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FATHERS |
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Joyce Kiefer |
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to him from his daughter-in-law, columnist Joyce Kiefer. |
He never stopped exploring the wilderness around him
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
One scene with Jerome Kiefer, my father-in-law, has carved itself so vividly in my mind that the heart of it shines clearly more than 30 years later, now that he has just passed away.
His children and grandchildren have all come home to Grand Junction, Colorado, for Christmas. He takes us for a picnic on a cliff overlooking the Colorado River. It's almost the same spot where, as a boy, he posed for a photo that shows him sitting next to his father and grandfather. In the picture the three generations stare across the water--same as we’re doing--at the crenelated sandstone cliffs that predate the age of the dinosaurs.
“That place is called Rattlesnake Canyon,” he tells us. “It’s supposed to have more sandstone arches than Arches National Park. I don’t think anyone has explored all of it.”
I was surprised that he had never explored any part of it. I didn’t think there was any wilderness in Colorado or in the Utah desert where he had never climbed or camped. When my husband, Bill, was growing up, Jerome would pack up his family and drive them off-road into the Utah desert to search for agates, gizzard stones, and parts of dinosaurs. He once took his sons camping in the Rockies and proved to them that sleeping under a sky white with stars was worth pushing their Chevy pickup over a collapsing, improvised bridge.
But somehow Jerome had never climbed the cliff across the river or bumped over the rocky excuse for a road to explore Rattlesnake Canyon. Perhaps it was the name or the thought that nothing could beat Arches.
I wanted to go there. For me it WAS the name and the sense of a secret place so near and yet elusive. Twenty years later, I managed to cajole the extended family to form a four-wheel drive safari to visit this place. Jerome did not join us. By then peripheral neuropathy had begun to affect the feeling in his feet.
I had never seen him so deeply disappointed.
For the first time physical limitation had become a roadblock
he couldn’t cross. Perhaps he felt diminished that his wimpy,
city-bred daughter-in-law would be in the vanguard of a family
expedition to a new place. Or perhaps he was sad that the time
had come when we would proceed without our wagon master.
But I regarded this outing without his presence as proof of his
success as my father-in-law. Like a parent, he helped me grow
in character. He pointed the way to new experience and let me
come around to accepting the perils in my own good time. He raised
my husband the same way.
Before I married Bill, I had never traveled an unpaved road, let alone one that crept up the side of a mountain and threatened death if a car came the other way. On my first such outing with my new in-laws, I got out of the car and told Jerome to pick me up on the way back.
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Rattlesnake Arches Trail. She was NOT flown there by helicopter, but actually hiked. |
But whenever we came to visit, he would show us slides of the drop-dead gorgeous scenery at the family’s latest outing. He hooked me with close-ups of the columbines at a place called Yankee Boy Basin. We joined the next family expedition to this meadow, high in the Rockies, surrounded by 14,000-foot peaks. I promised not to complain.
About 25 aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins edged their jeeps and trucks forward, back a few feet, and forward again around each turn up the mountains. I chose not to think about the downhill trip along the outer edge of the road. The reward was a lush Garden of Eden filled with giant columbines, Indian warriors, and a rainbow of other flowers. A cascading stream watered everything. That day I realized that love of nature and lack of fear were genetic Kiefer traits as strong as height and blue eyes. These intangible traits were absorbed by those who married into the family and were passed on to their children.
So Jerome gave me a family and a story, as all fathers do.
I had imagined the rugged West like a John Wayne movie. He told me what day-to-day life was really like--delivering milk on mornings when the temperature was 20 below zero, pumping water from the cistern, sleeping in the unheated (or air conditioned) bunk house with his brothers.
His great grandmother and her sons came from Indiana to pioneer the Grand Valley of Colorado near the Utah border. They found flaming red canyons edging the side of the valley next to the Colorado River and gray, fluted cliffs lining the other side, stretching hundreds of miles into the Utah desert. His great uncles developed a canal system that enabled farming and ranching on the hard, gray dirt. One uncle traded mustangs with the Indians. As a young man Jerome herded the family cattle in summer, mostly on horseback. “I always took a book or magazine along and read either sitting in the saddle or on the ground in the shade of the horse.”
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hike in the Colorado wilderness. |
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Most of the family married into similar German Catholic stock and had large families. They were deeply religious and cherished each child as if there were no one in the world like him or her. As an only child with few relatives, I was awed by the numbers and took years to get the names straight.
Jerome raised his own family with music. They sang around the piano on Saturday night when Bill was growing up and at Mass each Sunday morning. His wife, Florence, also loved music. When Bill joined the men’s barbershop chorus in Salt Lake City where we first lived, they drove for six hours to attend the shows. Soon they started a chapter in Grand Junction. Eventually their younger son became the director and sang in a quartet with his own son. Their daughter made music her career.
Jerome showed his children by example how to be a father. They, in turn, became excellent parents and passed the imprint on to their own children. All of the families are intact. He deeply loved his Florence. In her last few years he overcame increasing physical discomforts to take care of her needs as she failed mentally and physically. Once she passed away, his problems snowballed. A few weeks ago he sat down to dinner at his assisted living residence and asked, “Why am I here?”
Until the last few days of his life, he was sharp of mind, interested in how things worked, even the motorized wheelchair we got him two weeks before he died. He had been a sheet metal worker by trade but could have been an engineer. One of his teachers said he was the closest to a genius of any student he’d had. Jerome was 15 when he began his senior year of high school. Unlike his older brother, he was unable to go on to college. The Depression intervened. Instead, he left the ranch and went to work for an uncle in Indiana. I always knew him to be deeply satisfied with his life. At the end he was ready to let go and move on to meet his Lord and his wife.
When Bill was a teenager, the family explored an abandoned marble mine in the Rockies. Stone for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington had come from there. Jerome examined a fine cube of marble and said, “I want that for my headstone.” He and his sons hoisted it into the jeep.
He got his wish. The stone has been carved with musical notes on the side with the names and with columbine and a sketch of his favorite climbing mountain on the other. I saw the stone in the yard where tombstones are prepared. Both his and Florence’s names had been carved but his death date had not.
I was surprised to find a tombstone for Doc Holliday. “He died in bed,” it read, and had a poker hand carved on the other side. The image of his face had been vandalized once again and was being repaired. Doc is buried in Glenwood Springs 90 miles away. Other stones in the yard were being carved with elk or with scenes of the mountains and desert, perhaps in hope that paradise would look like Colorado.
Jerome’s epitaph is his family.
©2006 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos
are the property of the Kiefer family. All rights reserved. This
column first posted June 12, 2006.
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