I recently passed the mark, and I've noticed the change. It takes two forms.
One reaction is the basic: "Well, I reckon he's going to stick around and there's nothing we can do about that, so we might as well make the best of it and put up with him."
The other reaction goes this way: "Well, he's been around about a decade, and hasn't been carted off by anybody dressed like somebody from the FBI, and I actually saw him inside a church a time or two...
"He sort of has a job, but I can't understand why he'd try to do that kind of work in a place like this..."
I did grow up in Grayson County, but nobody knows that. It was on a farm on Millerstown Road, but nobody much saw me as a kid.
Several reasons for that. One was that I was the youngest of seven brothers, so the one car we had never was available.
Plus, my dad decided to teach me the value of a dollar early. And the way he did that was to go to the stockyards at Leitchfield (I didn't go with him) and buy five cows that had a few dairy genes somewhat hidden in their pedigree.
I was to milk these cows, morning and night, seven days a week, 365 days a year -- by hand.
That cuts down on a lot of extracurricular activities connected with school. It also gives you Popeye arms which don't fit a skinny kid. That's how I got the nickname Snakehips.
I made enough money to buy more feed to produce more milk and to buy clothes for school. I became familiar only to Lorenza Carby and Harley Williams. She taught school at Clarkson and would pick me up when I missed the bus. Harley would do the same when I ran very late, which was pretty often.
It takes longer than you might think to get cow manure off your shoes, especially in winter. And what you don't get removed isn't conducive to long get-to-know-you conversations anywhere other than at the stockyards.
When I got to school, I was mostly invisible. I was also a reader, devouring nearly every book in the school library, and nobody under 25 read anything in those days.
The bottom line is that I was the youngest hermit in the county, and the only one who really enjoyed that. I still like to be home and hate the pointless chatter at gatherings.
Finally, there came a day when I wandered off. Before leaving to join the Air Force, I promised my friends -- mostly trees and little spring creeks -- that I'd be back sometime.
While I was in the service, I got assigned to the Tactical Air Command's Honor Guard, and that required a top secret clearance.
They sent the FBI or somebody official from the Defense Department to check into my background in Grayson County. The response they got was usually, "Who?" The snoopy investigators innocently started a juicy rumor in the county. There are still people here who don't believe I ever spent four years in the military. They think I was in jail.
College followed, then a return home for a short stint at teaching elementary school. This is when I found out I wasn't a teacher, but dad was happy for a time. He liked the idea of teaching more than the nonsense and foolishness of writing stories.
But, I wandered off again. This time across Canada to see the country where those old books by Jack London about wolves had been set. I didn't find White Fang, but instead found wide open spaces that felt like home.
Then it was 20 years in Idaho, doing things like a wildlife magazine, an outdoors television show, a television history of Idaho. All of it in a state of less than a million people.
Home was spectacular desert canyons, windy mountain ridges, wild rivers, dark and brooding gorges, snow-blanketed prairies.
"So why in the world would you come back to Grayson County?"
The question came at me again and again. There were two answers. One is that I'm too old to hike or cross-country ski miles and miles. I'm also finished with sleeping on the ground. And, if I hear another Joe and me shot a bear story, I'll shoot myself!
Still, there were questions. After all, why would any half-decent writer come here? Nothing happens! Local policemen were convinced I was here in a witness protection program.
It is very different here than it is in the West. There, the pioneer spirit is still alive. You can come up with some odd ball scheme in the West, and most people will say something like, "Why not? Give it a shot."
That spirit is only 100 years old in Idaho, the last state white settlers came to. Here, though, the folks who came over the Appalachain Mountains are too long gone for us to remember. We are reticent here, we hold back when we shouldn't, worry too much about risk.
But much happens in this county. People here, and I run into them every day, have done phenomenal things. It's just that they don't know it, nobody's ever asked them about it before, or they wear accomplishment and fame like stain from walnut hulls. Leave it alone, it'll finally go away. Bragging here is getting awfully close to sin.
Rumor and gossip aside, this isn't a bad place to be. It's possible here to get away from the world, at least for a few minutes. You do have to work at that more now than was once the case. I've found, though, that the trees don't care where you've been, what you've done, whom you know. They don't worry about being a team player when the team's doing something wrong or just stupid.
It was Thomas Wolfe who said you can't go home again. He's right, because home changes, despite the fact we think all parts of our childhoods, including houses and neighbors, are never altered. The trick, I think, is to carry home with you and just let it lay down and rest wherever you find yourself.
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