Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a little about motivation. Not being a person who enjoys performing a lot of research, I’m probably the last person in Fremont County who should be making observations about what motivates folks to do things. Therefore, I can only speak from my own experiences, and what moves me to flip the rhetorical switch in my decision-making process in a particular direction.
My parents, like many of the parents of many kids growing up in Lander in the 60’s and 70’s, didn’t have a lot of spare dolares to bestow upon their children. Both my mom and dad worked to make ends meet each month, and it took nearly all of their earnings just to pay the bills. Not much was left over to place in a savings account. 401K savings plans didn’t come into existence until 1978, two years after I graduated high school, and neither of my parents’ employers offered a pension plan.
More than once, I heard my dad say, “I never worry about the banks going bankrupt because I’ve never been able to put much money in one anyway, so I guess I wouldn’t be out whole lot.”
I never considered our family to be poor, but comments such as those indicate to me now, that maybe we were just a couple of paychecks away from Poor House Road. So, I can understand my mother telling my brothers and me, “Don’t expect your dad and me to pay for any cars or guns, because we don’t have the money for either of them.”
The legal age to hunt big game in those days was fourteen. So what’s a twelve year-old to do when, in a couple of years, he will attain that milestone, a twelve year-old without a big game rifle to call his own. Well, he uses his predicament as motivation to somehow earn the money to buy one.
Money is a great motivator, but money-making opportunities didn’t fall out of trees for kids then, just as they don’t now; but I knew I could make a few bucks mowing laws. I also received a $5 per week allowance from my parents.
Somehow, I don’t remember how, I was put in touch with a Mrs. Jones. I can’t recall her first name now, (not that I would ever address her by her first name) but she was Hugh and Herb Jones’s mother. She lived next to the Popo Agie River on Second Street, and paid me $10 a week for mowing her law throughout that summer. That money combined with a random lawn here and there and my allowance were stashed away for two years. I was also not beneath babysitting for my older sister and her husband then.
All those fives, tens, and ones went somewhere, probably my sock drawer, in an envelope. During the summer of 1972, at the age of thirteen, my dad took me down to Dave Smail’s Coast to Coast store on Main Street, where I spent nearly every dime on a Remington Model 700 ADL rifle in 30/06 Springfield and a Weaver K4 rifle scope, plus a couple of boxes of ammunition.
That combination served me well for quite a few years, until I had to have something else. I’m not sure now what I traded it for, but whatever it was, it too has long ago been sent down the used gun pipeline to someone probably a lot like me.
Thus began a pattern of me buying and selling guns based on questionable justifications for each one. Finally, I got past trying to justify each one, and just bought firearms because I wanted to, but I still had to save for or trade for each one. That motivation still remains.
My goal as a 14 year old boy was to save enough to acquire a big game rifle, a shotgun for game birds and a .22 rifle for rabbits, and I would be set for life with just three firearms.
After buying the 30/06, the need for two more firearms provided the motivation for working and saving. During the summer of 1973, I worked for a local physician building fence across a sagebrush and boulder strewn hillside and made two bucks an hour. Knowing that my father had recently been paralyzed in a construction accident, I think the good doctor just wanted to provide me with a money-making opportunity because I really can’t say what that fence was for. His family’s horses were kept in a completely different enclosure.
Over the next summer, I was able to work here and there (I’m not sure where now), so that by the time I was sixteen, I had acquired a 12 gauge Remington pump-action shotgun and a Marlin lever-action .22 rifle. Those three firearms proved to be very functional and just what I needed for all my hunting needs.
But somehow over the years, those three were just not enough. I’m at a point now where I’m not sure how many guns I have, but I still have the Marlin .22. I can, however, describe each one, but why bother with counting them?
In my future, I can see mustering up the motivation to get rid of at least half of them. If I did that, I would still be more than adequately armed for any type of hunting or shooting I’ll do anymore.
I can figuratively hear some readers thinking: Well, how many guns do you need? To which, my only response can be: I need as many guns as I have…plus one more.
When I became a little older, the need for money provided the motivation for the first major purchase of my life up until that time. I needed a car, other than the family’s 1967 Ford Bronco that I had to share with my older brother.
The Bronco was okay, but I had somehow acquired a girlfriend, and the Ford was just not date friendly. So I secured employment at Don Cox’s Lander Standard at 4th and Main Street during my junior year of high school. I worked seven days a week (more than 40 hours a week), again for two bucks an hour, alongside senior Rick Christensen, one heck of a nice guy, then and now. He was someone who provided me with a little positive guidance as a teenager…when I needed it most.
Part way through that year, an opportunity arose for me to purchase a 1970 Mercury Cougar, which I did with the help of a local banker. I paid the loan off early, and soon I was its sole, proud owner. I kept the car for over three years, until after high school graduation and past my first year in college. In fact, the car lasted longer than the girlfriend.
In retrospect, it was more car than I needed, and with its 351 Cleveland engine and 4-barrel carburetor (remember those), I was lucky to have earned only one speeding ticket during the time I owned it.
Being retired now, my motivation to do things has changed. My wife and I like to travel a little, so lucky for us, my wife provides the motivation to budget money for our ventures to places I never thought I would see as a kid.
But not all motivation is money related. In early March of 2015, I woke up to find myself in a hospital ICU bed, not knowing where I was or how I arrived at that location. It turns out that cardiac arrest and coming within a hair’s breadth of dying is a pretty good motivator. After recovering from heart surgery, I lost a little weight, changed my diet some, and started getting more exercise in the forms of more walking, hiking, biking and cross-country skiing.
But just a month ago, someone I care for deeply came to visit for a couple of weeks. Only 18 months older than me, this person was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Instead of creating a plan to fight the disease tooth and nail and enjoy the time he has left, he seems to have lost interest in all the activities that have given him so much joy from a lifetime of living well, except for spending time with his daughter and grandkids.
Growing up, I tried to emulate this person’s actions, as he always seemed to be the voice of reason and was driven by and accomplished goals that I never thought possible or even thought about at all. He was someone I admired for his perseverance and just not giving a damn about what other people thought.
But now he’s going down a path to a place I don’t want to follow.
That experience, plus the encouragement from my daughters, my wife and my doctors, has given me the motivation to join a gym and try to maintain and improve my health for as long as possible. There are many countries I’ve never been to that seem to be calling and it seems we must go. When not traveling, I want to walk the sagebrush hills and timbered ridges for game birds for at least a couple of more decades, and every year I want to be able to hustle to the top of a ridge before daylight to have a chance at that elk that I know is just on the other side. And if I am lucky enough to be successful, I want to be able to pack it out…until I just can’t.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow another gun turns up in my gun cabinet.