The things that I remember from my childhood make me laugh. It makes no sense to remember going to the mountains for Sunday picnic in the summer. I can’t tell you if we went ten or a hundred times. I can tell you that we lived on plains of Colorado thirty or so miles east of the Rocky Mountains. I grew up watching the seasons changing on Longs Peak. It was awesome to wake up on a fall morning and see the magnificent peak covered with the first snow knowing that it would look like that till July the next year. The air would be crisp and fresh and I was sure that I could truly see forever. There were places close to home (Eaton, CO) that I could look to the south west and see Pikes Peak (120 miles away) west of Colorado Springs.
    When summer came usually in mid May dad would say to mom, “’Harshy’ (when things were going well and they were happy with each other “Harshy” was their pet name) let’s take kids and a picnic to mountains tomorrow.”
   Mom would start the process by boiling potatoes and eggs for potato salad. (you might think that she would do this on Saturday afternoon, you would be wrong she would start Sunday morning around 8:00 AM.) Mom was an interesting cook; I don’t think that she actually liked to cook, it was just what she did. Back to the potato salad it was a simple thing with boiled potatoes cut into small chunks, chunks of hard boiled eggs, and little pieces of cut up sweet pickles all mixed together with a couple of cups or so of “Miracle Whip” (we never bought mayonnaise because daddy didn’t like it), enough yellow mustard (I didn’t know about any other kind of mustard existed till I was nearly grown) to make it yellow, and a quarter of cup of sweet pickle vinegar. Now a lot of people do potato salad differently and some how I will always like it the way mom made it. Some where about mid morning mom would start frying the chicken which was a pretty simple process of dredging the pieces in flour and dropping them in the frying pan with hot “Crisco” (no one knew about cholesterol). Daddy liked his chicken very crisp so mom cooked on high heat and often the chicken pieces were very crisp. This was when I learned that first piece to be done was the gizzard and nobody liked it so I could always have the gizzard. (Keep in mind that it was now about noon and we had not left for the mountains on our adventure.) Canned “Pork n’ Beans would round out the menu for the day. Sometime around one o’clock in the afternoon we would have the car loaded up and get on the road. 
   We had several choices of routes and destinations. On many occasions we drove to Loveland then up the Big Thompson River Canyon to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. I remember dad telling us as we drove up the canyon to look at the high water mark and notice how people were building cabins close to water below the high water mark. He said that they were being foolish because there would most likely be water that high again. Thirteen years after he died, on July 31, 1976 there was huge thunderstorm which dropped 12 to 14 inches of rain in the 70 square mile Big Thompson drainage basin west of Loveland in just a few hours. A small dam broke above Estes Park and Big Thompson River flooded all the way down to Loveland. 144 people were killed and 86 others were injured. 313 of the cabins that dad pointed out to me were destroyed along with 45 mobile homes and 52 businesses. A little common sense could have prevented the loss of life and a great deal of the property damage. Dad had very little formal education and he never stopped learning. He taught me many things that I didn’t understand till long after he was gone. Common sense is hard to teach. I never visit a river canyon without thinking of my dad and lessons he taught me in the brief time we had together. (People have built back in the same places in the Big Thompson Canyon. We are slow to learn it seems.) Some times I think he knew that his time was limited and he tried to cram so much in the time he had. When you are ten you don’t understand things like that. I just wanted dad to play catch with me, he never did.
   I was always drawn to the Rocky Mountains and after I started driving I spent as much time as I could up there. I drove the back country four wheel drive roads in my Volkswagen. I hiked, camped, and explored the high country I always felt close to dad and my Heavenly Father when I was in the mountains.
   Our family outings were probably not as regular as I remember them and maybe not even as much fun. The last three summers of dad’s life our family traveled all around country so the trips to the Colorado Rockies ended. We started as soon as school was out in May and didn’t get back home till the end of August in time for school to start. What I missed in playing catch was more than made up for by seeing the country up close and personal. From Texas to Maine, across Canada to the Canadian Rockies, to Washington State and down the Pacific coast to southern California we traveled. Some days we would only travel thirty miles. We would spend a week or more in some places. I met the first girl I loved on the banks of Lake Erie in northern Pennsylvania. (Lorraine Service from Butler, Pa. We were only together one evening when we walked along the beach and talked for hours. I wrote to her for several years. I visited her once after my high school graduation. The distance was great and I was young so nothing developed.) There were so many experiences I can’t even begin to share them. All along the way dad was teaching me things and I was rebelling as any good teenager should. I still kinda wish dad had played catch with me.

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