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Boys and Guitars by Brad Knickerbocker Sustenance came not only from the wood we burned in the stove but, more important, from the writer’s paycheck. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Boys and Guitars
In the other room, I hear the boy loosening up with some old Peter, Paul, and Mary tunes. "Five Hundred Miles." "A ’Soalin’." Fatherly pride sets in as he jumps a generation to Led Zeppelin’s "Stairway to Heaven." Then he’s back to folk-picking "House of the Rising Sun."

I love hearing these old songs, these earnest songs, which I imagine is how my father would feel if I started noodling Hoagy Carmichael.

Finally, the boy settles down to the serious scales and chord progressions his guitar teacher will want to hear tomorrow—with a break for Neil Young’s "Needle and the Damage Done."

I suddenly wonder why this thirteen-year-old picks out the dark tunes, but then decide not to worry about it. He had new braces installed today—the heavy metal bands of adolescent life—and the music helps soothe the discomfort. Who says a kid can’t be a blues man?

Thirty years ago, I sat in a room like that . . . sorting though dreams and memories with music. Sometimes I still do.

Profile
My father, Brad Knickerbocker, works with wood—or so I thought in 1982. I was only six years old when we lived in Vienna, Virginia. Once farmland, our modest cul-de-sac served as home for commuters. Every morning my father hopped into his orange ’76 Volkswagen van and buzzed into Washington like a dedicated worker ant, along with thousands of other office workers whose homes orbited the city. Every evening he returned home just as the table was set for dinner. My world, however, consisted of the creek and a tangled clutch of woods that rolled into farmland behind our brick house. The distant office, the mysterious necktie, the skyscraped city itself were all linked to my father’s weekday world, a world largely myth to me.

One of my teachers at grade school asked me what my father did, and I answered with innocent logic, "He works with wood," for that is what I saw. On weekends he stayed home, and I saw him "at work"—out by the woodpile, hefting his battered maul and bringing it down on upright hunks of hickory. Later we fed the wood to the old cast iron stove that stood like a grandfather dwarf, snapping, popping, mumbling warmth into the living room. My father’s weekend chopping was an immediate, tangible "job" that made sense to me. Feeding the stove meant warmth for the family room, the center of our household.

Later I deduced that my father was known in the city world as a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, not a handler of mauls. He was a man who worked with words. My father’s name printed at the top of his articles became more impressive than the calluses he earned by gripping the wooden maul handle. I saw him go to work every day to write, like a coal miner rising before dawn to chip away at the earth, picking out the important parts and leaving the dross. This gave words importance—writing was serious stuff. Sustenance came not only from the wood we burned in the stove but, more important, from the writer’s paycheck.

In 1989 we moved to Ashland, Oregon, a place near giant trees older than our nation. My father no longer commutes to the city. In fact, his tie rack is graced with a healthy layer of dust. He writes at home now, when he’s not out scouring the West, rubbing elbows with sagebrush rebels and eco-warriors. Now I have the opportunity to see the writer at work. Or I can lure him away from his computer screen to go play in the environment: to hike up Wagner Butte or Mt. McLoughlin in the surrounding Siskiyou and Cascade mountains, to paddle the wetlands of Rocky Point. We no longer have a cast iron stove, and when I think of my dad’s work the sound of a maul swishing the air is replaced by the chatter of a keyboard. My father no longer works with wood—now he writes in the woods.

—Scott Knickerbocker

Bio
Brad Knickerbocker
Place of residence: Ashland, Oregon.
Birthplace: Muskegon, Michigan.
Grew up in: Delmar, New York.
Day job: Staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.
Education: B.A. in English, Hobart College, Geneva, New York (1964). Master’s degree in how to land single-seat jets on aircraft carriers (1966). Doctorate in how to do that at night after being shot at over the Ho Chi Minh trail (1968–69). Postdoctoral studies with Vietnam Veterans against the War (1970–71).
Current project: Cover the West for the Monitor, with a special emphasis on environmental issues.
Favorite book: An impossible question, but with bamboo slivers under my fingernails I would say A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold—then immediately regret it and say The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder, or Fools Crow by James Welch, or The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, or You Must Revise Your Life by William Stafford, or Dakota: A Spiritual Geography by Kathleen Norris, or the Bible, or The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, or Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, or. . . .
Belief: "I like to think that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos." (Saul Bellow.) "Love is the fulfilling of the law." (The Epistle of Paul to the Romans.)
Cravings: Hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with son Scott, then learn how to play clawhammer banjo as well as Bob Carlin or Cathy Fink.

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