I was a Tuesday child, born on the Ides of March, and thus came into the world on the 1,989 th anniversary of the leaving of it, through bloody assassination, of the tyrant and dictator Julius Caesar. Sic semper tyrannus , and that was decidedly the end of that . I was born in the middle of March, in the middle of America, in the middle of the last century, the second of four children in a middle-class family. It was a very middling sort of advent.
But my birth was a little unusual in one respect, and was an appropriate entrance for a future gardener. For I was borne into the world by a plant, in fact the castor plant, ricinus communis . The oil from the beans (seeds, really) of this plant is used around the world in folk medicine to induce labor contractions, and has been scientifically proven in the U.S. to accomplish that purpose, though I don’t think it is used that way very much these days. My mother, very much ready for labor to begin, used this method to get on with the process that brought me into the world, on greased skids you might say, or more accurately as a result of the contractions induced by ingesting castor oil. It all sounds rather messy and desperate, as no doubt in reality it was. My mother had been married young at the age of nineteen and I was born when she was only twenty-one.
We lived in Harvey, Illinois, a suburb on Chicago’s South Side; then, it was just another Chicago neighborhood, but today it is rather run down and poor looking. We did not live there long, however, and moved to Colorado that summer, when I was just under six months old. My parents suffered badly at the time from allergies acquired growing up in Racine, Wisconsin and living in Chicago, where my father was a newly minted CPA with the national firm of Arthur Anderson. They wanted to move somewhere with cleaner, drier air and scanned the Chicago papers for listings of jobs in the west. And they found one they liked the look of in Grand Junction, Colorado, then a small town of about 35,000 people and the center of a small uranium boom. Uranium mining had erupted all over the west as a result of the weapons that ended World War II, stimulating local economies and enriching many people, who wandered around the wild and barren western landscape with Geiger counters, looking like the slightly craven high-tech prospectors they no doubt were.
In Grand Junction, the young Atomic Energy Commission had built a processing facility that milled the uranium. This was the first step in the long process that eventually produced nuclear fuel and weapons-grade uranium for America’s push into nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. It would defend the West during the Cold War and, eventually, spiral into an arms race with such lofty levels of expense and sophistication that it would decisively end the Cold War, basically by bankrupting the Soviet Union and dismantling its Evil Empire of hostage states and republics. This small milling operation needed an accountant, and this is the job my father accepted, only having been west of the Mississippi once in his life, on a college joy ride to Wyoming with some buddies in the 1940s. So he and my mother bundled my older brother and me into an old station wagon and drove about 1400 miles across country – almost all on two-lane roads, of course, this being before the days of interstate highways – to start this new life. There was no Eisenhower Tunnel under the Continental Divide in those days either, and the main road across the Colorado Rockies was to drive over Loveland Pass, which was beautiful in summer but could be very perilous in the winter months.
I have a black and white photograph of that trip that I like: somewhere in the Colorado mountains on a crisp September morning, we had found a campground and stopped for breakfast. We are at a picnic table in the forest; my dad is wearing jeans and a white tee-shirt and my mom is wearing a black sweater. They both look so young and glamorous: like Marlon Brando running away with Ann-Margret. Both of them are drinking hot coffee out of a thermos, my older brother is playing, and I am in some sort of car seat, being a baby. A young, happy family in the mountains of Colorado, confidently on their way to a new life in the exotic and unknown west. We pulled into town on a hot day in early September, and moved into a tiny house on a rather poor street on Lincoln Avenue (just a dead-end street, really) on Orchard Mesa.
Children growing up in America today are much photographed and videotaped, but pictures from the era I am describing, while then becoming more common, were preciously rare by today’s standard. The childhoods of today’s children are extensively documented, but we were one of the last generations of American children that have only our own memories and a few photographs that we can use to reconstruct for ourselves our early days. As a result, I don’t remember much about life before I was about six years old. I do have one memory that is very early and which I can precisely date, however, and it is very precious to me. It was from December 1956 and I was only twenty-one months old.
I know the month because it is a memory of being on a train with my brother and my mother and the only train ride we took that fits was the one that month when my mother took us by train back to Chicago and then on to Racine to see her family, whom she had not seen since moving to Colorado. And the specific memory involves the part of that trip where the train, after coursing through the Rocky Mountains for some time and going through tunnel after tunnel, finally comes out of the mountains in the high foothills northwest of Denver, before beginning its steep switchback descent onto the broad plains where Denver lies. Then, as now, the passenger train comes upon this part of its journey suddenly in the early evening, after dark in December. And there, on the broad dark plain below, lay the city of Denver, sparkling in its prodigious sprawl of twinkling lights, the Queen City of the Plains. And that is my first conscious memory of life, looking down on the spectacular lights of Denver through the cold train window at night, still a baby really. I can close my eyes and see it still, so many years later.
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