A distant uncle’s lifelong influence on a little boy
December 12, 2004
Every little boy has a collection of heroes. Mine were mostly characters like Sky King, the airplane-flying rancher on Saturday morning TV, or Fury, the brave, gleaming black horse, or the Lone Ranger, a masked Samaritan with the silver bullets.
But I also had some real-life heroes, and one of them was my Uncle Bob.
I didn’t see much of Uncle Bob in my childhood, because he always lived a few hundred miles away from my home in Colorado. He worked for the Caterpillar Co., and he spent his 40-year career posted in Illinois and Arizona.
But once a year Caterpillar shut down its operations worldwide and employees were released for a two-week vacation, and that’s usually when I would get to see Uncle Bob and Aunt Lois for a day or two. They would pass through my hometown of Longmont to visit with Bob’s mother and sister, who were my grandmother and mom.
But that wasn’t their destination. Longmont was merely a stopping-off point at the start of a grand adventure.
Bob and Lois were always headed for journeys in the American wilderness – explorations of the high-altitude backcountry of Montana, or Wyoming, or Colorado. They loved to get as far away from people, and as close to nature, as they could on those vacations.
Adventure seemed to be in Uncle Bob’s blood. He was a navy pilot in World War II, and he met his sweetheart when he was working summers as a park ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. Even his college days were spent on a challenging adventure of the scholarly sort, earning a degree in mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.
But it was those summer vacations to exotic places – in the mind of a little boy – that captured my imagination. Equipped only with a tent, sleeping bags and some dehydrated packaged food, Uncle Bob and Aunt Lois would trek for days through the forests and meadows, far from the daily lives of millions of people who would never share their joy of a sunrise over a remote mountain lake, or the warmth of a campfire, or the beauty of a fragile alpine wildflower.
Those summer vacations turned into a lifelong venture for them, extending far after Bob’s retirement from Caterpillar in 1981. Just four years ago, when they were in their 70s, they departed for a 10-day canoe trip through the north Canadian wilderness, including a 400-mile stretch above the Arctic Circle – still spending nights in sleeping bags.
Uncle Bob was handy with more things than keeping a campfire going though. He used his hands and his talents to help build a house for his mother in Longmont and to build a home for him and his bride in Illinois.
I mostly remember those early days when they would pass through Longmont, and I was thrilled to ride “piggy back” on his broad shoulders, or to be swung through the air at the end of his arms as he turned in circles, making me so dizzy I couldn’t walk.
But it was those adventures of summer that truly caught my imagination. Later in my own life I was motivated by Bob and Lois’s expeditions when I traveled to India and Egypt and Turkey and Hong Kong and Peru. It was that sense of going places that I must have inherited from my uncle that sent me on a career in journalism, an adventure that took me far from the little town of Longmont.
My own mother and father, and schoolteachers along the way, had an influence of course. But it was Uncle Bob and Aunt Lois, departing on those mysterious trips of my youth, that expanded my horizons beyond those of a hometown boy.
It’s interesting to me how that sense of curiosity, that desire to explore the unknown, can be nurtured in such an incidental way – the brief encounter of a boy and his uncle for a couple of days each summer. But it’s undeniable that the effect was there.
Today, at the age of 81, Uncle Bob is embarking on a new adventure. Doctors discovered a pocket of cancer a couple of weeks ago, and a surgeon removed one of his kidneys last Tuesday. When I saw him in the hospital after his operation last week, he seemed as strong and determined as I always remembered him at the start of a journey.
I don’t think it will be too long before he’s back stoking the flames of a campfire, ready to fry another pan of fresh rainbow trout – and still a hero.
