Running on Empty Read Free

up more than two thousand square bales—that’s a couple hundred bales, at seventy pounds each, per hour. It was hard but gratifying labor, and although our parents didn’t materially reward us for it, we certainly felt their approval.
    Sometimes it was fun, too. Steve and I made most chores into a contest: “Who can bale and stack the most hay today? Ready, set, go!” He almost always beat me at this, which I hope in some way compensates for all the punishment he took on my behalf.
    We worked seven days a week, before and after school, and all day Saturday, but Sunday afternoons were my own. My comic books, sketch-pad, and adventure novels kept me company on the back porch, my refuge year-round, even in winter when it wasn’t heated. Engrossed in a tale like The Call of the Wild, I could feel the chill and indulge myself in the fantasy of being Buck, the noble sled dog, braving the frigid Yukon. I also loved to draw, especially my comic book heroes as they performed superhuman feats, and Mom always encouraged these interests—reading and art—by keeping me in good supply of books and pencils and paper.
    The fictional stories fired my imagination, while TV coverage of the true-life exploits of the early Everest mountaineers made me want to test my farm-hardened strength against the natural world. I was two years old in 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascended the 29,035 feet, the first men to reach the top and come back alive. Before my adolescence, more than a dozen summiteers had conquered Mount Everest, and many, many more have done it since. Not without paying a price, however. Images of their hands, so dramatic on our black-and-white television’s screen, fascinated me: Nails and knuckles swollen and darkened by severe frostbite, they had clawed their way down the mountainside as the wind blew, sounding an unyielding, eerie, and violent noise. Indeed, many climbers returned with fingers and toes frozen off, sacrificed to the gods of great adventure on the highest mountain on earth. Clearly, not just anyone would do this, but it was equally evident to my young eyes that it could be done. Besides, Mom was always telling us kids that we could accomplish anything . At five years old, I’d already decided that I wanted to climb mountains. Someday, I’d be one of the elevated few, keeping company with those exceptional people who brave the elements, tough it out, go the distance. Someday, I’d be a man who, as Jack London put it, “sounds the deeps of his nature.”
    Yet the demands of the farm kept me in the here and now. There was always work to be done. Crops to be tended, harvested, stored. Cows to be milked, fed, moved. Sheds to be cleaned and filled with straw. Machinery to be maintained, fixed, and, on incredibly rare occasions, junked. Dad, a real no-nonsense businessman in addition to being a farmer, was loath to throw anything away or buy anything new. The one time we told him about our neighbors’ suggestion that we get a new conveyor chain for the manure spreader, because they replaced theirs every couple of years and never had trouble with breakdowns, he looked at us like we’d lost our minds. His stern expression said it all: “You boys get on out there and use the links I bought you to fix that chain we’ve got.”
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    When I graduated from high school, in 1969, no one was surprised that I’d achieved less than a 2.0 grade-point average. Homework had always been a low priority, somewhere between visits to the barbershop and cleaning my room. In other words, I rarely studied, and my results reflected my schoolwork ethic.
    That August, a month after my eighteenth birthday, a dairy farm much larger than ours was home to the Woodstock Festival in New York. No, I didn’t attend, but I was well aware that we were in an era of free love and draft cards. By then I was seeing Jean Schmid, a girl I’d met a couple of years