains in a ground blizzard with only what we could carry.
Our plans for Christmas were very modest. We waded through knee-deep snow in the Black Hills and cut a picture-perfect blue spruce for a Christmas tree. I delighted in its symmetry and deep color. It was nothing like the holiday trees of my youth that grew in north-central Texas. Those raggedy a** cedars grew with dense foliage and sometimes in the classic cone-tapered form but they were hard to find and prickly as a woman spurned. They were as fragrant as the cedars of Lebanon.
In my childhood, the collection of ornaments was rarely added to, but like the family itself suffered brokenness and attrition. There wasn’t a complete set of anything. The glass globes were tarnished and foxed like old mirrors. We had “icicles,” narrow strips of lead foil that dusted our hands: the very thing for growing children to handle.
Here in Rapid City we didn’t even have these meager decorations for our beautiful tree. Five-year-old Aaron helped string endless garlands of bone-white popcorn and cranberries round and round the tree. I hand-painted winter scenes on colored glass globes and buried them like Easter eggs deep in the foliage of the tree. We scissored and glued chains of dull-colored construction paper. Displaying a remarkable lack of judgment I formed aluminum foil reflectors around a hundred birthday candles and attached them directly to the resin rich twigs of our early American tree. Almost every item on the tree was handmade.
The search for a job paralyzed me. The employment office had only listings that required experience. Now, I had dug graves and ditches, and played music for Ozark square dances. I’d worked the green chain at a sawmill and labored in the tobacco fields, but all that experience didn’t equal useful training it seemed.
Someone told me about a farrier who ran a stable at the airbase 20 miles east of town who might need help. With rough-forged ironwork from my blacksmithing attempts in hand, I went to see him. To this day I’m amazed that I persuaded a nationally known farrier to take me on as a salaried apprentice on the basis of my horse lifestyle and “blacksmithing experience.”
But I needed a work vehicle.
It took most of a box of matches to light the hundred tiny candles on the tree. The baby couldn’t take his eyes off the sharp points of light. “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” played softly on the radio and Aaron said, “Someone’s outside.” I gave the baby to Sue and went to the door.
A pearl-green 1949 three-quarter-ton Chevy pickup truck stood by the curb. The fenders were full and curved like river rocks. A young airman dressed in a greasy jumpsuit leaned into the open engine compartment. He stood up wiping his hands on a cloth. He had a sandy brush-cut, bright blue eyes and a harelip. He slammed the hood and extended his hand as he walked toward me. I knew his face from the little charismatic church I attended. He was painfully shy and we’d never spoken.
“The body is clean, there’s no rust and she gets 17 miles to the gallon,” he said proudly. He said he had heard at church that I had found work out by the airfield but I didn’t have a car.
“I’d like you to have the truck. I don’t want anything for it. I threw a set of chains in the back.” He almost smiled.
It proved to be a wonderful truck. It faithfully got me to work through those South Dakota blizzards. It had a low granny gear that would plow deep snow if I put a few hundred pounds in back and strapped on those chains. And it got 17 miles to the gallon.
