A Different Perspective - 2/8/2024

When I was a kid, I started getting hay fever around the age of four or five. Since we lived on a ranch and harvested hay from mountain meadows, the prognosis was gloomy for the summer months (summer being any time it wasn't winter.)

My eyes would swell shut and become glued that way overnight, itching. along with my throat, and my nose would run down to my toes.

Antihistamine medication in the 1950s was little help and just made me sleepy. I didn't know about karma then, but if I had, I would have spent a lot of that downtime wondering what I did so wrong in the previous life.

One June, just before my 8th birthday, my mom took me to visit an old prospector friend of hers at his diggings in the Little Belt mountains, where he lit carbide lights and took us into the mine for well over an hour.

That's when I found out there wasn't any pollen underground and I started down the road of a whole new life. Compounding the corruption of my youth, he introduced me to other old guys who were chasing the dream. The bunch of them entranced me with mining stories and set the hook in my soul.

They were all born in the 19th century, seeing and living a lot of history. The changes and contrasts they experienced during their lives were some of the most profound in history, and they were eager to share the experience with a youngster. There were so many things I didn't appreciate at the time, but have come back more and more as I now fall into their age bracket at the time. Those missed opportunities fuel my fascination with different perspectives.

Imagine the wonder of seeing jet airplanes and the beginnings of space travel, remembering the Wright Brother's first flight in your lifetime, and traveling by stagecoach, wagon, or buggy. The reign of Queen Victoria, the Titanic, and both World Wars. Having friends who were Civil War veterans, from both sides. Moving pictures, radio, television, from a time when the telephone and telegraph were modern wonders.

They told story after story and took the time to try and make me understand what life was like for them. In addition to miners, there were blacksmiths turned welders, ox-team freighters who drove trucks, and stagecoach drivers who flew in airplanes. Some wives wore nothing but dresses in a time when there were no washing machines to keep them clean, and cooked on wood ranges they gathered the fuel for.

There were no fat people, with hard work every day and no fast-food calories. They walked for most of their daily needs, and hats were a necessity as the weather changed while they did. The first years of cars with enclosed cabs all had high roofs to accommodate the hats. The smells, when all heat was wood or coal, no indoor plumbing or garbage collection, with livestock of every kind traveling the unpaved streets and relieving themselves whenever.

There was a lot of disease and no antibiotics until almost WWII. They showed me graveyards in ghost towns with markers for kids who had died of diphtheria, typhoid fever, whooping cough, and other diseases that were no longer a threat to me. Other graves were miners who died young from accidents and a life of filling their lungs with rock dust.

So, the next time you look at an old photograph, or watch a western movie, let yourself drop out of the comfortable present and feel that world. Look beyond the entertainment and try to see the people and the times as they lived them.