Unearthing a life.....

I came across this old photo this afternoon and scanned it so's I could forward it on to a childhood friend that I just made contact with after about fifty-four years. This fellow's name was Knute Holstein. He was more-or-less a hermit who had a cobbled together place up on Royal Slope decades before there was a Highway 26 running across it, or irrigation, or Royal City, or any of that. The rumor (amongst us kids) was that Knute had killed a man once ... maybe even two men. A Swede with considerable accent, he lived up on the 'slope' with his chickens and a small herd of goats. If you drove the old dirt road that went by his place, the goats all scrambled up on the roof of a shed and watched your approach. Maybe once a month he'd drive his old Model T Ford down to Smyrna for 'supplies'. For him, supplies were the occasional piece of mail, a large box of soda crackers and some tins of 'snoose'. Other than that he seemed to live off his chickens and goats.

I think that is my '53 Chevy in the background, so this probably was taken ca 1955. The sloped tarpaper surface on the left is the covered stairway from our Section House porch down into our dirt-domed root cellar. It was also the late summer night escape route from the upstairs bedrooms, across the kitchen roof, and down the incline .... to meet other teens who might have arrived on horseback in the dark. The dark chunk of building on the right was a small garage that my brother and I turned into a summer 'bunkhouse'. The white building in the background was the section laborer's house. A few years after this (and after I was long gone) it burned to the ground one night, killing the friend and neighbor who lived there.

I watched Tim Russert raking Gov. Richardson over the coals on the TV this morning. Russert was in his face with the usual "here's what you wrote two years ago and here's what you said last week ... how do you explain the contradiction?" And it doesn't do Richardson any good to say "I was wrong then," or "I've had to change my mind," Russert is only interested in carping on about contradictions. I'm sick and tired of all these talking heads and talking news-heads and shouting psuedo-news-heads doing their level best to DESTROY every candidate who dares to run for the presidency. I'm even getting tired of them destroying the candidates I hate. Richardson seemed like a nice guy. Russert not so much.