At Dave’s memorial service at St. Peter’s Methodist Church, I arranged three of pairs of his shoes beneath the altar—a nontraditional centerpiece. I didn’t include the dusty black, back-of-the-closet wedding and funeral dress pair. But the three in which he lived his adult life. Because Dave’s shoes far outmatched photos to illustrate his life, and he would have returned from the dead if I’d tried to create a PowerPoint.
Dave’s Converse All-Star high tops. Solid white or black—heaven forbid sporty red or trendy patterns. They served him for mowing the yard and feeding the rabbits. Digging into the duff as he braced his body and chain sawed a dying larch and split it into kindling. Inflating the raft and rowing us down the North Fork and clambering out over mossy rocks to a sandy picnic beach. He wore them—heart in his throat–to scale the orange ladder to three rungs from the top so that he could linseed the big cabin ridgepole. To gather each little dripping, towel-wrapped daughter from my arms, fresh from the outdoor shower, and carry her in to the fire where her pajamas waited. To walk us to the beaver pond. To vacuum his parents’ house; rototill; move furniture; shoot free throws. And for several years, to sit in the dark, smoke, listen to Joan Baez, down a six pack of Michelob Lite, and revisit the marriages he’d blown, his parents’ disappointment, and, how close he had come to losing his children.
Dave wore his thick-soled, brown Rockport oxfords every day to work and for speaking engagements, book signings, and classes. If he wore his brown corduroy pants, his button-down blue shirt, and a classy silk tie, he wore his Rockports. In them, he could walk the miles of Historical Society stacks; carry bound historic newspapers to waiting patrons from four metal staircases below in the archives; Xerox article after article; stand straight behind a podium for an hour and answer questions comfortably. He polished them every weekend. They bespoke the professional life his alcoholism had kept at bay too long. Dave in Rockports attended with perfect politeness, often joy, to shy old men spending their retirement researching historic tractors; to the fussbudget women who thought they’d invented genealogy; to the reluctant and timid teenagers who couldn’t believe how much fun it was to see a newspaper published on the day they were born. And finally to legislators chagrined to find that their idea wasn’t new. Dave loved Montana history. He loved helping other folks fall in love with it even more. He’d grown up schooled in the mental and physical attire of a college—his dad’s teaching world. He believed in a universe that ran better in proper dress and with dedicated civility. The day he donned his professional historian’s ensemble his life blossomed.
After Dave’s service, our writer friend Ivan queried me about the cowboy boots I’d placed alongside the Rockports and Converse high-tops. “Weren’t they,” he asked, “an affectation.” A puzzling question for me—especially coming from a guy born here in Montana, tethered to its ranching history for his successful publications But maybe not so unusual. Ivan knew better than most that Montana’s cowboy past, including its dress, had nothing in common with our Western fantasies. So, who knows? Dave bought his first pair of boots at fourteen when he started working at the McFarland’s dude ranch in Glacier National Park. The purchase is documented in his dad’s diary. De rigueur for a hand who saddled the horses every morning and flirted with young women from Maine at supper after a guiding the dudes all day down the river. Sexy as hell all the rest of his life with the 501 five-button Levi’s he wore low on his hips, a good leather belt and those same oxford cloth shirts—minus the tie. Boots were Dave’s choice for driving, football and basketball games, going to North Fork meetings and the county fair, sitting in the front row at an Ian Tyson concert, grocery store dates, Saturday hours at the Society, walking me across icy parking lots for a family dinner, shooting the breeze up some Forest Service road with the Fish, Wildlife and Parks bear man. Being a guy. Being a damned powerful and attractive guy when and for whom it counted. Being, there for a while in those first years, an angry guy who could move across a room, up to my face fast and threatening. Dave resoled and reheeled the same pair of boots for twenty years before buying new ones. Affectation? Not at all. The perfect choice for one-third of his soul.
I’ve given Dave’s boots to Amanda and her husband, thinking that Dave would welcome the next generation’s use. But kept the Rockports and Converse All-Stars. They are perhaps the most personal of Dave’s belongings that I have. They are now dusty, misshapen, no longer alive with use. But still powerful. The traffic-yellow paint of Dave’s last project spangles the high-tops and with them I am returned to the warm June day when Dave built a new platform for our garden sprinkler. ©
