| This
is a true story; nothing has been added
or embellished. -Alison Johnson
 This
highly unusual family memoir opens with
these paragraphs:
Two tons of silver and gold coins, hundreds
of thousands of nickels, dimes, quarters,
and gold pieces. They were under our beds,
in the kitchen cupboards, up in the attics,
in the bottom of dresser drawers, in holes
in the ground. My father was obsessed with
gathering up these coins and hiding them
away in any likely spot in the houses and
garages and store buildings he owned in
our tiny town on the mid-Western prairie.
Nothing could shake his belief that the
total collapse of the American economy and
government was just around the corner, a
collapse that would bring anarchy and rioting
in the streets.
With this shadow of Armageddon always hanging
over him, Dad believed that he could save
his family from disaster only by collecting
as much gold and silver as he could lay
his hands on.
This fear of a future calamity that might
leave his family penniless so dominated
Dad's thoughts that he failed to see how
his blind absorption in amassing wealth
created family problems that would lead
to his oldest son's hopeless alcoholism
and his wife's mental collapse. My sister
grew up so insecure that she eventually
turned to the stars for answers to the frustrations
of her life, immersing herself in the study
of astrology. In the fairy tale, King Midas's
daughter was miraculously restored to life
after she had been turned to stone by her
father's desire for gold, but Dad's destructive
influence on his family could not be so
easily reversed.
Our family home was in the small town
of Palisade on the Nebraska prairie. Palisade
lay in a flat river valley, and the hills
that surrounded it on all sides cut off
any extended view of a world beyond. Since
rainfall in southwestern Nebraska was meager,
the countryside yielded only a few scattered
cottonwood trees clinging to the banks of
the river or the tiny creeks trickling into
it. The only large plants to survive on
the open prairie were sunflowers and tall
weeds that dried up in the autumn into prickly
golden tumbleweeds that rolled restlessly
over the fields, driven by the relentless
winds sweeping across the plains.
When I was a child, Palisade had a population
of 799. Everyone vaguely thought it should
have been possible to come up with one more
living soul to push us to the more impressive
figure of 800, but 799 it was, and from
this peak the population declined to 350
in only a few decades. Even the surrounding
counties were sparsely populated. Palisade
lay halfway between Denver and Lincoln,
250 miles from each–about as far as
one could get from civilization in the United
States. From the hills encircling the town,
one could look for miles in any direction
and see only an occasional farmhouse with
its straggly windbreak of Russian olive
trees, planted because they were one of
the few trees that would survive wind and
drought.
|
