lou the blacksmith

As a kid, I rarely slept on the long car trips that ferried us between one set of grandparents and the other. Much of that time was spent either reading or staring out the window, daydreaming, but the rest was spent talking to my dad. As my mother and sister slept, I’d pester him with questions about why things were the way they were, about combines and cows and what exactly barley looked like. I especially loved it when he talked about his childhood and the friends, relatives, and ruffians who populated the small Nebraska town he grew up in.

The world of his childhood seemed to exist at a distant remove, even from the small Kansas town in which I was growing up. In that world, people used things like cream separators, and they did things like make bridles and trade horses. His own grandfather, my father often pointed out, was a veteran horse trader who frequently used Sunday’s reprieve from labor to lay the groundwork for a trade, but who was loath to close an actual deal on the day of rest.

One of my favorite stories involved an encounter between the Lakota chief Sitting Bull and the proud father of the first white child born at Fort Randall, South Dakota. A local blacksmith, already in his eighties at the time my father first heard the story, recalled his own father having boasted of showing him around as a newborn baby to everyone at the fort. Sitting Bull was being held prisoner there, and at the sight of the baby in his happy father’s arms, the story goes, the famous warrior reached through the prison bars and chucked the infant under the chin. As for the veracity of the blacksmith’s story, my dad only shrugs and notes that it’s chronologically plausible, given the ages of those involved.

With the most recent telling, my dad digressed into a technical explanation of forges, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and wagon trains. The pace of generational change is dizzying: Sitting Bull, the leader of a nomadic people faced with devastating social change; Lou, among the last blacksmiths to ply the trade that made westward expansion possible; and my own father, a civil engineer charged with building and maintaining the modern highways that have facilitated mobility. There are various ways to make this story coherent, I suppose, and each has appealed to me at different points in my life. As a child, I thrilled to the spark of adventure, the history-comes-to-life nature of it all. At other times, the story has seemed a cautionary one about the restless tide of technological and cultural change, each generation outpacing the last. This time, though, what resonated most with me was the gracious tenor of memory: the sweetness of hearing a favorite childhood tale retold, my father’s own gentle longing for a time and a place before him, and the lives that emerge through shared stories.