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Excerpts from book nearing completion: My father tried, sort of, to steer me away from my early fascination with the empty spaces of the West, saying that there was no future in any of those places, that there was only loneliness. Which was, of course, what attracted me. He wanted to see me oriented toward some normal path in life, some sort of civilized profession, with a nice wife and family, security - the white picket fence syndrome. All things that he had never had. He saw the West largely in terms of various failures - abandoned towns, dried up wells, dead cows, dust storms, hoboes and drifters. That may be a Depression, Dust Bowl sort of mentality. Of course, while my father was trying to steer me down some normal path he lived alone at an isolated sort of ranch at the end of a dirt road in the mountains not too far from Los Angeles, with a scraggly old dog, no hot water or toilet, feeding a visiting coyote, with bobcats and an occasional mountain lion prowling around. He ws a sort of hermit, albeit with a rather on and off connection with the real world - increasingly off as the years went by. I remember in my early years the excursions to town to take showers at the YMCA, meals in workingman's restaurants - as my father called them. At one such place, out toward Santa Paula, the proprietor asked my father if he was a fireman - because of the blue denim "chore coat" from Sears that my father often wore. "No," my father said. "I have a small place up in the hills." As if that explained everything. The man nodded, wiping the counter, looking at us. I imagined that he was thinking, "Another Okie, come out here in the 30's from some Dust Bowl place, got hold of some hardscrabble land back in the hills, real cheap, gets by. A man with his kid, eking out a living somehow. The old man looks kinda worn out, that thin gaunt look -and that beard, but maybe that kid'll do better, there's more opportunities now. But sometimes those kids take after their old man, their loner, red-neck ways." I imagined the man thinking something like that. Why, I don't know. "Dessert, gents?," the man asked. "No," my father said, laying a few bills on the counter. "We'll be on our way."
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"Hawks belong with hawks, As a hawk I soared Desert and rimrock country Then, even echoes die away;
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